The mayor of the central Mozambican city of Beira, Daviz Simango, has published in the Beira paper "Diario de Mocambique" documents which, he claims, prove that the Beira City Council is the true owner of some of the buildings from which it is now threatened with eviction.
The ruling Frelimo Party has claimed ownership of the buildings, and the Sofala Provincial Court found in its favour. The buildings are used as the headquarters of neighbourhood secretariats, the lowest structures in the municipal organisation.
One of the buildings, now the offices of the Matadouro neighbourhood secretariat, was once used as a work yard to store material for an urban development project, run by the government's Housing Fund (FFH).
On 20 November 2001, the Beira City Council, which was then run by Frelimo, wrote to the Beira delegation of the FFH, asking it to hand over the yard. That same day, the FFH replied, fixing 22 November as the date for the handover.
The correspondence looks very clear. A central government body, the FFH, had borrowed a building from the municipality and returned it. Yet on 22 January 2003, the Frelimo Beira City Committee signed a contract with the then mayor, Chivavice Muchangage, under which the City Council was to pay Frelimo four million old meticais (about 150 US dollars) a month rent for this same building.
But it was not Frelimo to whom the FFH returned the premises in 2001. Simango dismisses the 2003 document as "a false contract".
A second case concerns the building currently used by the Nhaconjo neighbourhood secretariat, in the Inhamizua administrative post. In the 1990s, this was a private house, owned by Catholic nuns, and the owners wanted it back. So the City Council reached an agreement with the owners, whereby the neighbourhood secretariat, a police station and a community court would operate out of an outhouse, which the Council paid to expand.
Simango published the 1999 correspondence over this house between Muchangage and the then head of the Inhamizua post, Jose Luis Juga. It was the same Jose Luis Juga who, in 2003, was Beira Frelimo Secretary, and signed a contract whereby the council paid Frelimo rent for this house. Yet in 1999 Juga knew full well that the house did not belong to Frelimo.
In between the two dates, Frelimo signed a rent contract for the same building with the state housing body, APIE. Simango described this as "fraudulent", because the building had never been nationalized and so had never belonged to APIE.
All Mozambican tenants of nationalized housing were entitled to buy the property, and Frelimo claims to have done just this. The certificate from the Beira registry office, putting the buildings in the name of Frelimo, is dated 5 August 2003.
Yet the announcement from the Sofala Provincial Commission on the Alienation of State Buildings, stating that Frelimo wished to obtain the buildings, and published in the press, is dated 11 December 2004.
How, Simango asked, could the buildings be registered in Frelimo's name over a year before the Frelimo request for them was published?
The publication of the request is legally important since, from the date of publication, anyone with a competing claim, or who believes there are any irregularities in the transfer, has 30 days to lodge an objection.
Jose Juga, who was central to the transfer of ownership of the houses, was a controversial figure in the Frelimo Beira organisation. He was forced to resign as Frelimo Beira secretary in 2004, and was accused of stealing money from the party - a charge he vehemently denied. In an interview at that time with the daily paper "Noticias", he claimed that unnamed other members of Frelimo "want to wipe me out politically".
In late 2004, he left Frelimo and joined the opposition Party for Peace, Democracy and Development (PDD), becoming the chairperson of the PDD in Sofala. He was the most senior Frelimo figure to defect to the PDD.
Read also: Beira Eviction Order Not Implemented
Source: allafrica -2010.07.21
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