Bearing in mind that four of the donors have not yet announced their promises, it is thought likely that the sums pledged for 2014 will be closed to the levels of G-19 aid for this year.
Of the sum so far announced, 310 million dollars is direct budget support, while the remaining 270 million dollars is intended to finance sector programmes. If the four countries who have not yet declared their 2014 aid (Britain, Norway, Finland and Portugal) keep to the same levels as this year, the government can expect a further 90 million dollars.
The pledges were delivered on Friday to Deputy Finance Minister Pedro Couto. At the ceremony, Danish ambassador Mogens Pedersen, speaking on behalf of all the PAPs, said this contribution comes at a time when donor countries are themselves facing a difficult economic situation.
“Our countries are under strong budgetary pressure”, said Pedersen, “and they are obliged to maintain a restrictive financial policy. This has an impact on the budget allocated to development cooperation”.
Increased donor support, he pointed out, requires additional efforts to improve the results from the partnership between the PAPs and the Mozambican government, particularly in areas such as inclusive growth and transparency in the public sector.
Couto urged the donors to comply with the calendar for disbursing their aid, as a condition for the successful implementation of the government’s plans. He claimed that permanent dialogue with all development actors, including the G-19, has contributed to the international recognition that Mozambique enjoys in matters of accountability.
An anonymous G-19 source, cited in Monday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax”, said the donors want urgent clarification of the alleged role played by Agriculture Minister Jose Pacheco, and one of his predecessors, Tomas Mandlate, in the illegal shipment of timber to China.
The timber racket was denounced by a British-based NGO, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which looked at the figures from both the Mozambican and Chinese ends of the trade and spotted enormous discrepancies. The imports of Mozambican timber declared in China massively exceed the exports declared in Mozambique.
According to the EIA report, in 2012 China recorded imports of wood (logs and sawn wood) of 450,000 cubic metres. Yet for the same year Mozambique recorded exports of wood of 260,385 cubic metres, not merely to China but to the entire world.
When the Chinese figures are broken down, 323,000 cubic metres of the wood imports from Mozambique are logs. The total exports of logs in the Mozambican records are just 41,543 cubic metres. While the discrepancy was exceptionally large in 2012, it follows the pattern of preceding years. The EIA calculates that from 2007 to 2012 “more than 707,025 cubic metres of China’s registered imports of Mozambican timber were not registered or licensed for export by Mozambique”.
The financial loss to the Mozambican economy is very considerable. The Mozambican export figures for 2012 show 49 million US dollars worth of timber was shipped to China. The Chinese figures show timber imports from Mozambique valued at 134 million dollars. So 85 million dollars has gone missing.
One of the main smuggling outfits is the Chinese company MOFID, which has been repeatedly caught out by Mozambican officials and the Mozambican press, attempting to export logs illegally from northern Mozambican ports. Despite this, MOFID continues to operate in Mozambique.
EIA investigators, posing as clients, talked to one of the owners of MOFID, Liu Chaoying, who boasted that he could export large quantities of first class hardwoods – which, under Mozambican law, should never be exported as logs, but only as processed products.
Liu also boasted that he had close connections with Pacheco, claiming “me and him are like brothers”, describing him as “a friend”, and alleging that when the Minister “needs money, he has come looking for me”.
This is extremely flimsy evidence against Pacheco. Such claims of close ties with the Minister may only be the idle boast of a crooked businessman trying to impress someone he believes to be a client. If that is the sum of the evidence against Pacheco, then he has no case to answer.
Facing questions from the opposition in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, in April, Pacheco said that the claims of close ties between him and Chinese timber merchants were “pure and flagrant lies”.
Mandlate is much more compromised than Pacheco. EIA investigators say they met, and recorded, Mandlate at the home of a man named Xu in the northern city of Pemba in September. Xu is an official with the Senlian Corporation, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Senlian Timber Industrial Development Corporation.
Mandlate was staying at Xu’s house during the Frelimo Tenth Congress. According to the report, Mandlate claimed that his role is “to help the company solve some problems”.
Mandlate has strongly denied any involvement in the illegal timber trade. But in March he resigned his seat in the Assembly of the Republic, for no evident reason.
Donors also want to see the theft of about five million dollars from the Ministry of Education last year cleared up. The case became public knowledge in December, and in February the Ministry said it had remitted the case to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC). No results from this investigation have yet been made public.
Post published in: Africa News