From Africa Recovery, Vol.14#3 (October 2000), page 13 (part of Mozambique: Country in Focus)

Floods take a serious economic toll

The Mozambican government's confidence that economic growth rates of 10 per cent or more could be sustained for the foreseeable future suffered a rude blow when floods swept through much of the south and centre of the country in February. Every major valley south of Beira was affected, as rivers burst their banks. When a cyclone then hit central Mozambique at the end of the month, it worsened an already massive natural disaster.

At the traditional May Day parade in Maputo, Prime Minister Mocumbi gave preliminary estimates that about 700 people had died and another 100 were missing. Almost 2 million people (some 12 per cent of the total population) were seriously affected, with half needing food aid. Almost 250,000 people lost their homes. And with 140,000 hectares of cultivated and grazing land lost to the floods - about 11 per cent of total cultivated area in the five provinces affected - over 113,000 small farm households had lost their livelihoods. Furthermore, some 20,000 head of cattle were missing and feared drowned, and many more could die of disease.

On the positive side, over 45,000 people were rescued from trees, from the tops of buildings, and from isolated areas surrounded by flood waters. Initially, this was carried out from a few Mozambican naval vessels and fewer than a dozen helicopters provided by South Africa, Malawi and the Mozambican air force. Only some three weeks after the catastrophe began did significant amounts of rescue equipment and aerial support arrive from Europe and North America.

The worst agricultural losses were to irrigation, with the government estimating that some 90 per cent of the country's functioning irrigation infrastructure was damaged. Industry too suffered as torrential rains caused severe damage in Matola, the industrial city on the outskirts of Maputo, leading to shutdowns or sharply reduced production in some of Mozambique's most successful factories. Virtually all production in the flooded cities of Xai-Xai and Chokwe in the Limpopo Valley came to a halt, largely because the electricity installations in these towns were under water. Over a thousand shops and wholesalers in the river basins, and even in low-lying areas of Maputo itself, were damaged.

Many secondary and tertiary roads were washed away, as were many bridges. All the railways in southern Mozambique were badly affected, particularly the Limpopo line from Maputo to Zimbabwe. The floods also closed 630 schools, attended by 214,000 pupils, and 42 health units were destroyed or damaged, including Beira Central Hospital, the second largest in the country.

When a donor conference was held in Rome in early May to fund post-flood reconstruction, the government, backed by the UN, requested nearly $450 mn. Donors met that target, but, as President Joaquim Chissano noted at the UN's Millennium Assembly in early September, "the slow process of disbursement" has brought delays in the relief aid's actual delivery, with only about $250 mn actually confirmed.

Faced with the devastation, the government has cut back its target for economic growth in 2000 from 10 per cent to below 4 per cent.

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