21 May 2008
Macomia — Failure to reimburse government loans is due to poor harvests, claimed some residents of the district of Macomia, in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, when President Armando Geubuza addressed a rally there on Tuesday.
Each of Mozambique's 128 districts receives an annual fund from the state budget of at least seven million meticais (about 290,000 US dollars). The money is supposed to be lent to small businesses or individuals who can present projects for increasing food production and generating jobs.
But the money is a loan not a grant, and should be repaid so that it can form a revolving fund. Concern has been raised that many of these loans are not being repaid. The Macomia excuse is that crops withered in dry weather, and elephants ate them, so the farmers had no money to repay the loans.
A Macomia resident named Diogo Rachid told Guebuza that many beneficiaries of the local initiative fund were peasant farmers whose only source of income was to cultivate their fields, which had been devastated by drought and by elephants. "How are we going to return the money, if we can't raise any income due to these problems?", he asked
Elephants do certainly cause problems in Macomia: according to a report from the district government presented to Guebuza, five people were killed by elephants last year. The local authorities want to recruit wild life wardens whose task will be to scare the elephants away from cultivated areas.
Elephants are a protected species. Despite that, one farmer at Guebuza's rally, Hassane Trigo requested a gun "to fight against the elephants".
"We depend on our fields", declared another speaker, Bacar Ali. "But the elephants go there and destroy everything. And if that wasn't enough, they kill people".
In his meetings with the public and with officials, Guebuza has been urging that better methods be found of managing the local initiative fund. The government also wants to see wildlife managed in such a way that there are not constant conflicts over resources between animals and people.
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