Africa-Press – Mozambique. Mozambique’s government has promised to start paying, from this month, the agreed pensions to the former guerrillas of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) as part of the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) process resulting from peace agreements between that opposition party and the governing Frelimo.
“We hope that by the 23rd of September we will have paid the pensions as soon as they are received with the approval of the Administrative Tribunal,” said Filimão Suaze, spokesperson for the Council of Ministers, after the 32nd session of the body in Maputo.
The DDR process, which covered 5,221 former guerrillas from Renamo, Mozambique’s largest opposition party, ended last June with the closure of the its last base, at Vunduzi, in the district of Gorongosa, in the central province of Sofala.
The reintegration phase has now started, which includes the start of pension payments to the demobilised.
According to Suaze, the payments will be made “directly into the beneficiaries’ bank accounts” and he is therefore asking the demobilised to hand in the “documents needed to set up their pensions” at the district headquarters, provincial combatants’ services and the Ministry of Combatants.
He said that the process of paying pensions is “very advanced” and that the government is “fulfilling its part” of the agreement. “As a government we reaffirm that everything laid down in the DDR is being complied with.”
The last Renamo base closed 30 years and eight months after the end of Mozambique’s civil war, with the ceremony representing the end of the demobilisation process for the guerrillas who had remained at the bases in remote areas and who began handing in their weapons in 2019.
The closure of the last base is part of the Peace and National Reconciliation Agreement signed between the Frelimo government and Renamo in August 2019 – the third signed between the parties, with the first two having been violated, resulting in armed confrontation after the opposition party contested the election results.
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