Mozambique Elections: Renamo marches through Maputo, despite tear gas - AIM
Photo: O País
The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Thursday passed a resolution approving the General State Account (CGE) for the 2016 financial year, with all opposition deputies voting against.
The CGE is drawn up by the government after the end of the financial year concerned, and is then submitted to the Administrative Tribunal, the body responsible for overseeing the legality of public expenditure. The Tribunal then sends its report and comments on the CGE to the Assembly.
Every year, the Administrative Tribunal criticises the CGE for various shortcomings, and every year the opposition parties say that the Tribunal’s report is evidence of government misconduct or corruption, and call for rejection of the CGE.
Equally predictable is the response from the ruling Frelimo Party, which says the CGE proves the government did indeed implement the budget passed by the Assembly. Frelimo deputies argue that the CGE shows the government is carrying out its programme, but accepts that there have been failings. It claims that the CGE is improving, year after year, and that, since the account is in accordance with the law, it should be accepted.
That debate took place last week, and on Thursday the Assembly’s Plan and Budget Commission brought to the plenary a motion approving the CGE, but calling on the government to follow the recommendations made by the Administrative Tribunal and by the CPO itself in its earlier assessment of the CGE. Virtually identical resolutions have been brought by the CPO, and passed by the plenary, every year.
The Thursday debate was a replay, in miniature, of last week’s debate on the CGE. Antonio Timba, of the rebel movement Renamo, accused the government of ignoring the report from the Administrative Tribunal, which had found “abuses and illegalities” in the CGE. He made the innovative claim that the government sets low tax collection targets “in order to facilitate diversion of funds”, and accused the government of “the dilapidation of public assets”.
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For Frelimo, Pedro Cossa praised the government for stabilising the exchange rate of the national currency, the metical, and said that the CGE is improving year after year. He also claimed that the government had to implement the 2016 budget in a situation where traditional donors had suspended their direct support for the Mozambican budget (but failed to mention that the support was withdrawn because of over a billion dollars of clandestine debt which the previous government, under President Armando Guebuza, had hidden from both international institutions and the Mozambican public).
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Frelimo’s absolute majority in the Assembly ensured that the first reading of the resolution approving the CGE was passed by 133 votes to 72.
The Assembly then moved to a second reading, going through the resolution paragraph by paragraph. As in previous years, Renamo threw in a wrecking amendment, calling for replacing the words “the CGE is approved” with “the CGE is rejected”.
Procedurally, such an amendment is illegitimate since the Assembly had already voted to approve the CGE. Nonetheless a vote was taken on the amendment, and once again Frelimo prevailed by 133 votes to 72.
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