MDM clears Nampula rubbish with Quelimane equipement

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MDM clears Nampula rubbish with Quelimane equipement

8:51 CAT | 22 Jan 2018

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The Mayor of the central Mozambican city of Quelimane, Manuel de Araujo, has lent garbage trucks, containers and other equipment to clear a backlog of rubbish in the northern municipality of Nampula.

The problem with this apparently generous gesture is that Nampula is in the middle of a campaign for a mayoral by-election due to be held on Wednesday. Both cities are run by the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), and the MDM candidate for mayor, Carlos Saide, has made clearing up the rubbish one of his main campaign promises.

The use of the Quelimane garbage trucks in Nampula thus falls foul of a clause in the Mozambican electoral legislation that forbids political parties from using state assets in election campaigns. That clause covers not only assets owned by the central government, but also municipal assets.

Araujo, interviewed by the independent television station STV, justified the Quelimane gesture as “solidarity” from one municipality to another. Yet the person who took immediate charge of the operation to remove the rubbish was none other than Carlos Saide.

Saide has boasted that, if elected, he will clear away the rubbish in seven days. That promise was ridiculed by several Nampula city councillors, who pointed out that the municipality simply does not have enough operational equipment to honour Saide’s pledge – and also that some of the municipal accounts remain frozen.

The offer from Quelimane thus comes in time to rescue Saide from his own promise. He can clear the rubbish at the expense of a city located hundreds of kilometres away.

Nampula officials of the ruling Frelimo Party were outraged at this MDM move, arguing that the talk of “solidarity” was just a cover for a blatant violation of the law on the use of state assets during election campaigns.

Araujo also brought Quelimane municipal workers to Nampula. STV noted that the people physically moving the rubbish were workers from Quelimane, not Nampula.

This operation cannot come cheap. Moving heavy vehicles and equipment from Quelimane to Nampula is very costly in fuel alone. No doubt the costs, including the overtime pay for the rubbish collection workers, is being shouldered, not by the MDM, but by Quelimane Municipal Council.

The rubbish problem ought to be an embarrassment for the MDM, since the MDM has run Nampula since the December 2013 municipal election returned an MDM mayor, Mahamudo Amurane, and an MDM majority in the municipal assembly.

After Amurane’s assassination on 4 October, the city remained in the MDM’s hands. Two interim mayors followed in quick succession, Manuel Tocova and Americo Iemenle, both of them members of the MDM.

The MDM refuses to accept any blame for the rubbish crisis, and instead blames “sabotage” by those councillors who worked with Amurane, and whom his successors tried, unsuccessfully, to sack.

Source: AIM