Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
22 June 2009
Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza declared on Monday that his government has proved able to mitigate the effects of the international financial crisis, and has ensured "a favourable environment for us to carry on, as a people, the grandiose task of building a prosperous nation".
Guebuza was delivering his annual state of the nation address to the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic. Since this is the last such address in his current term of office, much of the data he presented covered the entire period since 2004.
He stressed that the number of primary and secondary schools in the country grew from about 10,000 in 2004 to about 12,000 in 2008, with a corresponding increase in the number of pupils entering education from four million in 2004 to about five million in 2008.
Guebuza's government has laid a heavy emphasis on technical education, and he announced that 74 technical and professional schools are operating in the country. They graduated 7,000 students in 2008, compared with 4,500 in 2004.
As for higher education, the number of university level institutions had more than doubled over the four year period, from 17 to 38, and today the country has 60,000 university students.
Turning to the health service, Guebuza said that in 2004 only 62 of the country's 128 districts had at least one doctor - but today the figure has risen to 115. Every district now has at least one ambulance, and this, together with the building and rehabilitation of health units, "has improved access to, and quality of health care for many Mozambicans".
The battle against one of the major killer diseases, malaria, was now being won. Guebuza noted that between 2007 and 2008 the number of malaria cases diagnosed fell by 24 per cent and the number of deaths from malaria fell by 35 per cent.
The president added that the anti-retroviral therapy essential for prolonging the lives of HIV-positive people, which was only available in 19 districts in 2004, can now be obtained in every district in the country. Between 2004 and 2008, the number of people receiving anti-retroviral drugs has risen from 6,000 to 135,000.
Electrification had gathered pace. Since 2004, a further 32 district capitals had been connected to the national grid, and the number of electricity consumers had risen from 284,000 to 615,000. "Our target is to electrify the entire country", Guebuza declared. "Our priority is to link all district capitals to the national grid, and then expand to all the administrative posts and localities".
As part of the Green Revolution advocated by the government to guarantee the nation's food security, wheat production, which two years ago was restricted to the Angonia plateau in Tete province, has now been expanded to nine districts in Niassa, Manica, Gaza and Maputo provinces.
Rice production, said Guebuza, had risen from 174,000 tonnes in 2005 to 206,000 tonnes in the 2008 harvest. Grain production as a whole had risen from 1.9 to 2.3 million tonnes between 2005 and 2009.
The country's cattle herd had grown from 1.2 million to 1.6 million over the same period, and the number of peasant families breeding cattle had doubled, from 175,000 to 350,000. That, Guebuza said, meant "there are more beef and milk cattle, and more oxen for animal traction".
As for transport, Guebuza stressed that the government is "implanting an efficient intermodal transport system which responds to the requirements of the development of the nation and of the districts in particular". This "integrated transport system" had involved reviving the publicly-owned bus, rail, ferry and air companies, acquiring new vehicles, railcars, boats and planes.
Rehabilitation of the Sena railway in central Mozambique, out of action for quarter of a century because of sabotage by the apartheid-backed Renamo rebels, had now reached the point where there are regular train services from the port of Beira to Muanza, Cheringoma and Marromeu districts, which had not seen a train in decades.
Though not yet open to traffic, the construction of a new bridge over the Zambezi was complete, linking Caia in Sofala province to Chumuara in Zambezia. This, Guebuza said, would provide a permanent road link between north and south of the country.
Communications had been transformed with the spread of mobile phones across Mozambique. There were about 600,000 mobile phone subscribers in 2004, but by 2008 the number had reached four million. The number of districts reached by cell phones had risen from 73 to 111.
The fixed phone network had also expanded, from 68 to 116 districts. But the number of subscribers to fixed phones has only risen slightly - from 75,000 to 80,000.
The fibre-optic network of the publicly owned telecommunications company, TDM, had now reached all the provincial capitals. This, Guebuza said, made it possible for information, including internet services, "to circulate reliably and in real time".
Guebuza claimed that, under the public sector reform programme, there had been a positive change in the attitude shown by civil servants, and greater rapidity in dealing with issues of interest to citizens, notably the licensing of economic activities.
The government, he added, was also paying particular attention to the administration of justice, in order to achieve "a speedier and more transparent justice that is ever closer to the citizens".
The training of staff for each component of the legal system, Guebuza stressed, "seeks to guarantee respect for human rights, particularly respect for human life". It was this respect for life that would ensure "that lives are not lost in our prisons due to human negligence" - an oblique reference to the death by asphyxiation in March of 12 prisoners in a grotesquely overcrowded police cell in the northern district of Mogincual.
Guebuza also warned that only the courts were empowered to sentence criminals, and condemned all attempts by citizens to take the law into their own hands.
He pledged that the government will continue working "for an increasingly just and prosperous Mozambique where respect for the rights and freedoms of citizens is promoted and cultivated in each citizen and particularly each state agent and official".
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