November 1897.
Mayor Hans Leighton convened a meeting with the leaders of several state-owned factories in the city, along with the managers of dozens of fairly capable workshops.
Although many of these workshops were small, in a country like East Africa, they still counted as part of state capital. Aside from a few State-owned large factories, these small workshops were instead enterprises directly managed by Maputo City. In other words, the State-owned large factories were state enterprises, while these handicraft workshops were municipally owned enterprises, but in essence they were the same. The only difference was that state enterprises did not necessarily have to look to Maputo City for approval; behind them lay connections to the provincial government and even Central Government departments.
"Mayor Hans Leighton, may I ask why you summoned the principal factory directors and management personnel of Maputo City here?" the director of the Maputo City Power Plant asked first.
"Ahem. The main reason for calling everyone here today is to hope that we can work together with one heart and one mind, each contributing to Maputo City's development. After all, everyone knows that Maputo City is poor! If we do not unite, then in future competition with other cities, Maputo City will only be left at a disadvantage. That is not good news for any of us."
"We understand that, of course. But if the state does not provide resources and quotas, we cannot expand our scale even if we want to. Maputo City is only so large, and there are only so many residents. We cannot possibly generate more electricity just to let it go to waste, can we?" said the director of the Maputo City Power Plant.
"That is indeed the case. The reason we were able to build factories in the first place