Past days
have been hectic and full of interviews, as were leaving Maputo on Monday and
have little time left to gather information here.
On Tuesday
we interviewed Teemu Seppälä, who is a senior expert in the Ministry of Science
and Technology and is working in the STIFIMO project,
with a mission to build an innovation ecosystem between the universities, the private
sector and the public sector. They have been organizing for example a
nationwide business plan competition, workshops, innovation and coworking spaces
(like Design Factory or Startup Sauna at Aalto University) and hackathons. The
Chamanculo hackathon they organized with us is the fourth one and their first
community involving case. Their hackathon group has over 500 members already.
Teemu has
been doing business in over 40 countries, so we were interested in how
Mozambique in his opinion functions in relation to other counties. Teemu said
that he finds Mozambique the most corrupted country in the world and gave
several examples of unsuccessful international projects where the money had not
gone where it was supposed to go. According to him many development cooperation
projects with Mozambique have in fact been lately cancelled due to the problems
with the use of the given funds. He also said that in no other country he had
encountered such a lack of respect from the government. He did admit though
that the situation is now better as he has gained some trust, and named the
lack of trust another big issue. He said that the concept of responsibility doesn’t
exist here – nobody is taking it but not really expecting anyone else to take
it either. There is also a lack of leadership and knowledge.
In
Mozambique politics and governance can no longer be separated, and the police,
army and officials are all part of Frelimo. Frelimo used to be a communist
party, but nowadays Mozambique is tightly government-led capitalistic country.
The society is very authoritarian, and according to Teemu the president tells
his ministers what to do, who in turn tell the parliament what to do. All the
ministries are quite isolated, and don’t cooperate or know of each other very
well.
The income
gap between the rich and the poor is all the time growing in Mozambique. There
is practically no middle class, some people are just a bit less poor than
others. The price level of the country is quite insane compared to most people’s
income. The apartments in the city cost in some places as much as in Helsinki
and in other places as much as in Manhattan. Even Chamanculo is not a cheap
place to live if you don’t own the land – apparently there are companies that
buy people’s houses and land and then rent it back to them. Most of the food is
imported from South-Africa, and the local agriculture is suffering. In
industrial scale there are only few things like sugar, bananas and nuts
produced. The importing of food is a very good business for Frelimo. The prices
of the foods at the supermarket are similar to Finland, and for example milk
and cheese cost a lot more here than in Finland. Still the minimum wage here is
50 euros a month, and a doctor earns about 350€ per month. Everybody has
multiple jobs, so they can’t really focus on anything. For example teachers don’t
really have time to do their job well. For primary school teachers don’t even
have an incentive to do their job well, as they usually also after school give
extra support lessons that need to be
paid for.
Teemu also
pointed out something that we have also noticed: people live very strongly in
the present moment and don’t think about the future. This is very evident when
discussing with people. They live like they could die any day. One example is
that they cannot even by more phone credit than 20 meticals (50 cents) at once because
they’ll use it up straight away if they get more, even though getting more at
once is a lot better deal.
Teemu still
believed that changes can happen and that for example ASSCODECHA could very
well succeed in making some small changes in the Chamanculo situation through
lobbying. The situation with Chamanculo
is actually quite interesting, as almost every politician has lived there or
has close connections there – for example the current president and many
ministers are from Chamanculo. He believed in leading by example. He suggested
that in our project we will think about some small practical solutions that
people can make themselves and make a difference in their everyday life. He
didn’t believe that people would be ready to pay for practically anything but
food and water.
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