Assembly debates general state account – AIM report

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Assembly debates general state account – AIM report

7:17 CAT | 12 Apr 2017

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The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Wednesday began debating the General State Account (CGE) for 2015, with the ruling Frelimo Party praising the government’s work on implementing the 2015 budget, while the opposition demanded that the CGE be rejected.

The procedure is that the CGE is first presented to the Administrative Tribunal, the body that checks the legality of public expenditure, in the year following budget execution. The CGE, plus the Tribunal’s report and opinion, is then submitted to the Assembly early the next year.

The Assembly debate follows what is by now a very familiar pattern. Every year, the opposition parties cite the large number of irregularities in the CGE indicated by the Tribunal. And every year Frelimo says the government’s work has improved, and this year’s CGE is better than its predecessors.

Leaning on parts of the Tribunal’s report, the main opposition party, the rebel movement Renamo, complained of the defective paperwork in some of the state bodies audited by the Tribunal, and the poor organisation of their archives “which makes it difficult to locate completely the documents proving the revenue collected and the expenditure made”.

Budgetary allocations, Renamo said, had been altered without proper authorisation, and money had been switched between projects without following the correct procedure.

The Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) noted that the 2015 CGE mentions the illicit government guarantees given to loans from European banks to the security-related companies Proindicus (622 million US dollars) and Mozambique Asset Management, MAM (535 million dollars). These guarantees date from 2013 and 2014 but had been omitted from the CGEs of those years.

The MDM stressed that it was illegal for the debts of Proindicus, MAM and Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company) to become state debt, since the guarantees the three companies obtained had not been authorised by the Assembly of the Republic, as demanded by the Mozambican constitution. “The Mozambican people must not pay”, declared the MDM group in the Assembly’s Constitutional and Legal Affairs Commission.

Frelimo, however, argued that “the clarity, exactitude and simplicity with which the State Account was drawn up shows a growth in the transparency of financial governance, which consolidates the democratic rule of law”.

It believed that the government had been making every effort to comply with previous recommendations made by the Administrative Tribunal, and resolutions passed by the Assembly itself in previous years.

The Frelimo group on the Assembly’s Budget and Plan Commission admitted there are still “some defects” in the CGE, but regarded this as part of “a normal process of growth”.

During the debate on the Assembly floor, Renamo deputy Jose Samo Gudo accused the government of paying no attention to audits by the Tribunal, and called for the sacking of the chairpersons of public companies whose management, he claimed, was “chaotic”.

MDM deputy Fernando Bismarque alleged that the government had “legalized” the Ematum, Proindicus and MAM debts, even though an independent audit of these three companies by the US firm Kroll is still under way.

Frelimo deputies, however, pointed to the government’s achievements in 2015, despite the severe flooding that hit parts of central and northern Mozambique in the first part of the year, and “the politico-military instability caused by the enemies of development”, as Emilia Pereira put it, referring to Renamo’s illegal militia.

Moreira Vasco praised the “high degree of rigour” shown by the government in drawing up the CGE, and dismissed Renamo’s concerns as “crocodile tears” shed by people “who have never done anything but destroy what Frelimo built”.

Source: AIM