The director of the African department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Tuesday that it is necessary to address the underlying causes of the conflict in northern Mozambique and not just increase public spending on military spending.

"It is important to deal with the security challenge, but you also need, when countries are framing development policies, to look at the underlying causes of conflict; in some cases more military spending is not the only solution, you need to address the causes of conflict, whether they are primarily political or internal, or consequences of conflict elsewhere," said Abebe Aemro Selassie.

Speaking at the fourth Forum on Resilience in Africa, during the panel 'The nexus between security, economic growth, and investment', in which the Mozambican Finance Minister also spoke, Selassie reinforced that "increasing spending on security may be the first political and economic response, but without dealing with the underlying causes of conflict" one cannot "move forward".

In explaining the economic effects of conflict, Selassie pointed out that another problem, besides the humanitarian issues, is that countries' revenues decrease at the same time that expenditures go up.

"One of the challenges that countries face with the amounts of revenue they have, which are limited, is that when they have security challenges, the public expenditure available for investment goes down even further, and at the same time you have to increase military expenditure, and that limits the ability to invest in human capital development, and that's where the IMF comes in," he pointed out.

The Fund has already supported 39 countries in Africa over the past year and a half, which is 13 times the normal amount, reaching about $30 billion, which is in addition to the $33 billion that has been channeled through the Special Drawing Rights allocation to the continent.

Lusa Agency