Dispute over Beira rubbish collection fee rumbles on – Mozambique

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Dispute over Beira rubbish collection fee rumbles on – Mozambique

8:42 CAT | 15 Oct 2016

CRV Magazine / Frelimo first secretary in Beira, Lino Massinguine

Both the ruling Frelimo Party and the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) held press conferences in the central city of Beira on Thursday, claiming that their version of the payment, or non-payment, of money owed to Beira Municipal Council by the publicly-owned electricity company, EDM, was correct.

The two parties had almost come to blows over this issue at an extraordinary meeting of the Beira Municipal Assembly on Monday, held to approve an amended budget for 2016 submitted by the Beira Municipal Council.

The Council argued that expenditure had to be cut because Beira had not received money from the central government’s Municipal Compensation Fund, and because the publicly owned electricity company, EDM, had also not transferred the money it owes the municipality.

EDM collects the garbage removal fee, which is added to the monthly electricity bill of each household. But, according to the Council, since December 2015 this money has not been deposited in the municipal coffers.

However, the Frelimo group in the Assembly claimed that it had evidence that EDM had paid the money owing – but failed to distribute this supposed proof to other Assembly members. After a rowdy debate, the MDM majority in the Assembly passed the amended budget.

On Thursday, according to a report in Friday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”, Council spokesperson Francisco Majoi showed reporters correspondence between the Council and EDM. On 14 September, the Council had written to EDM asking that it transfer urgently the money from the rubbish collection fee for the months of January to September.

Six days later, EDM replied and apologized for not sending the money. It claimed there had been an error in indicating the bank account for the transfers, and promised to regularize the matter soon.

As far as the Council was concerned, EDM’s apology was clear evidence that it had received no money from the company.

But at the Frelimo press conference, the party’s first secretary in Beira, Lino Massinguine, claimed Frelimo had EDM documents proving that the money had been sent regularly to an account in the country’s second largest commercial bank, the BCI, in the name of “Beira Municipal Council, Department of Finance”.

The documents list a series of municipalities, including Beira, to which EDM has made payments, month by month, reaching a total for Beira of around 13 million meticais (about 169,000 US dollars, at current exchange rates).

“Here’s the documentary evidence”, declared Massinguine. “When we understood that the main question at the extraordinary session was amending the budget, and that this was based on EDM’s supposed failure to channel the money from the garbage fee to the Council since January, we went to the company and obtained data proving that the money had been sent, including the amount for September, which was transferred on 7 October”.

Massinguine said that during the Assembly session “we tried unsuccessfully to prove our version, but we were verbally and physically assaulted by the MDM group. They’re trying to hide something. The money was transferred”.

The Council, however, said the account mentioned in the documents shown by Frelimo does not exist. Not only did the Council have no knowledge of any account in the name of “Beira Municipal Council: Finance Department”, but neither did the BCI. The correct Council account is held in the Bank of Mozambique (the central bank does not normally have commercial bank functions, but it does hold accounts of state and municipal bodies).

“We think that the attitude of EDM is very strange”, said Majoi. “Since we signed the contract about the rubbish collection fee with EDM about ten years ago, it has been depositing the money in a Bank of Mozambique account. We don’t know why it changed this procedure in January without informing us”.

But the money has now been deposited in the correct account. Majoi said that, at about 15.00 on Wednesday, EDM notified the Council that, on 7 October, it had deposited rather more than 15 million meticais in the Council’s Bank of Mozambique account.

In that case, reporters asked, why had the Council insisted on amending the budget? The Assembly session was on Monday, 10 October, by which time the money had been sitting in the correct account for three days.

Majoi’s excuse was that, by the time of the Assembly meeting, “The Municipal Assembly had not been notified of this transfer. We only had the letter of apology sent to the Council by EDM”.

This is an admission that, before asking the Assembly to amend the budget, the Council did not bother to check how much money was in its bank account.

The sequence of events can now be pieced together, without resort to any conspiracy theory or accusations of forgery. From the documents shown at the two press conferences, it seems that EDM transferred the rubbish collection fee to the wrong account number over a period of nine months. When the Council finally protested, in mid-September, that it had not received the money, EDM realized that it had made a mistake and sent the funds, in one lump sum, to the correct account.

Nobody comes out of this saga looking good. For nine months, EDM sent the money to the wrong account, with no explanation. The Council allowed EDM to persist in its error, and did not protest until September. Both Frelimo and the MDM then tried to make political capital out of the blunder.

The EDM Beira office has now said that it will give its own version of events some time in the next few days.

Source: AIM