Good afternoon. Last week, President Daniel Chapo asked for over $37bn to fund Mozambique’s climate resilience plan. His request is one of the government’s more ambitious pitches, but asking (or, in some cases, begging) for money is what comes most naturally to the Mozambican government. At the other end of the scale, a consultant working for the government last week said that it needed $700m to implement its civil aviation strategy. The part which was unsaid, but implied, was that the government wants donor countries and development banks to provide the money.
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Begging has become an institution, and quite a lucrative one for consultancy firms, who get to write reports for the government explaining why it needs this or that sum of money for this or that sector. But it has become a substitute for taking action and taking responsibility. An example of this is the roads sector, where the government previously obtained grant funding for the repair of the N1 highway. The money was spent and the road was repaired, but government funds intended for maintenance got diverted. Without maintenance, the condition of the road inevitably got worse, and now large stretches of the N1 are in a terrible state and it needs major interventions (which are taking a long time to go through the procurement phase). Had the government taken better care of the road, it would not have needed to embark on such an expensive and cumbersome project to rehabilitate it now.
