Good afternoon. Gueta Chapo says the Organisation of Mozambican Women (OMM) is tired of asking for money. On a visit to Chimoio this week, the First Lady, who also chairs the ruling party's women's wing, announced that it would build a large hotel, complete with an events hall for weddings, as the commercial heart of a new "women's sustainability centre." The complex, she said, "must make money." The organisation had to stop going around with its hand out.
The aim is reasonable. But a business needs capital before it earns any, and a body with no money cannot build a hotel by itself. Someone else will pay. Neither Gueta nor the report of her visit named the cost, the owner, or the operator. In Mozambique, those who pay for the ruling party's ventures expect a return, and her plan to copy the model everywhere only multiplies the question of what that return would be.
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The same silence runs through everything her office does. In February she promised a free capulana to every Mozambican woman, some 18 million of them, for Women's Day on 7 April, without saying who would pay. By April, she was admitting she had no factory, that the cloth depended on "partners" and donations, and that the churches might step in. The promise fell apart. In Anchilo, in Nampula, women who came out to demand what they'd been promised were dispersed by riot police with tear gas and live rounds. Two were wounded, one of them a child.
It happened again in April, when the First Lady arranged treatment in India for a sick young man, Dillan Vasco. The news came in a presidential communiqué that praised her work "with partners," named none of them and gave no figures. Charity is announced from the presidency, credited to anonymous benefactors and never itemised. The public is invited to applaud and told nothing.
