By Violet Ikong
Since October 2017, the people of Mozambique’s rural northern province of Cabo Delgado have been suffering at the hands of armed groups and militias attempting to control the resource-rich province. The groups are described as terrorists by the U.S. Department of State.
Between 2021 and 2022, over 1 million people were displaced within and outside Mozambique, with about 4,000 deaths recorded. And since a fresh wave of intense fighting began last December over 100,000 people have been displaced.
The groups have particularly targeted certain districts of the province: Mocímboa da Praia, Palma, Nangade, Muidumbe, Macomia, Meluco, Quissanga, and Ibo. Some who have fled their homes now live in relatively safer districts, while others live in temporary camps managed by United Nations humanitarian agencies, or as refugees in neighboring Tanzania.
Resource curse
When natural gas was discovered in Cabo Delgado in the early 2010s, many residents lost their homes and source of livelihood, as they were resettled in new areas far from their farms and fishing areas. The government did little to help, providing meager compensation and little else.
According to a 2022 report by the African Union, when Cabo Delgado’s conflict began, the Mozambican government prioritized protecting gas investments in the province over protecting people or addressing the root cause of the conflict.
Now Cabo Delgado boasts billions of dollars of foreign investments, but conflict is ravaging the country as the people suffer from lives of desolation and poverty.
Three of Africa’s major gas projects are situated in Cabo Delgado: the Mozambique LNG
Project, worth $20 billion (USD); the Coral FLNG Project, worth $4.7 billion; and the Rovuma LNG Project, worth $30 billion. These projects are led by multinational energy companies, including France’s TotalEnergies, Italy’s ENI SpA, America’s ExxonMobil, and China’s CNPC.
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Adriano Nuvunga, professor and director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights (CDD), noted that the discovery of natural gas only exacerbated a sentiment of marginalization that already existed in Cabo Delgado: “The marginalization of Cabo Delgado is one of the enabling factors of a conflict that might have started for different reasons. Despite being the home of Mozambique’s biggest gas reserves and most precious minerals and rubies, this sentiment of exclusion [was already] there.”
The conflict has gone through three major phases, said Nuvunga, who is also the chairperson of the Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network (SAHRDN).
“The first phase was at the beginning when the violence [from armed groups] was expanding rapidly, with the beheading of people and the creation of all sorts of terror within communities. And then the government reacted forcefully, with military capacity, and contracted foreign military groups and companies. But this support was not adequate for the situation,” he said.
The second phase saw the arrival of both Rwandan troops and troops from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to contain the violence where gas investment was taking place.
The third phase was supposed to be marked by a focus on improving the lives of the people of Cabo Delgado by creating jobs and increasing community participation in the governance of the region.
But since 2020, when ADIN – the Northern Integrated Development Agency was created to do this work, the Mozambican government has failed in the effective implementation of the strategy, and conflict has only worsened.
‘Not a religious conflict’
Brutal attacks that have in some cases targeted churches, and Christians have raised questions about the possibility of the conflict being aimed at Islamizing Cabo Delgado, a province with a Muslim majority. But most Mozambicans and religious leaders believe religion is not behind the violence.
Joseph*, a Mozambican Christian missionary who used to live in Cabo Delgado but fled in 2020 during a violent attack, said, “I don’t believe this is a religious conflict. … I lived in the reality of this conflict for three years as a Christian missionary. Insurgents do not want to see people in the mineral resource zone. It’s about the oil, gas, and precious stones.”
Nuvunga agrees. “This is not a religious conflict. It is a result of poor and failed governance, and it serves as a response to neglect, marginalization, and an extractive form of governance where the leaders look at the province of Cabo Delgado as a cow to milk and not a province where there are people with equal rights who need equal opportunities to improve their lives,” he said.
Muslims and Christians in Cabo Delgado are known to have a long history of peaceful co-existence, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the conflict are a mix of Christians and Muslims.
An African problem
Africa, with the richest concentration of natural resources in the world, suffers because of her wealth. Many African countries with export-rich natural resources are poor, underdeveloped, and economically disadvantaged. African governments and elites, as well as multinational companies, benefit from the extraordinary resources, but ordinary citizens are often left out, which leads some to express their grievances through violence.
“African governments have contributed immensely towards pushing people to take up arms. They don’t provide social amenities to citizens, despite benefiting from the wealth in their lands,” said Idris Mohammed, a Nigerian journalist and expert in peace, security, and conflict.
“People … are not seeing any sign of governance. They have no other option than to resort to violence because they believe that by causing trouble, the government will listen to them,” he added.
Foreign countries and companies have been repeatedly accused of exploiting Africa’s natural resource wealth at the expense of its poor citizens and, in the process, fueling resource conflicts in countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria’s Niger Delta and northern region, and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“The international actors are the major buyers of all these natural resources, and there are conspiracy theories that some of them manufacture weapons and send them to Africa to destabilize the continent and continue fetching our resources,” Mohammed said.
In the DR Congo, Chinese companies have been linked to illegal logging and mining, and also are accused of exploiting child and forced labor to mine cobalt. The companies have also been accused of engaging in illicit mineral mining and fueling terrorism in Nigeria’s northern region.
In Mozambique, Nuvunga believes Mozambique elites add to the problem by inflaming the conflict for personal benefit. “The fact that we have had a faceless insurgency in Mozambique for over six years means it has some level of local support, which has aided its sustenance. And this should be a wake-up call for all ruling elites, but they don’t care because they have invested their interest in those minerals. You meet a politician in the morning; in the afternoon, he is a businessman, controlling licenses, shareholdings, lands, and so on,” Nuvunga said.
“Everyday governance in Mozambique and other parts of this continent is based on extraction. It is all about using the office to take people’s resources. And the people see all that and end up reacting in ways that we are seeing now,” he added.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the situation in Cabo Delgado is worsening. As violence continues to escalate, more funding is needed to provide relief for displaced persons.
*Name changed to conceal identity
