By MOZTIMES
Maputo (MOZTIMES) – Mozambican President Daniel Chapo has promised to scrap an entire layer of provincial governance, in a move that will save millions of dollars a year, and wipe out a mountain of red tape.
He made this promise in a bill he submitted on Wednesday to the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, and explained in some detail at the opening on Thursday of a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Frelimo Party.
This short bill cancels the constitutional amendments of 2018, which had introduced an unwieldy system of local authorities in the name of decentralisation.
This complex system had two overlapping layers of provincial power. Alongside the provincial government, headed by an elected provincial governor, and known as “the decentralised provincial governance”, there were the “bodies of state representation in the province”, known as the “State Representation Council”, introduced because there are supposedly state functions that cannot be handled by the provincial governor.
This was bitterly contested right from the start. Both inside and outside the ruling Frelimo Party, complaints were raised that the bodies of state representation were unnecessary, merely duplicating the work of the provincial governors. Unelected bodies, it was said, were undermining the elected provincial governors.
Opposition parties argued that the dual system was a means of Frelimo clinging onto power in the provinces should opposition figures ever be elected as provincial governors.
Elected mayors from Frelimo also saw no reason to surrender power to the State Representation Councils, but were reluctant to complain publicly against a scheme promoted by the Frelimo leadership of the time, under the then President Filipe Nyusi.
Chapo said that eliminating the bodies of state representation in the provinces will save 1,250 million meticais (about 20 million US dollars) from the state budget every year.
He asked the Assembly to insert his bill into the agenda for its current sitting as a matter of urgency. Although all Frelimo parliamentarians had obediently backed the 2018 reforms, this time they are likely to back Chapo. Certainly, no-one has spoken against Chapo’s proposal.
Chapo said his bill fulfils a promise he had made in his inauguration speech in January 2025 to restructure the provincial state bodies. This restructuring will certainly mean that dozens, if not hundreds, of officials will lose their jobs. (MT)
