Mozambique’s parliament will discuss undisclosed debts “at the right time” – Speaker

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Mozambique’s parliament will discuss undisclosed debts “at the right time” – Speaker

8:04 CAT | 26 Apr 2016

The chairperson of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Veronica Macamo, said on Monday that the government should come to parliament to explain the huge rise in the country’s public debt – but “at the right time”.

Macamo was speaking to reporters shortly after receiving a visiting Chinese delegation. She admitted that Mozambicans want to know the circumstances under which the debts were contracted, and what the money was used for.

She thought it important to choose “an intelligent moment” to summon the government to the Assembly “so that it can explain to us in detail how this debt was contracted, so that we can take a position on it”.

Macamo was reacting to a statement issued by the Human Rights Commission of the Mozambican Bar Association on Friday which called on the Assembly to act urgently on the revelations that over a billion dollars of public debt was concealed, by the previous government, headed by President Armando Guebuza, from the Mozambican public and from the International Monetary Fund.

The main opposition party, the rebel movement Renamo, demanded a fortnight ago that the government be called urgently to explain itself in parliament. But on12 April the ruling Frelimo Party used its overall majority in the Assembly to reject the Renamo demand outright.

The Frelimo deputies had clearly misread the mood in the country, and calls for a full explanation of the debt have come from many quarters, including from within the Frelimo Central Committee itself.

The Central Committee met in mid-April, and according to one of its members, former information minister Teodato Hunguana, was strongly opposed to the position taken by the Frelimo parliamentary group. The Central Committee, he said, has demanded that explanations be given, “not only to Frelimo members, but to the nation. The nation has to know what is really going on. What is the scale of this? At the end of the day, we are all Mozambicans and not just members of this or that party”.

This position is leading the Frelimo parliamentarians to backtrack. Macamo promised that the Assembly’s governing board, its Standing Commission, will decide whether to call an extraordinary session of the Assembly, solely for the government to explain the debts, or whether the matter can wait until the ordinary sitting of the Assembly resumes, on 26 June.

But Macamo did not seem to be in any hurry. She repeated that the Assembly could not take decision based on information gathered from the press. “We said we needed more time to collect the material, and then we will sit down and listen to the government”, she said.

Leaks from the IMF to the Reuters news agency suggest that the total amount of undisclosed debt is about 1.35 billion US dollars.

Source: AIM