Focus on corruption and donor aid

Mozambique should recognise growing corruption and act decisively to restore transparent governance if it wishes to continue currying favour with donors, analysts warned on Wednesday. Since the first democratic elections in 1994 after years of civil war, the southern African country has had a remarkable recovery. Political stability was restored, investment returned and the country became one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Today, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth is expected to average nine percent per year during the period 2001-2003. Impressive by any account - especially considering Mozambique's difficult past - World Bank figures still put the country as among the poorest in the world. But, what has been touted as an African "success" story, analysts cautioned, may soon begin to unravel if rising crime and corruption in the country continue to go unchecked. A study on the perception of corruption among the Mozambican public, released in September 2000 at the launch of a new anti-corruption NGO "Ethics Mozambique", revealed that key state institutions such as the police and the courts had lost credibility. Forty-two percent of the sample thought the government had no interest in tackling corruption, while 20.6 percent thought it had a great deal of interest. The score for the police was substantially worse — 50.5 percent thought the police had no interest in eradicating corruption, while 15.8 percent believed they had a great deal of interest. Asked how many members of the government they believed were involved in corruption, 58.8 percent of the sample replied "many" or "most", and only 6.8 percent answered "none" or "almost none". The highly publicised murder of journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000, who had been writing extensively about a massive bank fraud in which US $14m was siphoned out of the Commercial Bank of Mozambique in 1996 just before it was privatised, threw the spotlight on corruption. International donors, on whom the economy depends, have since urged the government of President Joaquim Chissano to tackle corruption as a matter of priority. Analysts point out that the country's current problem of escalating crime and corruption is a result of its tumultuous political history. The country in the past has veered from one extreme to the other. From colonial capitalism, into a one-party socialist system and now to an aggressive open market system. "The result of which has left individuals totally confused. Each time a new policy is introduced, norms are disrupted," Peter Gastrow from the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) told IRIN. He added that there was scepticism over the political will and the government's capacity to infiltrate what are seen as deeply entrenched networks of crime and corruption. "Both the government and donors can do more to temper and reveal the growing problem of corruption which seriously threatens future growth," he said. Following several privatisation scandals, the Norwegian government launched an investigation into Norwegian aid to Mozambique last week, the first of its kind. An ISS report on organised crime, corruption and governance in the Southern African region, concluded that: "unless there are dramatic and far reaching interventions by the government, this slide will lead to criminal networks operating in the shadow of the formal state administration". The report sketched how the country's legal system had allegedly collapsed and that court rulings were available to the highest bidder. "Money laundering is common, and Mozambique has become an important drug warehousing and transit centre, with senior figures involved," the report said. "So anxious are donors to sell the seductive story of Mozambican progress to their taxpayers back home that they choose to ignore the decay within the country. Donors must take responsibility for the disbursement of funds," Gastrow noted. In a scathing attack on the role of donors in Mozambique, Joseph Hanlon of the Open University in the United Kingdom, wondered whether donors were in fact promoting corruption. "When some donors are under pressure to increase aid to meet international targets, while others are under pressure from conservative governments to justify their aid budgets, they desperately need success stories. With so few successes in Africa, they don't want to rock the boat by questioning the image of Mozambique," Hanlon said. The Mozambican elites have become skilled in giving the donors what they want - market-friendly policies, fiscal restraint, transparency, good accounting of donor money and obsequious praise of donor policies. Meanwhile, ordinary Mozambicans have yet to see any real changes in their lives, Hanlon said. This was confirmed by a public opinion survey which showed people do not feel their standards of living are improving. In a survey of 13,790 households undertaken by the National Statistics Institute between October 2000 and May 2001, people were asked to compare their situation with what it had been a year earlier. Thirty-five percent said they were in much the same situation, while 38 percent said they were worse off. Both Gastrow and Hanlon warned that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) should also demonstrate the political will to combat organised crime. What happens in Mozambique will inevitably have repercussions for the entire region as far as economic stability, democratic governance, and the investor confidence, they cautioned.