Maputo, 27 Sep (AIM) – The Mozambican Justice Minister, Helena Kida, revealed on Thursday that the state spends about 16 million meticais (about 250,000 US dollars, at the current exchange rate) a day to feed prison inmates across the country.
Speaking at the seventh National Religious Conference, which took place in Maputo under the slogan “Religious Confessions, United in Building a Culture of Peace in Mozambique”, the minister said there are a total of 24,000 inmates in the country’s prisons.
According to Kida, these figures are suffocating the budget allocated to the country’s National Prison Service (SERNAP) “because we are talking about 700 Meticais per prisoner per day, multiplied by 24,000, just for food. That’s a lot of money, not to mention the responsibility of making sure they’re healthy, with the correct clothing, including the supply of electricity, water and everything else.”
The minister explained that in order to change the situation, the prisons have been investing in the production of some foodstuffs for their own sustenance.
“The effort we have to make, as a sector, is to try to depend as little as possible on the state budget, and that’s why we’ve been developing activities within the scope of SERNAP itself, which is the production of our own food, so that we can obtain from our production the income that will help us maintain the inmate population of prison inmates”, she said.
The Minister also expressed her concern at the growing number of inmates in the country, despite the pardons that the Mozambican President grants every year.
(AIM)
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