Mozambique: Zambezia contractors told to finish abandoned jobs – AIM report

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Mozambique: Zambezia contractors told to finish abandoned jobs – AIM report

4:17 CAT | 20 Apr 2020

Photo: Diário da Zambézia

The government of the central Mozambican province of Zambezia has given dishonest building contractors four months to compete jobs that they were hired to do for state bodies.

In all, there are 59 building jobs in the province which have not been completed since 2015. On 30 of these, the work has been paralysed, while the other 29 have been purely and simply abandoned. The losses to the state are estimated at 900 million meticais (about 13.4 million US dollars, at current exchange rates).

The unfinished buildings include schools, health centres and residences for district administrators.

The Secretary of State for Zambezia, Judite Mussacula, met on Friday with the contractors to discuss the matter. She told them she could see no plausible explanation for the failure to complete the work – especially since some of the contractors had been paid in full for the jobs, and others had received over 60 per cent of the agreed price.

So she gave them four months to complete the jobs. “We cannot allow you to prejudice the public”, she said. Any contractor who failed to complete the work in the four months would be placed on a black list, and barred from any future public works tenders.

At the meeting, Alfredo Chapala, chairperson of the Zambezia Association of Contractors, criticised the government for paying 100 per cent of the price for a job to contractors who had not presented any bank guarantees.

Source: AIM