Mozambique donors must “build a positive agenda” – Portuguese Secretary of State

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique donors must “build a positive agenda” – Portuguese Secretary of State

12:02 CAT | 09 Nov 2017

Portuguese Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (SENEC), Teresa Ribeiro, yesterday advocated a rapprochement with Mozambique of the traditional donors to the country who suspended the support in 2016.

“Portugal is in agreement with the position taken by most donors”, following the scandal of the Mozambican state’s hidden debts, but Teresa Ribeiro argues that it is now necessary “to create an agenda with the government”.

“We cannot just wait for something to happen,” she said in an interview with Lusa in Maputo after a three-day visit to Mozambique.

“Donors are now forced to build a positive agenda that will allow us to resume political dialogue and to resume some reforms. The digging in of international donors on one side and the government on the other does not seem to be conducive to anything positive,” she said.

International donors, including Portugal and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have made resumption of direct aid to the State Budget dependent on the results of a US$2 billion hidden debt audit, an investigation that has meanwhile been carried out, but with some information still not disclosed, leaving aspects still to clarify.

The IMF said in July that a new agreement with the country required more information from the public companies involved and accountability measures to which it had not yet received a response.

Asked if this is not leading to all donors also waiting for developments in the relationship between the Fund and Mozambique, Teresa Ribeiro considers that the group should be “a little less passive”.

“This is where we have to think: In these circumstances, what can I do? Politics is the art of the possible and that is what we have to work on,” she said.

In a meeting with donors in Maputo, Teresa Ribeiro says she had left an appeal to create “a movement that is positive, an agenda of hope, while being demanding. The positions are not incompatible,” she added.

“I think we have to find the wisdom to combine, in a judicious way, mechanism both of exigence and approximation,” she concluded.

Sven von Burgsdorff, Mozambique representative of the European Union which currently occupies the rotating leadership in G14 group of traditional state budget donors, said on Saturday in an interview with Lusa that there was still no defined group position for 2018.

He said the signing of a new agreement with the IMF would mobilise the rest of the donors and hoped that this could happen, though the governor of the Mozambican central bank had already made forecasts for 2018 without counting on support from either the IMF or traditional donors.

Source: Lusa