Mozambique: Government approves new Military Service Regulation
Nyusi swears in new ministers into office – AIM report
9:56 CAT | 14 Dec 2017
From left to right: Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Higino Francisco Marrule, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation José Condungua Pacheco, President Filipe Nyusi and the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Ernesto Max Elias Tonela.
Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Thursday swore into office three new members of his government, urging them to act, not individually, but as part of a team.
Two of them have previous experience as ministers, but have been given new portfolios. The new Foreign Minister is Jose Pacheco, who was previously Minister of Agriculture, and the new Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy is the former Minister of Industry and Trade, Max Tonela.
The newcomer to the government is agronomist Higino Marrule, who takes over from Pacheco as Agriculture Minister.
Nyusi told the ministers “Be prepared to face this challenge, which is not individual but for an entire group. Be part of the teams that you will find and do not consider yourselves as chiefs. Help solve problems as part of a team”.
He said that, in appointing the ministers, he had taken their experience into account. It was his intention to strengthen the government’s capacity to respond to the challenges the country faces.
Nyusi recognised that time is running out. His five year term of office began in January 2015, and so the government has little more than two years left to complete its programme for the 2015-2019 period. He urged the three ministers “to use the time that remains to carry out our promises. This obliges us to be more careful in defining priorities and implementing the activities we have chosen”.
He told Pacheco that his experience allows him to have an overall view of the country, which makes him the ideal person to coordinate foreign policy, representing the interests and good name of Mozambique.
“The way our country is seen abroad depends largely on the capacity of our diplomacy to transmit to the world an image that reflects our reality”, Nyusi said. The goal of Mozambican foreign policy, he added, was always to make more friends and create partnerships within the principles of equality and mutual respect.
“We should also bank on economic diplomacy which allows us to attract foreign investment, capable of advancing the national economy, creating more jobs, and empowering the training of human capital in specialist areas”, said the President.
He urged Tonela to define strategies to guarantee that the country’s mineral resources will be exploited in such a way as to benefit Mozambicans first and foremost. “We must be aware that these resources could be exhausted in a few decades”, he warned. “At that time we will have to ask what benefits Mozambicans obtained from mining”.
Nyusi insisted that environmental protection norms, and the living standards of local people, must always be respected by mining operators. “We must not, on the pretext of the necessity of establishing a mining project, sacrifice the people living nearby, depriving them of sources of income and removing them from their homes without paying the legally established compensation”, he said.
Tonela’s ministry, he added, “should continue the electrification of the country in order to guarantee that by the end of the present cycle of governance all the districts of our country can have electrical power”.
Turning to Marrule, Nyusi said “a significant part of our agriculture is subsistence family farming, which means that some of the people who make their livelihood from it are in a precarious situation”.
He called on the Agriculture Ministry to step up its programmes to support peasant farmers through disseminating good practices and distributing improved seeds, among other measures that will improve productivity.
The ministers promised to make every effort to comply with their new missions. “I shall use all my capacities to carry out successfully this complex task of looking after our country’s foreign policy”, pledged Pacheco.
Source: AIM
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