Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican state owes building contractors a debt of over 14 billion meticais (about 219 million US dollars, at the current exchange rate), accumulated over the past ten years.
The chairperson of the Mozambican Association of Contractors (FME), Bento Machaila, announced the debt when speaking to reporters in Maputo on Friday, shortly after an audience granted by the former President, Armando Guebuza.
During the audience Machaila shared with Guebuza the plans for the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the FME in November.
“The debt got much worse over the past ten years”, he said. “That is why we now have situations of companies closing down”.
He added that earlier on Friday he received information about the imminent closure of one of the country’s major contractors. The only reason this company is keeping an office open is to chase up the debts it is owed.
“It no longer knows how to compete”, said Machaila, “since it is afraid that the State will not pay for the jobs contracted”.
He added that, over the past ten years, the legislation affecting contractors has been revised in a regressive manner, “which has created a barrier for Mozambican contractors, because it is no longer compulsory for foreigners to prove the authenticity of the documentation presented in public tenders”.
“This is a situation in which they submit document issued in their countries of origin, and there is no document for checking whether these documents are authentic”, he said. “We have already denounced that we have companies in our country who are submitting fraudulent documents”.
Machaila also said that recent changes to regulations on quality control mean that companies no longer have to submit to the state-owned Mozambique Laboratory of Engineering (LEM) examples of the materials they are using to check their quality.
This, he claimed, was one of the reasons for “the proliferation of building job that have no quality, because the contractors are no longer obliged to go to the LEM. When bidding for tenders, it was no longer obligatory for contractors to allocate funds to cover the costs of LEM laboratory tests.
This has damaged the country’s interests, said Machaila, since it meant that “nowadays we have infrastructures that have no quality, some of which only last for a short period”.
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