Government makes a start on corruption crackdown

Although it is not a full-scale, official campaign, a number of highly publicised actions suggest that the government is now moving against corruption.

The issue clearly cost Frelimo votes in the December national elections. And at the closed dinner on 8 June at the Consultative Group meeting in Paris, donors all hammered the government about its failure to tackle corruption. Corruption in Maputo may not be as bad as Brussels or Boston, but it has been growing and is a deeply felt issue.

Most dramatic was the dismissal of the attorney general (Procurador-Geral) and his deputies by the President at the beginning of July. This followed a very public dispute about the blocking of investigations into a $14 million fraud at the time of the privatisation of the retail banking arm of the Bank of Mozambique to become BCM, Banco Comercial de Moçambique.

The fraud occurred in 1996 and there have been no prosecutions. In an unprecedented speech in parliament on 14 March, former minister Eneas Comiche, who is now BCM chair, accused the attorney's general's office of blocking the investigation. The press took up the reports and accused the attorney general's office of being corrupt. A deputy attorney general then publicly accused some of his colleagues of disrupting the BCM investigation and he was suspended by the attorney general for denigrating the office of the attorney general.

At the beginning of July, the attorney general and all deputies were dismissed, and a Maputo judge, Joaquim Madeira, appointed to be the new attorney general. At the formal swearing in of Madeira on 19 July, President Chissano made clear he expected the new attorney general to "create a new climate" in the prosecutor's office.

Several governors have also begun publicly cracking down on corruption in what seemed like a coordinated serious of announcements. In Manica in April, then governor Felício Zacarias suspended district administrators for taking cattle intended for peasants. (see box)

In Nampula in June, then governor Rosário Mualeia announced that a local construction company would be prosecuted for leaving two health centres half built after being paid most of the money.

In July Agriculture Minister Hélder Muteia expelled four forestry department officials in Sofala province for pocketing $20,000 in fees paid by companies for logging licences.

All three cases are examples of very common forms of corruption. The most commonly asked question is whether this is the start of much broader prosecutions and dismissals, or only a few cases to try to assuage public discontent.

The press remains unconvinced. A journalist from the normally docile government-owned daily Notícias (15 July) challenged Minister of State Administration José Chichava during a visit to Zambézia. The article claimed that embezzlement of funds by district officials was common and systematic, and went unpunished. The newspaper even claimed that a district administrator had been caught stealing $10,000, including money intended for pensioners, and he was unpunished and was simply transferred to work in the Quelimane municipality offices.

Chichava responded that anyone who stole public money would be punished, and that President Chissano had said that one of the great challenges for the next five years was to curb corruption.

Meanwhile, the daily Metical has been stressing the total failure to clean up the justice system which it considers totally corrupted, where many judges can be bribed. And there is a backlog of thousands of cases, which is getting longer rather than shorter. Metical was particularly critical of President Chissano's decision to keep the minister of justice, who it considers weak, but to not re-appoint the vice minister, Filipe Manjate, who it considered one of the few good people left in the ministry.

Perhaps a first indication of a change in the justice system was the conviction of an Administrative Court judge, Alfredo Chambule, of murdering his daughter's boyfriend. Many saw the case as a test of whether or not judges and other senior officials had impunity. Chambule was convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison.

The appointment of new governors could also be seen in an anti-corruption context. None of the 10 provinces now has a governor who is a native of the province. Pressure to be corrupt is lessened and there are fewer easy channels for corruption if a governor does not have extensive family links in the province.

Corruption is not bad faith The extent to which corruption has come to be accepted as normal is shown by the case of 50 cattle in Manica. The cattle were from a European Union-funded aid programme and were supposed to be distributed to peasants. The governor Felício Zacarias took the unprecedented step of calling a press conference on 20 April to say all 50 had been taken by officials or their wives, and he distributed to the press a list of who took the cattle: four district administrators, one municipal council president, and 11 provincial agriculture officials. The four district administrators were eventually suspended. But the response of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Hélder Muteia, showed both how much this sort of corruption is treated as normal, and the difficulties with aid projects. He went to Chimoio to investigate and reported at a press conference there on 26 May that the problem was that the donor agency had demanded that the peasants pay between $50 and $80 for each animal, and that no peasant had enough money. Only cattle farmers who also had state salaries could afford to buy the animals. Thus the civil servants who took the cattle intended for peasants were not acting in "bad faith", Muteia said, and were not acting deliberately to harm the peasants. Nevertheless, they would be punished for damaging the image of the state.

 
Pay rise prevents general strike

A last minute agreement to increase the minimum wage headed off a general strike planned for 26-28 July. Under IMF pressure, the minimum wage had fallen from an equivalent of $38 per month in 1987 to below $18 in 1993, and then had risen steadily from 1996 to reach $36 when the minimum wage was set at 450,000 meticais last year. But inflation had pushed this back to $28 when three way (labour, business, government) negotiations began this year.

Business offered a 15% rise while unions demanded 30%. When no agreement was reached, government imposed a 16% rise to 522,000 mt ($32). This was rejected by the trade union federation OTM, which called the general strike. It soon became clear that the strike would have wide backing, and at the last minute the government agreed to a rise of 26% in the minimum wage, to 568,980 mt ($35) per month, and this was accepted by OTM. However, government wages above the minimum wage rise only by 16%. The agricultural minimum wage rises from 352,350 mt to 382,625 mt ($24).

 
First local finance reports

The 2000 national budget gives the first indication of the spending of the 33 city and town councils elected in 1998.

These towns and cities raised 69% of their own revenue, through fees. Central government transfers, still only on a per capita basis, accounted for the remaining 31%.

The 33 councils had total current spending of $12 million and capital spending of $16 million (of which $4 million and $11 million were in Maputo). The town which had the smallest revenue and spent the least was Metangula, in Niassa, which had revenue and expenditure of $31,000, of which 75% came from central government.

Moatize, where the by-election should have been held, spent $76,000 (one-fifth of the cost of the proposed election), of which it raised 48 per cent.

+ Without comment, the central government has removed one source of local revenue. Municipalities were to receive 30 per cent of the national tourism tax (on hotel bills, etc), which would have helped local governments to pay for infrastructure required by tourists. But in the 2000 budget, the government abolished the tourism tax, on the grounds that there is already value added tax on all tourist expenditures.

No provision had ever been made to transfer part of the tax to local government, but it does leave a potential revenue gap for coastal and other tourist cities.