Nampula: Frelimo demands mayor reveals source of funds for public works

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Nampula: Frelimo demands mayor reveals source of funds for public works

7:11 CAT | 03 Sep 2021

Nampula mayor Paulo Vahanle. [ Photo: DW]

Nampula mayor Paulo Vahanle is being pressured to reveal the source of the financial resources behind the road works and the expansion of garbage collection in the city. Mayor Vahanle, however, does not want to tell the ‘secret’, and criticises the central government’s slowness in releasing resources.

The expansion of public works and services in the Mozambican city of Nampula – especially in the components of road works in peripheral neighbourhoods and urban cleansing – is worrying the bench of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) in the city’s Municipal Assembly. Frelimo members are asking where the resources are coming from.

Chicochi Quintino, deputy head of the Frelimo bench – the main opposition party in the municipality – wants to know where mayor Paulo Vahanle got the money to fund so much work. The fact that the municipality is “the stage for certain works” is positive, according to Quintino, but he wants to know who is financing the ‘Limpa Nampula’ [‘Clean Nampula’] project.

“We would like to have a detailed explanation of the origin of the funds for the realisation [of the projects],” Quintino, deputy head of the Frelimo bench, says.

Works.nampula.dw_ — *Road construction and cleaning have been the focus of the municipal management*

The mayor, elected form the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) lists, had previously admitted a degree of city mismanagement, citing inexperience in governance. But among other contributing factors, Vahanle says, was the central government’s slowness in disbursing Municipal Compensation Fund (FCA) and Municipal Investment Fund (FIA) resources.

Travel explanations

Last month, Vahanle travelled to Brazil on business, and the opposition argues that the mayor’s trip was illegal because it was not authorised by the Municipal Assembly.

“The mayor is a public figure and his absence from the autarchy must be duly authorized by the legislature. All the more so now in these Covid-19 pandemic times,” Quintino argues. The leader of the Frelimo bench also points out that the objectives and the results of the visit have not yet been clarified.

Mayor of the third largest Mozambican city says he cannot reveal the “secrets of the success of his governance”, recalling that it was already proven in trial that “he had not embezzled any funds.”

He says that revealing the secret would be to pass the “secret to the opponent”, which he will not do. “It is a governance secret. This is why there are different political parties; each one competes according to their own development projects,” Vahanle explains.

Source: Deutsche Welle