Citizens who are of voting age should not give up their constitutional right to vote, he stressed.
Speaking at a rally in the outlying suburb of Manga, in the central city of Beira, as part of his “open and inclusive presidency” in Sofala province, Guebuza said “our vote seeks to strengthen national unity and diversify the ways in which we can rapidly overcome poverty”.
“We should not fail to go and vote, even if there are difficulties, because it’s through the vote that we guarantee our future”, he stressed.
On Monday, Guebuza also chaired a meeting of the Sofala provincial government at which the governor, Felix Paulo, announced that Sofala has been free of cholera for the past three years.
In that period, there had not been a single case of cholera, whereas previously cholera epidemics had frequently struck the province, and particularly the outer suburbs of Beira, such as Manga and Munhava.
Defeating cholera was “a great achievement”, he said, and “a victory that we must defend”.
He said that this success was in part due to improvements in sanitation and in the supply of clean water in the province. Decent sanitation now covers 63.7 per cent of the population in Sofala’s urban and peri-urban zones, compared with a rate of 42 per cent nationally. Clean water in the urban areas, he added, now reaches 92 per cent of the population.
In the rural parts of the province, the clean water coverage rate is 58 per cent, while 53.4 per cent of the rural population has latrines.
Paulo said that in 2011, the authorities connected 11,500 households to water supply, which was 3,000 more than initially planned. In the rural areas, it was planned to install 178 new water sources (wells and boreholes), but 218 were built.
The governor said that malaria remains a major headache for the health services in Sofala. In 2012, 295,293 cases of malaria were diagnosed, and 213 people died of the disease.
Serious though these figures are, they are an improvement on 2011, when there were 325,057 cases of malaria and 216 deaths.
Post published in: Africa News