Mozambique: Government approves €35,500 for Hulene landfill collapse victims

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Mozambique: Government approves €35,500 for Hulene landfill collapse victims

7:39 CAT | 13 May 2025

This Tuesday's Cabinet meeting was held in Chimoio city, Manica province. [Photo: Notícias]

Mozambique’s government approved on Tuesday an “extraordinary transfer” of €35,500 to maintain support for victims of the 2018 collapse of the largest open-air rubbish dump in Maputo, in Hulene.

The decision was taken during the usual weekly cabinet meeting, in this case held in the city of Chimoio, in the central province of Manica, where Mozambican President Daniel Chapo is visiting, according to the final communiqué of the 16th ordinary session of that body.

The meeting approved “the decree approving the extraordinary transfer relating to the continued disbursement of subsidies to support the victims of the landslide at the Hulene landfill” in the Mozambican capital.

This is support worth 2,520,000 meticais (€35,500), “from revenue collected by the Land and Environment sector for the Maputo City Council,” the same statement explains.

In the early hours of 19 February 2018, part of the capital’s largest landfill, as high as a three-storey building, collapsed due to heavy rain and fell on several makeshift dwellings, killing 16 people, including seven children.

Mozambique’s government announced in the same year that the Hulene landfill would be closed, but it remains in operation to this day.

Families displaced by the landfill’s collapse have complained about delays in the payment of subsidies previously allocated by the government. Each family is paying 30,000 meticais (€420) per quarter to rent a rented accommodation while they wait for the completion of new houses.

The rehousing of families living near the Hulene landfill was scheduled for the end of 2018, but has not yet been fully completed.

The president of the Maputo Municipal Council, Rasaque Manhique, said on 7 May that the new landfill in the Mozambican capital should be operational in two years, after launching a public tender this summer.

“It will be operational in approximately two years, but we want to work, without compromising compliance with standards and quality assurance, to see if we can still reduce this timeframe,” Rasaque Manhique told Lusa in Lisbon, where the tender for the landfill that will replace the open-air dump in Hulene was presented.

He stressed the importance of the construction of the new landfill, an investment of US$525 million, more than €460 million, shared with the World Bank, given the saturation of the Hulene landfill, which is well known to be in a condition that requires very rapid intervention.

This landfill, described at the session as a 30-metre mountain of open rubbish, covers 25 hectares and is the largest landfill in Mozambique. It is also the livelihood of thousands of people, known as catadores, who search for some income among the waste every day.

During the session in Lisbon, officials expressed “great concern about creating conditions so that those displaced by the disaster [the landslide in 2018] can receive their homes,” with only 21 of the 268 affected houses still to be delivered.

The new landfill is expected to increase the municipality’s revenue from 2.9 million to 9.3 million meticais (€40,700 to €130,700). It will have a seven-year operating contract, which must include a solution for the 700 to 1,500 waste pickers who must be accommodated and integrated into other municipal activities.

Source: Lusa