Text: Lusa (via Visão)

Parliament postponed until Thursday the start of the debate on the revision of the Basic Law on the Creation, Organization, and Functioning of Local Authorities, to allow deputies time to analyze the opinions on the legal instrument.

"The debate on the Basic Law for the Creation, Organization, and Functioning of Local Authorities [initially scheduled for today] will be postponed to Thursday for technical reasons," said the president of the Assembly of the Republic (AR), Esperança Bias, without specifying the reasons for the postponement.

But several deputies told Lusa that the rescheduling of the debate was due to the need to give more time to the analysis of the opinions of parliamentary committees on the proposed amendment of the aforementioned legal provision.

The legislators said they received the opinions on the matter this morning and have not yet sufficiently studied the documents produced by the committees.

In February, the president of the Commission of Public Administration and Local Government (CAPPL) of the AR, Francisco Mucanheia, considered it urgent to revise the referred law, aiming to adapt it to the current challenges imposed by the new organs of provincial decentralized governance.

"We note that Mozambicans advocate updating the legislation on local authorities, which is an important basis for the whole decentralization process," Mucanheia said.

The deputy said that the country is establishing more municipalities and extending decentralization, contexts that deepen democracy, but which also potentially generate conflicts of competence among the various jurisdictions in the territory.

"For example, we heard a debate that there is a decree from the Council of Ministers that gives the possibility for local authorities to request the transfer of competencies to manage schools and health units. This issue is still at the level of a decree and we think that we will have to see how to bring the issue in a clear way when reviewing this law," said Francisco Mucanheia.

The clarification of management competencies of structures such as morgues, cemeteries and crematoria, the powers of the municipal police, the competencies of the State's representative bodies in the municipalities, the possibility of widening the composition of the municipalities' management bodies, and the social security of the members of the municipal assemblies are other matters that may be debated in the revision of the aforementioned law.

Political and administrative decentralization in Mozambique took a new leap in the 2019 general elections, when provincial governors were elected for the first time in the country's history, no longer appointed by nomination by the President of the Republic, and the figure of secretary of state was introduced.

In the same framework, it is foreseen that district administrators will also be elected rather than appointed.