What went wrong in Mozambique?

RECENT events in Palma, a town in the volatile Cabo Delgado province in the north of Mozambique, have taken bloodshed in the region to new levels.

Dozens of people were killed when hundreds of Islamist militants stormed the town on Wednesday, March 25. They targeted shops, banks and a military barracks.

The attack has been devastating for the people living in the area – as well as the country. The escalating violence has already left at least 1 000 dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The conflict has put a temporary lid on plans that have been in the making for more than a decade since rich liquefied natural gas (LNG) deposits were discovered in the Rovuma Basin, just off the coast of Cabo Delgado. Western majors like Total, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP entered the Mozambique LNG industry as well as Japan’s Mitsui, Malaysia’s Petronas and China’s CNPC. The gas projects are estimated to be worth $60 billion (R880bn) in total.

Some observers recently predicted that Mozambique could become one of the top 10 LNG producers in the world. The development of the projects had led to the area becoming a hive of economic activity.

The plan was for Palma to become a LNG manufacturing hub where hundreds of skilled workers would be located. And, more broadly, the hope was that it would drive the rapid advancement of a country that ranks close to the bottom of the UN Human Development Index. More than 70% of the population have been classified as “multidimensionally poor” by the UN Development Programme.

The LNG projects in the northern Cabo Delgado area represented a silver lining of hope. Since 2012 the major multinational energy companies have spent billions of dollars on developing the offshore gas sites. Today, offshore exploration in the Cabo Delgado area includes Africa’s three largest LNG projects. These are the Mozambique LNG Project (involving Total and previously Anadarko) worth $20bn; the Coral FLNG Project (involving Eni and Exxon Mobil) worth $4.7bn; and the Rovuma LNG Project (involving Exxon Mobil, Eni and CNPC) worth $30bn. Production was scheduled to start in 2024 but intensifying attacks near the gas site on the Afungi peninsula are now posing serious challenges to the production time lines.

There have been no material benefits for the people of Cabo Delgado thus far. Moreover, many local people feel deeply aggrieved because many were evicted and had to relocate soon after the discovery of gas to make way for LNG infrastructure development.

Neglected over many years, the people who live there have been politically marginalised. And the area is underdeveloped. Since independence in 1975, investment and rising incomes were largely confined to the capital Maputo in the south as well as the southern parts of the country. In addition, the central government in Maputo has only had a fragile and precarious control over the territory and borders of the country.

A 16-year civil war that involved clashes between the central government and Renamo, a militant organisation and political movement during the liberation struggle and now opposition party, claimed more than a million lives.

More recently, since 2017, the militant Islamic movement, Ansar al-Sunna, locally known as al-Shabaab, has been active in Cabo Delgado. It now poses the biggest security threat in the country, rendering some of the northern parts almost ungovernable.