Antigo Primeiro-ministro Alberto Vaquina
Maputo, 11 Apr (AIM) – Former Mozambican Prime Minister Alberto Vaquina has criticized the current government for its alleged delay in responding to Sunday night’s tragedy, in which 98 people drowned in a shipwreck, off the coast of the northern province of Nampula.
Vaquina was Prime Minister under President Armando Guebuza, from 2012 to 2015.
In an exclusive interview with CIPCAST, a programme of the anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), Vaquina suggested that the government in which he had served would have reacted more quickly to the disaster than the current government did.
The shipwreck occurred on Sunday evening, but only 48 hours later, on Tuesday did the government declare three days of national mourning. President Filipe Nyusi went to the site of the disaster on Wednesday.
Coordination in decision taking is very important, declared Vaquina, “and that’s why it’s easier to give some autonomy to those who are on the ground, such as the locality head, the head of the administrative post, the district administrator, the provincial governor, the secretary or state, and even the members of Frelimo, who could have contacted Lunga rapidly to find out what had happened”. (Lunga is an administrative post in Mossuril district, where the overloaded fishing boat began its disastrous journey).
“Frelimo has done better than this”, said Vaquina. “Experiences exist, and we don’t need to import experiences, either from doubtful pasts or from other places, before exhausting our own experience”.
“We are Frelimo and we come from a great experience of governance, which should serve as an inspiration so that we, the younger generation, who now take on board the destiny of the country, know how to deal with the most sensitive matters”.
When the shipwreck occurred, said Vaquina, the local Frelimo structures “probably did not have instructions to act. The problem is waiting for instructions”.
But instructions should not have been necessary. It was the party branches that should have taken the initiative. It should have been enough to make a simple phone call asking “see what’s going on, because we want to make a preliminary reaction”.
“We have to give power to those who are there”, he added, “instead of wasting time seeing who is governing more, who is enriching more. What interests us is taking care of the Mozambican people”.
Vaquina stressed that local authorities “must have the instruments that allow them to take decisions”. Instructions, he added, should not be given when events happen, but instead Frelimo must be ready in advance.
“If we are not duly organized in day-to-day life, then, on the day when we need our organisation to save lives, we will be in a complex situation which could endanger our lives, and then we shall be obliged to improvise”, he said.
“As far as I can see, things are not being done in such a way that would suggest that there is a prior organization which is used to dealing with difficult situations”, Vaquina continued. “When I was Prime Minister, I knew that the intermeshing between members of the government was such that, in a very short time, we were able to obtain the information we wanted”.
“I’m not saying we were perfect”, he added, “but I am saying that this country is used to better organization, and it’s time to say that we do not deserve this kind of disorganization”.
Asked whether the country had progressed or not since when he left the government in 2015, Vaquina said “anybody who knows how to interpret numbers can look at the previous and the current numbers and check whether in my government there was more production than in the current one. This doesn’t need any scientist or statistician. It’s just a comparison of numbers that any citizen can do”.
But the only specific number Vaquina mentioned was the exchange rate which was about 30 meticais to the US dollar in 2015. It is now about 64 meticais to the dollar.
He failed to mention that the sharp drop in the value of the metical was due exclusively to the country’s largest ever financial scandal, known as the case of the “hidden debts”.
Under Guebuza’s government, three fraudulent state-owned companies, Prondicus, Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), all run by the security service, SISE, borrowed over two billion dollars from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia.
The loans were clandestine and were only possible because Guebuza’s Finance Minister, Manuel Chang, signed guarantees which meant that, if the companies were to default (as they all did), the Mozambican state would be liable to repay the full amount of the loans.
When the true extent of the loans became public knowledge, in April 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suspended its programme with Mozambique and all donors who gave some of their aid in direct budget support, suspended all further disbursements.
This crashed the Mozambican economy and sent the currency into a tailspin, from which it was only rescued by draconian monetary measures taken by the Bank of Mozambique.
(AIM)
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