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Mozambique: Differing Perspectives On Floods And Riots
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
10 March 2008
Posted to the web 10 March 2008
Maputo
Maria Moreno, head of the parliamentary group of the opposition Renamo-Electoral Union coalition, on Monday claimed that the Mozambican government's flood resettlement programme is a return to "the communist dream of communal villages".
Speaking at the opening of the first sitting this year of the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Moreno claimed that villagisation is "an attack on individual freedom", and threatened that the resettlement would fail, just as the communal villages of 30 years ago had failed. (Of course, she failed to mention that one of the reasons early communal villages failed was that Renamo gangs, working for the South African apartheid regime, burnt them down.)
Moreno claimed that in the resettlement areas "priority is being given to hoisting flags, rather than to distributing food and medicines", a claim which certainly clashes with what AIM has seen of life in the resettlement centres.
She claimed that flags of the ruling Frelimo Party are flying over standpipes providing drinking water, and that the flags of other political parties are banned. "We ask: what is more important ? To have a flag at the place where you fetch water, or to receive food in sufficient quantity and clothes to cover your nakedness?", Moreno asked
She sneered at the promises to provide decent housing for the flood victims, which she imagined was also part of "the communist dream".
Her opposite number in Frelimo, Manuel Tome, also stressed the floods crisis in his speech - but from a very different perspective, pointing out that this time the government had been prepared to deal with the crisis. The fact that fewer people were affected this year than in the floods earlier in the decade (in 2000, 2001 and 2007) "is evidence of the government's greater capacity to forecast, contain and mitigate the effects of natural disasters".
In 2007, Tome pointed out, the number of people affected by floods and cyclones was about 510,000. This year the number affected (including by cyclone Jokwe, which hit the northern province of Nampula at the weekend) was less than 300,000 - even though the floods on the Zambezi and Pungoe rivers were worse than in 2007 or 2001.
Tome rejected the Renamo claim that providing building materials for flood victims was somehow in conflict with providing food aid and clean water. He pointed out that so far the government and its partners have distributed over 4,000 tonnes of food to the resettlement areas, 2,700 tents and tarpaulins, and 100 large tents for temporary schools. 12,000 plots of land have been distributed to households to build new homes.
"What Frelimo wants is for the government to provide food, water, schools, health posts and shelter", said Tome. "We want to keep families together which can't be achieved without shelter".
Both Moreno and Tome spoke at some length about the riots in Maputo and the neighbouring city of Matola on 5 February, but again from sharply different perspectives. For Tome, the violence used in these riots over minibus fares, and in subsequent clashes over demands for wage rises at the Xinavane sugar plantation, and over the supposed ineffectiveness of the justice system in the central city of Chimoio, was unacceptable.
"Any of the motives presented as pretexts for the demonstrations might eventually be correct, but under no circumstances should violence be legitimized", he stressed. The trend for people to take the law into their own hands had to be resisted, since "you don't punish one crime by committing another".
Tome also expressed his concern at the shocking images of lynchings shown on Mozambican television stations, which "have the effect of trivializing death, and thus devaluing life".
For Moreno, however, the riots were a case of Mozambicans standing up to the government and declaring "enough is enough".
"The people went onto the streets to confront a government that claims to be a people's government, but when the people say they're fed up, this same government treats them as criminals, but forgets that nobody can live honestly on the minimum wage", she declared.
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Carried away be her own rhetoric, Moreno claimed that whenever oil prices rise on the world market they are immediately reflected in a rise in Mozambican fuel prices. "A rise on the international market at 09.00 results in a rise on the domestic market at 15.00", she alleged.
In fact, fuel prices are reviewed every month, not every day, and are changed if import prices, when expressed in the national currency, the metical, have moved in either direction by more than three per cent. The last time Mozambican fuel prices went up was on 23 January, There was no change at all to the prices in February.
Pf/ (788)
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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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