Maputo

A Mozambican NGO has managed to collect more than 800 000 weapons used in the country’s 16-year civil war, Vista News reported on Tuesday. This was revealed by the head of the Mozambican Christian Council’s Transforming Swords into Ploughshares project, Bishop Dinis Sengulane, in a report published by Radio Mozambique.

Press freedom improved in Mozambique in 2006 as compared with previous years, a new human rights report has found, Vista News said on Wednesday. The report, released on Wednesday in Maputo, said that while media institutions reported that freedom of speech and the press had improved, police continued to harass journalists in 2006.

South Africa has made available three helicopters to help transport provisions and to monitor refugee centres accommodating flood victims in the Zambezi Valley, Vista News reported on Monday. Radio Mozambique said the helicopters were expected to arrive in Caia district, more than 1 000km north of Maputo, on Tuesday.

Mozambican marines rescued more than 1 700 people, including 900 children, from flooding in central Mozambique on Friday. The marines used eight boats to mount the rescue operation in the central town of Buzi in the province of Sofala, where at least 28 000 people have been affected by the floods.

Mozambique registered a rise of 15% in the number of people who died of the disease last year, news reports said on Wednesday. Health Ministry spokesperson Martinhio Djedje said more than six-million cases of the disease were reported in the country’s public health centres last year.

Emergency workers on Friday surveyed damage to areas of Mozambique left devastated by Cyclone Favio, which left at least three people dead, scores injured and flattened most of the worst-hit town. Red Cross spokesperson Tapiwa Gomo said he had received differing reports that three or four people had been killed in and around the town of Vilankulo.

Cyclone Favio, sweeping in after wreaking havoc in Madagascar, made landfall at Vilankulo in Mozambique on Thursday morning. Tshepho Ngobeni, marine forecaster at the South African weather service, told the Mail & Guardian Online that the storm had average wind speeds of about 176km/h, with gusts of up to 246km/h.

A tropical cyclone was moving on Monday toward Mozambique, where about 40 people have already died in flooding caused by heavy rains. Cyclone Flavio, located on Monday morning in the Mozambique Channel about 200km off the coast, was moving inland at a rate of 12kph.

Soldiers and relief workers using helicopters and canoes have evacuated about 60 000 people from the flooded Zambezi River Valley in central Mozambique, where more than 100 000 others are at risk, officials said on Monday.

Mozambican Prime Minister Luisa Diogo on Thursday warned that heavy rains lashing the country could soon fuel an emergency and wreak more havoc than heavy floods in 2001 when nearly 1 000 people died. ”It’s really a dramatic situation and there is a possibility of emergency,” she told reporters.

A donation by South Africa of military surplus equipment to Mozambique came at the right time for the country — two work boats will be used to save people left stranded by floods. About 43 000 people are stranded in western Mozambique after heavy rains and floods in the area.

Torrential rains have destroyed more than 1 000 houses, leaving more than 6 000 people homeless in northern Mozambique, officials said on Thursday. A statement by the government’s relief agency said 13 classrooms have also been swept away by the rain, and a further 150 houses are at risk of collapse.

President Armando Guebuza pledged to step up the fight against the crippling levels of poverty in war-ravaged Mozambique on Friday as he opened the long-time ruling Frelimo party’s national congress. Frelimo has begun to make inroads into levels of poverty in the past few years.

Portugal on Tuesday handed over its controlling stake in one of Africa’s largest dams to former colony Mozambique after tortuous negotiations spanning more than three decades. The pact, signed by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza and Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, gives Mozambique control of an 85% stake of the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi river.

The United Nations has pledged to provide about -million to fight poverty in Mozambique, which is slowly emerging from a brutal 16-year civil war. ”The UN will mobilise nearly -million for the government’s poverty reduction plan to help officials fight poverty in the next three years,” UN chief representative in Mozambique, resident Ndolamb Ngokwey, said late on Monday.

Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Thursday marked the 20th anniversary of independence hero Samora Machel’s death in a mystery plane crash, hailing him as an ”African hero”. Guebuza and South African President Thabo Mbeki will later on Thursday jointly pay homage to Machel at the site of the plane crash in South Africa.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is not just economics, but a matter of life or death, said Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to the United Nations secretary general. The MDGs, approved by almost every government in the world at the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000, include such targets as halving extreme poverty, reversing the spread of HIV/Aids and reducing child mortality.

Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Friday said there had been no word from South African authorities on a fresh probe into the mysterious death of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, during the apartheid era. ”Sadly enough, we haven’t had an answer as yet,” Guebuza said.

Four people died in the powerful earthquake on Thursday that forced thousands of panicked residents from their homes, Mozambique’s government and state radio reported on Friday. The United States Geological Survey said the quake struck on Thursday at 12.19am local time with a magnitude of 7,5.