Re-building after the floods

During a recent visit to Mozambique’s southern Gaza province, an area hit by devastating floods two-years in a row, UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown said that the “overwhelming impression” was that “normal life had been restored and sensible improvements made”. Malloch Brown co-chaired the donor conference in Rome in May 2000, where over US $450 million to support Mozambique’s first flood recovery appeal was pledged. So far, US $360 million has been disbursed. The donors’ response to the 2000 floods “was remarkable and showed confidence in the country,” he said. He added that donor controls on the use of the money granted to the Mozambican government were tight, and the donor reports he had seen on the use of funds “are very positive”. A spokeswoman for the Mozambican government told IRIN that “generally the government was quite happy with the reconstruction process and with the progress that had been made”. She explained to IRIN that there were basically two reconstruction programmes running simultaneously. “We are having to rehabilitate and re-build those areas destroyed by the floods in 1999/2000 and those areas destroyed by the floods earlier this year. It is important to see our reconstruction programme as one and not as two separate entities,” the spokeswoman said. The floods earlier this year affected a much larger geographical area than the year before. At a one-day donor conference in Maputo in July the government said that it needed an estimated US $132 million for reconstruction and rehabilitation. The problem has been the alleged delays in the disbursement of the reconstruction aid. Alexander Aboagye, an economic advisor at UNDP in Maputo told IRIN that the international donor community had affirmed their full support to the 2001 reconstruction plan that the government presented. “In theory there were no pledges. But two things happened at the conference. All donors were willing to modify their programme of support to the government so as to enable it to release funds to meet the required US $132 million. Second, there have been specific pronouncements by some donors with specific amounts to support the reconstruction programme for 2001,” Aboagye said. “It has been a very slow process, initially there was quite a delay between the time donors pledged money and the actual disbursement of the funds. This meant that the re-building process was slow to start. But things have started moving and like I said we are getting there slowly,” the government spokeswoman said. “We have started re-building and rehabilitating roads. We have also started resettling people and moving them out of the flood prone areas to safer parts of the districts in which they live.” However, despite the optimism, there have been concerns about the rate of progress. “One naturally understands that there is a delay from the time a donor pledges money and the actual disbursements of the funds. But in some cases there was as much as an 18-month delay and so when the funding request for the first emergency was finally honoured the Mozambican government found itself in a position where it had to again make an appeal for money,” a Western diplomat in Maputo told IRIN. “This delay on the part of some donors meant that the government was slow in starting its re-building process. So the government found itself under added pressure when the second floods came around,” he said. He told IRIN that there had been some concerns among donors about the reconstruction process. “Too many times it seemed as if much of the reconstruction was focused around Maputo and the areas closest to the capital. The further away one goes from Maputo, the more difficult does it become for one to see or even realise that reconstruction is taking place,” he added. “I guess it boils down to a question of politics some times and the fact that it is politically expedient to focus these kinds of efforts around the seat of power.” The diplomat told IRIN that although Mozambique has been held up as an example of the way a government should run, donors were concerned over the maintenance of transparency. “I think it is a case of once bitten, twice shy. Donors are still reeling from the corruption of funding money in so many developing countries that many chose to release their money in very small bits and pieces, and first investigate where the one tranche of money went to before releasing the next. Some donors might not openly acknowledge this, but believe me it is a real concern even if it is behind closed doors,” he noted. An aid worker with a large international non-government organisation in Mozambique told IRIN that there have also been concerns among the NGO community about the reconstruction progress. She told IRIN that in some areas NGO’s had adopted a go it alone attitude and “did first and informed later”. “Some NGOs are just tired with all the bureaucracy and the politicking and so they are running reconstruction programmes on their own and only once it is up and running do they inform the government. For example, in some areas along the banks of the Zambezi river some NGOs have taken it upon themselves to resettle people and build resettlement camps and they have used their own money because they could not rely on and wait for the government,” she said.