Mozambique: Government sends brigades to monitor cholera cases in four provinces
RM (File photo) / SERNAP guards
Mozambican Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario on Wednesday challenged the new management of the National Prison Service (SERNAP) to ensure respect for human dignity and for the rights of prisoners.
Speaking at a ceremony where he swore into office the new general director of SERNAP, Domingos Muanquina, Rosario said prisons must ensure basic services for inmates such as a nutritious diet, sanitation, medical care, recreational activities, and the opportunity to practice religious beliefs.
The Prime Minister said the challenges facing the prison system are enormous, and he urged Muanquina “to promote activities which help improve and modernise security conditions in the prisons, in order to reduce the number of escapes”.
Prisons should also be effective in rehabilitating inmates, and ensuring their reinsertion into society once they have completed their sentences, said Rosario. He also wanted to see more economic activities in prisons, so that they can generate income that can be used to improve conditions in jails.
This, he stressed, included the production of food by the prisoners, in order to improve the prison diet, and produce a surplus for sale on the market. This would help diversify sources of revenue, and reduce dependence on the state budget.
Muanquina told reporters that prison escapes are the result of poor organisation and he promised to work to minimise the problem.
“We shall look at the human resources, at the staff we have, and what functions they are performing”, he said. “We shall see what existed in the past, what the difficulties were, and we shall assess concerted measures so that we can tackle this problem of escapes”.
He agreed with Rosario that one of the priorities should be to reduce pressure from the prisons on the State Budget, and hoped that he would be able to propose measures to increase production by the prisoners themselves.
The former SERNAP general director, Eduardo Mussanhane, said he was leaving the post “with my head held high” and a sense of “mission accomplished”.
“My mission was to restructure and reformulate the sector”, he added. “The first step has been taken and right now we are at the stage of implementing the reforms. I would like my successor to try to consolidate them, and to introduce other aspects so that the institution continues to occupy the place reserved for it in the maintenance of law and order”.
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