16 April 2008
Maputo — About 400 former workers of the extinct Northern Improvement Brigade (BMN) went out Sunday on a demonstration in the Namialo town, district of Meconta, in the Mozambican northern Nampula province, demanding the payment of allegedly owed compensations, reports Wednesday's issue of the daily 'Noticias'.
BMN had been contracted, during the 1980s, to rehabilitate the railway linking the Nacala port, in Nampula, and the city of Cuamba, in the northern Niassa province.
Carmo Mussa, chief of the Namialo administrative post, told reporters that those former workers sent a letter to the Meconta district government on 10 April, saying that they would stage a demonstration on Sunday, as a means to press the authorities to review the process that, about three decades ago, led to the cancellation of their contracts with that company.
However, Mussa said that having read the letter, he found that 'their demands are not clear, because BMN was a contractor, and we are not sure if the government had any shares there, and if there was a fixed deadline for the work in question . All we know is that the company had to dismiss the entire workforce'.
The former workers argue that their contracts were to rehabilitate the rail line between Nacala port and Lichinga, the Niassa capital, crossing Nampula and Cuamba, but the work was only done up to Cuamba and did not reach Lichinga, and that was not their fault.
The strange thing is that only after three decades of the extinction of BMN do the workers raise such an issue.
As a means to get a better understanding of the matter, Nampula provincial governor Felismino Tocoli ordered the Labour, and the Transports and Communications directors, Amisse Cololo, and Baptista Rodrigues, respectively, to meet with the commission of those former workers to learn and have a clear explanation of their demands.
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