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Miramar
Maputo City Council has urged citizens of the capital to persuade the sellers of the informal “Nwankakana” [or Wakakana, or 16 de Junho] market to leave the space that they are illegally occupying, in order to allow work to finish on the northern access road to the suspension bridge being built over the Bay of Maputo.
The refusal of the market stallholders to leave is one of the factors delaying completion of the bridge, which can no longer meet its original deadline of opening to traffic by the end of the year.
Also Read: Maputo-Catembe bridge: Wakakana market vendors will not be compensated, says City Council
A press release from the Council on Friday also urged cooperation from “those politicians who have been promoting and perpetuating the environment of disobedience”. Instead, the politicians (whom the release did not name) should “facilitate the normal functioning of people and of institutions”.
The market sellers, the Council argued, are acting against their own best interests, since the Council has offered them all space in a properly structured municipal market. And, like everyone else in Mozambican society, they will benefit from the bridge linking central Maputo to the outlying district of Katembe.
Although the Wakakana market is informal, the Council release points out that it is on municipal property. “None of the stallholders owns the place”, it said. “The new site to which the market sellers will be transferred, is also a municipal market, and the property of the Maputo municipality”.
The stallholders have been threatening that they will not leave unless they are paid compensation. The Council, however, rejects any monetary compensation, pointing out that the sellers are already being compensated through the provision of other facilities where they can continue selling their wares.
This dispute has dragged on for more than a year, and means that a handful of market sellers are holding up one of the largest construction projects in the country. The new market stalls have been built, but remain empty since the Wakakana sellers refuse to occupy them.
The Council warned the stallholders that “the bridge is a work of public interest and its construction cannot and must not be hindered or delayed under any pretext. Given its scale, it involves not only Mozambican, but also international interests, and its construction and conclusion obey deadlines laid down in contracts between the government and private companies”.
The sellers have taken to staying overnight in the market for fear that the Council might send in bulldozers to remove their stalls and shacks under cover of darkness, but so far the Council has not resorted to force, and still hopes to persuade the stallholders to move.
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