The Ministry of Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs (MJACR) has awarded five million meticais to Chicken Palace, LDA. The amount is intended to cover the food costs of the Commission for Reflection on the Decentralization Model (CREMOD).

CREMOD is made up of 20 members, including individuals from political parties, academia and civil society organizations. According to the Center for Public Integrity (CIP), the Commission holds two sessions a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The CIP considers that there is "noise" in the reasonableness of the value of the award considering that CREMOD will cease functions in the next two months - until July - and the number of its members.

Considering next week, it is estimated that there will be 20 more sessions from then on. CIP's accounts indicate that, for the value of the contract, the state will spend 250,000 meticais on each session to feed the CREMOD members. In other words, at each session, a CREMOD member consumes (or has the right to consume) the equivalent of 12,500 meticais in food costs alone.

"This means that in just one snack, each member of CREMOD consumes more than the minimum civil service wage, 8,758 meticais," says CIP.

CREMOD was created by Resolution 21/2023 of July 17. It is obliged to submit a quarterly Progress Report on the preliminary results of the work it has carried out in designing proposals for decentralization models. So far, a document it has produced has not been brought to public scrutiny, noted the CIP.