Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, on Friday declared itself opposed to the deal giving Mozambique ownership of the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi, opposed to the budgetary decentralization that allocates at least seven million meticais (280,000 US dollars) to each of the country's 128 districts, and opposed to Mozambican participation in the regional integration of SADC (Southern African Development community),

Speaking at the close of the final sitting this year of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, the head of the Renamo parliamentary group, Maria Moreno, claimed that it was not known how Mozambique would pay for its majority holding in the Cahora Bassa operating company, HCB.

"We do not know how much debt will fall on each and every Mozambican", she said. "With the negotiations over, Mozambicans have the right to know what was negotiated. It is not enough to say that Cahora Bassa is ours, we also need to know the price that we will pay for Cahora Bassa to be ours"

As a matter of cold, hard fact, the size of the debt is known. Mozambique contracted a loan from a consortium formed by the French bank CA Lyon and the Portuguese Investment Bank (BPI) for 700 million dollars - this sum was transferred to Portugal in November for the purchase of 67 per cent of the shares in HCB - raising Mozambique's holding in the company to 85 per cent and reducing that of Portugal to 15 per cent.

Repeatedly Energy Minister Salvador Namburete has declared that the debt to the banking consortium will be paid, not out of the Mozambican state budget, but out of HCB's sales of electricity (to the South African, Zimbabwean and Mozambican power companies - Eskom, Zesa and EDM).

HCB is currently a very profitable company, making enough money to pay off the debt (in under ten years, according to Namburete), to pay taxes to the Mozambican state, and to pay dividends to shareholders (neither of which ever happened when it was under Portuguese control).

The one significant detail not made public is the interest rate the banks are charging - though there has been no official denial of a well-informed story carried by the independent weekly "Savana" that it would be LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate) plus two per cent.

Moreno suggested that the original shareholding structure (82 per cent for the Portuguese state and 18 per cent for Mozambique) was a bribe to Portugal in exchange for "excluding other political forces from Mozambican independence". The dam was, she suggested, the bargaining counter used to ensure that Portugal would recognize Frelimo as "sole representative of the Mozambican people in the independence process".

As a further matter of cold, hard fact, the dam had not even begun selling power by the time of Mozambican independence in 1975. HCB itself was set up on 23 June 1975 - just two days before independence, making it rather unlikely that the shareholding structure was the price for Mozambican sovereignty.

Portugal had incurred a large debt in building the dam, and the new Mozambican state had no intention of paying that debt. So the deal was reached that, as the debt was paid off, bit by bit shares would be transferred from Portugal to Mozambique. Three years after the debt was paid, the dam was to be entirely in Mozambican hands.

This never happened because, acting on instructions from the apartheid military, Renamo blew up hundreds of pylons on the transmission lines from Cahora Bassa to the South African border. Unable to sell power to its main client, Eskom, HCB plunged deeper and deeper into debt. The first sabotage occurred in 1980, and power transmission to Eskom could only resume in 1998. These are the details of history that today's Renamo prefers to ignore.

As for financial decentralization, Moreno complained that the allocation of funds to the districts was "light minded and irresponsible". She complained of "insensitivity and lack of planning" because the same sum was given to all districts, regardless of their size.

There was no accountability for the use of this money, she claimed, and "no assessment as to whether this is the best option to take Mozambique out of the claws of absolute poverty".

Turning to regional integration, and the impending southern African free trade area, Moreno claimed that these were being questioned "by the majority of business people and workers of this vast nation".

She alleged that "the only companies who desire this challenge are companies belonging to figures linked to political power, with easy access to funds for investment, without risks".

There had been "no preparation and sparse information" about regional integration, Moreno complained. The government had thus "failed in its mission of preparing the country for this future".

Moreno dismissed the government's promised "Green Revolution" on the grounds that "nobody knows what it is". This was despite the fact that only 24 hours previously President Armando Guebuza had clearly stated that a "Green Revolution" would "increase the levels of agricultural production and productivity through the use of improved seeds, fertilizers, adequate production technologies, including animal traction, agricultural mechanization, and the construction of reservoirs for irrigation".

Guebuza had concluded his speech with the words "The State of the Nation is good" - and Moreno retorted "the State of the Nation is bad. It has never been so bad. If there has been any change, it's been for the worse".

So for Moreno the situation in the Mozambique of 2007 is worse than at any previous time in its 32 year history - including the years when armed Renamo gangs roamed the countryside, killing and looting, when factories, bridges and railways were sabotaged, when production was in steep decline, and when millions of Mozambicans fled into neighbouring countries to escape the war. If we take her speech literally, Moreno preferred those years to the current scenario of peace, economic growth and gradual poverty reduction.

Towards the end of her speech, Moreno digressed into a wild fantasy of pseudo-science, claiming that "the way in which DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid - the molecule that contains the genetic instructions for building all living things) functions is clearly expressed on the walls of the Egyptian pyramids, built 4,000 years ago - something which scientists of the first world countries have only been investigating for the last three or four decades".

"This DNA and its functioning, which seems to be the revolution of medicine and of genetic engineering, had already been studied and schematized by the learned Africans of Egypt", said Moreno. "But the twists of history have today made us Africans the neediest, poorest, most corrupt, sickest and most beggarly people on the planet".

There are plenty of crackpot theories about the pyramids, and real archaeologists have an irreverent word for people who indulge in such fantasies. They call them pyramidiots.

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