Ten demonstrators arrested in Nampula, Mozambique

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Ten demonstrators arrested in Nampula, Mozambique

7:51 CAT | 19 Sep 2016

The Mozambican police arrested ten people on Monday during a demonstration in the northern city of Nampula.

More than 1,300 people, recruited to register households in Nampula for the distribution of mosquito nets due to begin shortly, demonstrated on Monday morning against the failure to pay them their promised weekend training allowances.

The training took place at the weekend, and the health authorities trained 1,333 people in how to register households living in the city.

The registration was to have started on Monday, but not only was there a shortage of the basic material required, such as pens, files and registration stickers, but those trained staged a demonstration when they were not given their allowances.

The demonstrators threw up barricades and blocked the traffic along one of Nampula’s main thoroughfares, 25 September Avenue.

Each person trained should have received 400 meticais (about 5.3 US dollars at current exchange rates) – 200 meticais for each day of training. The total owing is thus 533,200 meticais. The demonstrators said they took to the streets because they had lost confidence in the people involved in the training.

One of the demonstrators, Viegas Jorge, told reporters they had initially been promised that the allowances would be paid on Sunday. “On Sunday they told us everything had been solved, but they would pay us on Monday”, he said. “But strangely today they tell us we will not be paid until the last day of registration. This is absurd and a lack of respect”.

Another of the protestors, Chaulane Acacio, said “we’ve been treated like animals. On those two days we worked from 07.00 to 16.00, without water to drink, without any snacks, much less lunch. They now say we must first register the households and then we will receive the training money. And what are we going to eat out there, in all this sun?”

His colleague Tauacali Mario added “These people aren’t serious, there were deceiving us for two days, and now they don’t want to pay us”.

Furthermore they have now been told that the money will be paid into m’pesa accounts. M’pesa is the banking service of the mobile phone company Vodacom, and Mario asked how those who do not use Vodacom will be paid.

The police turned up at the scene of the demonstration and fired shots into the air to disperse the protestors. They arrested ten of the demonstrators who were supposedly “agitators”.

At a press conference later in the day the Nampula city director of health, Doris Zaina, regretted what had happened. She was sure that the body managing the registration, the Malaria Consortium, would solve the problem and the activity would go ahead as planned.

Registration would take a week, and the logistics were being managed by the Malaria Consortium. Zaina admitted that the Malaria Consortium had delayed payment of the allowance “and so people are annoyed and revolted”.

Source: AIM