Mozambique and Malaysia have decided to relaunch bilateral cooperation, and, as the first step, each country is to appoint an honorary consul in the other.
This decision was taken at a meeting between Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Saturday night, at the Malaysian resort of Langkawi, where Chissano had been attending the International Smart Partnership Dialogue.
A source in the Mozambican delegation told AIM that Chissano and Badawi stressed the need to strengthen relations particularly in agriculture, agro-industry, and the promotion of investments.
Currently, according to a diplomatic source contacted by AIM, relations between Mozambique and Malaysia are marking time, thanks to the political climate in the two countries - Mozambique is just four months away from general elections, and in Malaysia Badawi's government, emerging from last year's elections, is still being formed. Thus a new dynamic in bilateral relations is only likely to take off as from January 2005.
The main experience with Malaysian investment to date has been in banking: in 1997 a Malaysian bank, the Southern Bank Berhard (SBB), in a consortium with several Mozambican companies, purchased 60 per cent of what had been the state-owned People's Development Bank (BPD), which it promptly renamed the Austral Bank.
In less than four years Austral had been ruined. In April 2001, the Mozambican-Malaysian consortium refused to recapitalise the bank, and simply handed their shares back to the Mozambican state. The Malaysian managers quickly left the country, making legal investigations into the banking debacle difficult. Will the next Mozambican government, emerging from the December elections, share Chissano's enthusiasm for the Smart Partnership Dialogues (which are the brainchild of Badawi's predecessor, Mahathir Mohamed) ?
Chissano told AIM that he believed his successor would continue to accompany this movement, based on a philosophy that defends a spirit of "win-win" in a globalised world.
He pointed out that Mozambique has been involved in the Smart Partnership initiative for many years. "Lots of people have already participated in these dialogues", said Chissano. "When we speak about this philosophy, it's very easy for a Mozambican to understand because, in the end, these are things we are already doing".
"We hope that this movement will become increasingly popular in Africa because NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) itself is developing along these lines of smart partnership, in which all are concerned to see the African partners win", added Chissano. "We are in dialogue with our foreign partners in the same philosophy", the President continued, "in which we no longer ask for aid but for cooperation on the basis of reciprocal gains.
Obviously we don't refuse aid, which we still need, but this is not the basis of our cooperation now".
Fonte: AIM
