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Mozambique: Dhlakama Objects to Decent Houses for Flood Victims
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
5 March 2008
Posted to the web 5 March 2008
Maputo
Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's former rebel movement Renamo, on Tuesday claimed that the government's programme to resettle victims of the floods along the major river valleys in the centre of the country is just a plot by the ruling Frelimo Party to recover ground supposedly lost to Renamo during the war of destabilisation.
Speaking to reporters, Dhlakama summarized his own visit to the flood-stricken areas, and denounced the government's attempts to provide decent housing in the resettlement areas. He claimed that the immediate needs were food, water supply, medical care, and mosquito nets, but not building materials.
"The Frelimo government has understood that every year the people return to their original homes after critical flood periods or after receiving food", said Dhlakama. "So it has found a way of keeping them in these new places. To stop them from returning, the government shares in house building by providing zinc sheeting and cement, and thus obliges people to stay there".
One might have imagined that brick houses are an improvement on grass huts, and that a government which helps peasant farmers live in better houses deserved some praise. And one would have been wrong - for Dhlakama this was no more than a cunning strategy to return to the "communal villages" of the 1970s "where freedom of expression and of movement are controlled".
He claimed that "the people have understood this strategy and are resisting. That is why whenever there are floods the same people are rescued from the same areas of risk".
Frelimo policies "are deceitful", he alleged. "It's time that Frelimo stopped because they show that this government does not have human beings at the centre of its attention".
Dhlakama poured scorn on the house building programme, claiming that the government was not able to provide enough cement, or enough sheeting for the roofs, and would not be able to do so "even in 500 years".
AIM too has visited resettlement areas, and has noted several types of accommodation - crude grass huts erected immediately people arrive, fleeing from the flooded valleys, crowded tents, and relatively spacious brick houses, built by their owners under food-for-work schemes. No-one in their right mind would rather live in the former than the latter.
A further government policy denounced by Dhlakama as "a puppet show" is budgetary decentralization. He denounced the allocation of seven million meticais (about 290,000 US dollars) to each of the country's 128 districts, regardless of size. (Dhlakama's information is out of date - in the latest instalment of the local investment funds, more than seven million meticais are allocated and the size of the district population is taken into account).
Dhlakama claimed that no economic viability study had been undertaken and that it made no sense to allocate the same money to a district such as Massinga, in Inhambane province, where around 300,000 people live, and to Chiuta in Tete, which has less than 70,000 inhabitants
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He was thus skeptical about the usefulness of the Local Investment Fund. "I didn't see any palpable results in the place I visited", he said, "and I don't expect to because in the scheme's current form the population will not obtain income or better living conditions".
He suggested the abolition of the local investment fund and the adoption of unspecified "other means" of promoting development in the districts.
Dhlakama said nothing about Renamo's preparations for the municipal elections due later this year.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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