BACKGROUND TO THE WORKSHOP

The training workshop in Maputo was planned as a result of renewed and increasing interest in APNAC members of parliament from both countries as evidenced by their participation in the APNAC Regional Conference for Southern Africa in Cape Town in September 2005 and the APNAC Annual General Meeting in Accra , Ghana , a month later. The attendance was significant because Mozambique 's participation in APNAC had waned over the years in spite of the country having been represented in the APNAC Founding Meeting in 1999.

In part, the decline was a result of the departure from electoral politics of the then main APNAC contact persons in Mozambique , Abdul Carimo (then Deputy Speaker) and Zelma Vasconceles (MP).

The training workshop was therefore aimed at reaching a larger number of Mozambican and Angolan MPs and to re-energize the formation of chapters in the two countries. Delegations from both countries had demonstrated increasing interest and commitment to APNAC and the formation of national chapters in these two countries was considered imminent. Two renowned civil society groups in Maputo , The Centre of Public Integrity and Ethics Mozambique , were charged with the design and delivery of the training program.

WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS

Despite the absence of FRELIMO (ruling party), which resulted from a misunderstanding between FRELIMO and RENAMO (opposition), the training workshop was very successful; the participants engaged in very spirited discussions about corruption and how to eradicate it. Anticorruption conventions such as the SADC protocol and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption were compared and evaluated; national integrity systems in both Angola and Mozambique were reviewed; the role of parliament and civil society in fighting corruption was discussed; etc. However, the field visit planned around the topic of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as well as a discussion on pilot projects were among those cut off from the program.

LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS  

The friction between the ruling and opposition parties in Mozambique is to be expected and has been observed in many other countries, especially in matters of anticorruption. However, the line between an individual's commitment to fight corruption and his political party's aspirations needs to be maintained, as its eradication could put lead to the violation of APNAC's principle of non-partisanship.

The question of an APNAC chapter's effectiveness is also brought into question when one considers that in Mozambique, for instance, parliament only sits for 90 days in a year.

Half of this time is spent debating the budget, leaving very limited time to undertake any substantial anticorruption activities. While this does not rule out the feasibility of an active chapter in the country - the Tanzanian parliament meets for approximately 4 months a year, yet the APNAC chapter there is quite active - it brings into focus the larger question of the effectiveness of parliamentary accountability in Mozambique .

Future involvement with either Mozambique or Angola will have to be carefully evaluated, to ensure that all parties are on board when it comes to creating an APNAC chapter. The post-conflict relationship of political parties in both countries is still latently volatile and it is in APNAC's interests not to be caught on either side. A worthy consideration might be to engage the two countries first within the larger framework of the SADC-PF.