Maputo — Months after the completion, with Chinese funds, of a Maputo residential neighbourhood exclusively for officers of the Mozambican armed forces (FADM), there is still nobody living there.
According to Defence Ministry spokesperson Lazaro Mathe, cited in Thursday's issue of the independent newsheet "Vertical", this is because the houses are not yet furnished. Mathe claimed that the 12 houses for generals and 42 flats for other officers would be furnished this month - i.e. by next Tuesday.
He said the delay was because the Ministry has decided that it will supply the furniture, which will remain Ministry property. Thus whenever officers leave these houses, they will not take the furniture with them.
But other Defence Ministry sources denied this story, and claimed that military housing is riddled with corruption.
They told "Vertical" that, after the end of the war of destabilisation, when the foreign staff working at the Defence Ministry returned to their home countries, senior officers seized the houses they had been living in.
With the formation of the FADM, out of volunteers from both the old government army (the FAM/FPLM) and from the former rebel movement Renamo, it became necessary to find housing for ex- Renamo officers.
Initially they were accommodated in hotels, with the Defence Ministry footing the bill. This was intolerably expensive, and so the Ministry's logistics department was told to find other accommodation for these officers.
The solution found was simple and deeply corrupt: those officers who had seized houses where foreign staff had once lived began to rent them out to the ex-Renamo officers (with the Ministry paying the rent). One of "Vertical"'s sources said this abuse of state-owned housing "has been going on for a long time, and since all the officers are involved, nobody says anything".
It is not in the interests of these officers that their tenants should move into the new military neighbourhood, since this would immediately dry up their supplementary source of income.
According to a report in a second newsheet "Mediafax", some officers rent the houses to themselves. The officers in question tell the Ministry they are renting their houses from third parties, the Ministry pays the rent - and the money goes straight into the pockets of the officers.
In principle, it should be easy to confirm or deny these allegations, by looking at the list of state houses allocated to the Defence Ministry in the 1970s and 80s and checking what happened to each and every one of them. It will be interesting to see whether the Finance Ministry orders such an inquiry.
