Joint Commission still discussing working group – AIM report

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Joint Commission still discussing working group – AIM report

7:38 CAT | 09 Dec 2016

Noticias

The Joint Commission set up between the Mozambican government and the Renamo rebels on Thursday discussed matters concerning the creation of the group that will draw up principles to guide a new law on decentralisation.

The Commission took the decision to set up the working group at its meeting on Wednesday. “We are continuing to engage in productive discussion and we shall continue again tomorrow”, the spokesperson for the international mediating team, former Botswana President Quett Masire, told reporters after the meeting. (Masire has taken over temporarily from European Union representative Mario Raffaelli, who is out of the country).

The exact role of the new working group is far from clear. It seems to duplicate the sub-commission that was set up in August with the task of drawing up a package of constitutional amendments and new or amended legislation on decentralisation which should take effect before the next general elections (scheduled for 2019).

That package was to include legislation on provincial governments, and provincial finance, and a re-examination of a 1994 law, never implemented, on setting up municipal districts.

A constitutional amendment is required in order to change the way provincial governors are appointed. Currently the President of the Republic appoints the governors, but Renamo is demanding the right to appoint governors in the six central and northern provinces it claims to have won in the 2014 general elections. The second opposition party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) is insisting that the governors should be elected.

Although the sub-commission was tasked with drawing up this legislation in August, nothing has yet been made public, let alone submitted for debate in the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.

The mediators had hoped to send a consensual document on decentralisation to the Assembly by the end of November. That might have allowed new legislation to be passed in the current parliamentary sitting.

But no consensual draft has appeared, and it looks impossible for any new legislation, or constitutional amendment, to be drafted, debated and approved before the end of the
Assembly sitting on 20 December.

Meanwhile Renamo’s insurgency in the centre of the country is continuing. The latest incident to be reported was a Renamo attack on Wednesday against a train owned by the Indian mining company Jindal in Sofala province, as it was carrying coal for export from the port of Beira.

Source: AIM