27 February 2008
Maputo — Residents of Meluco district, in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, have demanded that the district administrator, Victorino Chauque, be jailed for alleged misuse of the district budget.
Currently the central government grants to all 128 districts a fund of at least seven million meticais (280,000 US dollars) for local investment. The money is supposed, in particular, to stimulate food production and generate employment.
But when the Cabo Delgado provincial governor, Eliseu Machava, addressed a rally in Meluco last Saturday, he found that members of the audience who spoke up claimed that the money had not been spent properly, and demanded that the administrator and two other senior district officials should be thrown in jail.
"Last year we didn't see or feel anything from these seven million meticais", a man named Ibraimo Cassimo declared, according to the report on the rally in Wednesday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".
"We're now almost in the third month of this year, but there's still nothing that can be shown as resulting from application of this fund for local initiatives", said Cassimo. "Once again they're lying to the people".
They had been told that some of the money was used to buy a tractor - but that tractor had never ploughed any land, claimed Cassimo, and the trailer had only arrived in Meluco town two days earlier, because of Machava's visit.
There was also a parabolic antenna, but that was used solely by the administrator. Meluco residents were also told that some of the money went to open a well. But only now was this spoken about without making it clear whether then money involved came the 2006 or 2007 allocation.
"To make matters worse, the administrator is inaccessible, even to the staff working under him", added Cassimo. "That's why he's on his own. He doesn't want to listen to other people's ideas, and those who ought to support him have let him go on making mistakes".
Another speaker, Nacir Amisse, claimed that documents concerning the local initiative fund had been falsified, with local officials declaring that certain sums had been allocated to beneficiaries who in reality had received less. It was feared that the officials concerned had pocketed the difference.
He claimed that a police officer who had only been transferred from Maputo to Meluco seven months ago had mysteriously become eligible for a grant of 150,000 meticais. Far from using this money in Meluco, this policeman had returned to Maputo. Likewise a man named Assane Gomes had received 50,000 meticais - and instead of investing this in Meluco, he had used it to buy a minibus and start a transport business in his home district of Montepuez.
A third case was that of a civil servant named Abdul Salimo, who was given a grant from the fund which he spent, not in Meluco, but in the coastal district of Mocimboa da Praia.
"Noticias" says it discovered that another beneficiary of the fund was the former Meluco District Permanent Secretary. But he was subsequently transferred to the district of Ancuabe, presumably taking the money with him. The money granted from the local initiative fund takes the form of loans, which are supposed to be repaid. This may prove difficult to enforce when beneficiaries move to other districts or provinces.
"Who among these people is going to develop Meluco?", asked Nacir Amisse. "Did the money come just to enrich state officials, who have a salary at the end of each month? Is it not true that the money was to create jobs, produce food and generate income? These people (the administrator and his staff) should be arrested and answer for their acts in court".
When the paper asked Chauque to comment on the claims raised at the rally, he admitted that the Meluco public is fed up with the poor functioning of the district administration, particularly the handling of the local initiative fund. He blamed the problems on the two other administration staff named at the rally, Jose Muchanga and Cabral Anli.
"This is so real that there are cases with the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) against these two", he said. "It's becoming ever clearer that that they were charging commissions from the beneficiaries in order to accept them as eligible, or were giving them sums much lower than those approved".
Chauque insisted that there are disciplinary and criminal proceedings under way, particularly against Muchanga. He accepted that the delay in dealing with these cases led people to suspect a cover-up, and this was why his name was on the list of those they wanted to see jailed.
Machava said he was pleased with the forthright manner in which they had raised problems, but he disagreed with the "authoritarian" approach they wanted him to adopt. He promised to investigate the case "until we discover what happened to the money that was intended to create jobs, produce food and generate income here in Meluco".
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