Mozambique: Sales of cars and properties above 250,000 meticais must be reported to GIFiM - MZNews
Photo: O País
A flagship project of the previous Mozambican government, under President Armando Guebuza, has collapsed, leaving nothing but debts, according to the current Minister of Industry and Trade, Ragendra de Sousa.
The project in question is a vehicle assembly plant, Matchedje Motors, inaugurated by Guebuza himself in 2014.
The factory resulted from a partnership between the Mozambican state and the Chinese company China Tong Jian Investment. With a total investment of about 150 million US dollars, the factory was built on an area of 20,000 square metres in Machava, in the southern city of Matola.
The first Matchedje vehicle rolled off the assembly line on September 25. The first vehicle sold to a customer was handed over on October 9. The following year, 2015, Transport Minister Carlos Mesquita signed an agreement with Matchedje Motors, to acquire buses in order to improve urban public transport.
At the inauguration, the plant was hailed as a major step forward in the industrialisation of Mozambique. The new factory “has the potential to contribute to reducing imports of light and heavy vehicles and to provide solutions through cutting-edge technologies. The deployment and commissioning of Motor Matchedje bodes well for the growth of the Mozambican economy”, declared Guebuza.
But just three years after the inauguration, Matchedje Motors stopped assembling vehicles, and switched to becoming nothing more than a workshop, simply repairing cars and buses, mostly those owned by the Maputo and Matola municipal bus companies. All the assembly lines were closed.
The company blamed such factors as the lack of skilled labour, the depreciation of the Mozambican currency, the metical, in 2016-17, and the fact that it is much cheaper to buy a used car imported from Japan than one assembled in Maputo.
Today, the premises of Matchedje Motors are used simply to convert the carcasses of ruined buses into school classrooms.
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Cited in the online version of the independent paper “O Pais”, Ragendra de Sousa said that Matchedje Motors “only left debts for the Mozambican state”. He thought the transformation of bus carcasses into classrooms was useful and welcome.
But, apart from a couple of items in the press, there has been no explanation to the public of the collapse of a project that initially boasted it would be assembling half a million vehicles a year, for domestic sales and for export, by 2020.
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