WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-10-21 Time: 18:00:01 Posted By: News Poster
Maputo – Certain members of the Mozambican government “are enriching themselves at the cost of the people”, accused former Information Minister Jorge Rebelo on Tuesday.
Rebelo was giving a lecture at the country’s Youth Parliament to mark the 24th anniversary of the death of Mozambique’s first President, Samora Machel, in a plane crash on 19 October 1986.
He noted that today’s young people complaint of a lack of reference points or role models. Some turned to religion – but there were role models in Mozambique’s own recent past, in the shape of leaders who were not corrupted, such as the founder of Frelimo, Eduardo Mondlane (assassinated in 1969), and his successor, Samora Machel.
He painted a grim picture of what has happened in Mozambique over the past decade or so – citing the massive thefts from the two privatised banks, the BCM and the Austral Bank, and the murders of two of those who tried to bring the thieves to justice, investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, and the interim chairman of Austral, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua.
“You have heard that they were killed because they knew and could identify the bandits”, said Rebelo, “and you have heard that a Minister used money from a company supervised by his ministry to pay for his children to study abroad”. He was referring to former Transport Minister Antonio Mungwambe who was found guilty of stealing state funds, and was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He has not spent a day behind bars, because the verdict has been appealed.
Rebelo was a key figure in the Frelimo leadership during the war to liberate the country from Portuguese colonial rule, and after independence he was head of the Frelimo ideology department under Machel. He said “During the war nobody was concerned about becoming rich, but we have changed”.
He warned against painting everybody in the government with the same brush. “The government is an abstract entity”, he said. “Within the government there are ministers, deputy ministers, national directors, and some of them are enriching themselves at the expense of the people. But there are also serious people”.
What worried Rebelo, he said, was to see some of these serious people thrown out of government.
“I know Dr Ivo Garrido (former Health Minister, sacked by President Armando Guebuza last week), and I know he is not corrupt and is not associated with corruption”, said Rebelo. “But he was thrown out of the government. I don’t understand why. I also know Eneas Comiche (former mayor of Maputo) and I know the struggle he was waging in Maputo City Council to end corrupt schemes. But he too was removed”.
Rebelo also attacked government agricultural policy, describing food production as “a disaster. Even the potatoes, onions and tomatoes we eat every day are imported”.
Rebelo admitted that many mistakes had been made by the governments led by Machel, arising largely from the “utopian” vision of the young revolutionaries who took power in 1975 and wanted to turn Mozambique into an example of social justice.
One of Machel’s major mistakes, he said, was to convince the country’s parliament to pass a law in 1983 which approved the use of flogging as a punishment for a range of crimes. This created serious divergences, but although there was no consensus, Frelimo’s strong party discipline led the flogging law to be passed.
Such blunders could not be blamed exclusively on Samora Machel, since Frelimo had a collegiate leadership. Rebelo himself was a member of the Frelimo Political Bureau at the time, and was thus implicated in all the major decision taken by Frelimo.
Rebelo also now believes that Frelimo was mistaken, in 1976, when it outlawed private medical practice and private funeral parlours, on the grounds that these were forms of exploitation whereby a few people became rich at the cost of the suffering of many.
However, the real result of the ban on private medicine, he said, was that few Mozambicans were prepared to study medicine in the only university that taught a medical course in the 1970s and 80s.
Samora Machel’s widow, Graca, shares many of Rebelo’s concerns, Cited in Wednesday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”, she said that the values that characterized Machel’s style of governance have been disappearing, and that the rulers of Mozambique today no longer respect public property.
“At that time, nobody talked about corruption in Mozambique, because Samora was a very transparent man who served the people and respected public property”.
“Today”, she added, “the problem is that leaders do not give an example of honesty and do not respect public property”.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 20 October 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201010210996.html?viewall=1