Maputo, Mozambique — Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano on Monday urged the country's business class to produce, not only goods, but also ideas.
"Ideas are the most precious things that we can create. Our private sector can only face today's challenges if it produces sufficient new ideas," he said.
Chissano was speaking at the opening session of the annual sector on the Mozambican private sector, a forum at which the government and private sector exchange opinions, and businessmen pose the problems affecting their companies' development.
"We are full of products in this country", said Chissano, "but we need ideas that allow us to use these products for the good of our people".
The President said that globalisation had opened new markets, but had also intensified competition. Customs barriers were coming down across the world "and attempts by government to protect their industries are increasingly tenuous and inefficient".
"We are exposed to competition the likes of which we have not seen before", Chissano warned, "and the only way out is to take part in this competition, by making the most of our comparative advantages, without neglecting the quality of our products".
Chissano made it clear that the Mozambican government was not about to accede to business demands either for protection of for administrative measures to force the banks to lower their interest rates.
The government's response, he said, had been to encourage the diversification of the financial sector, and the banks were now introducing "new financial products, with the intention of providing support and advice for businesses".
On his part, Mozambique's Confederation of Business Associations called for a modernisation of the state apparatus as "decisive for good governance".
The CTA chairperson Egas Mussanhane urged the "professionalisation, simplification and modernisation" of the Mozambican state.
"Without a state apparatus and a legal apparatus that are equipped with good working conditions", he added "it will not be possible to ensure a high degree of professionalism, or avoid the break in institutional memory resulting from excessive staff and leadership turnover".
Mussanhane, implicitly breaking from the export-oriented model championed by the World Bank and the IMF, said the focal point for economic policy should be the expansion of the domestic market.
This would mean a stress on agriculture, livestock and fisheries, encouragement for rural markets, and the development of small and medium-sized agro-industries that would add value to agricultural produce.
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"Because the agricultural sector is not yet competitive, and because the recovery of investments takes a long time, with a high degree of risk, it is essential that funds be made available, on concessional terms, to establish infrastructures in the agricultural sector, and to reduce the costs which weigh heavily on the production and circulation of agricultural goods", urged Mussanhane.
He called for "technical and financial support" for small and medium companies "which have an enormous social function to perform".
Mussanhane protested at the high cost of fuel, air transport, coastal shipping, energy, telecommunications and financial services, and called on the state to regulate the activity of the companies, state or private, that provide these services on a monopoly or near-monopoly basis.
He also attacked Mozambican labour legislation as "an obstacle to increased productivity", arguing that "it discourages job creation, makes it difficult to hire qualified staff, and hinders transfer of technology".
