Mozambique’s $49 Billion Gas Plan Stokes Anxiety in Rural North

SEATTLE (Oil Monster): A giant refrigerator will replace the village Jonas Alide Saide has called home for 70 years and he’s not happy about it.

As Mozambique’s plans to export natural gas gather pace, Saide’s northeastern settlement of Quitupo will make way for a plant planned by companies including Anadarko Petroleum Corp. Located on a site larger than Manhattan, the facility will extract and liquefy the offshore gas and generate most of the $49 billion the government expects from sales of the fuel over the next three decades.

But for Saide, the elder in the village of 1,500 people who are due to be resettled nearby, the $20 billion project has brought only anxiety.

“We no longer have the strength and power to say anything -- our opinions are not heard,” he said in an interview under the shade of a mango tree. “We depend on fishing. We will no longer have access to the sea.”

How the government and energy companies handle such communities may be key to thwarting an emerging Islamist insurgency in the Cabo Delgado province, where the project is located, that’s seen more than 50 people killed this year. Beneath the region’s Indian Ocean waters there’s enough gas to make Mozambique the world’s fourth-largest exporter of the fuel. But residents include some of the world’s poorest people -- most of them young, and at least some potential militant recruits.

The group known as Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama, which means “followers of the prophetic tradition” in Arabic, is thought by researchers to have been behind the attacks, encouraged by radical Islamist leaders from places including Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia.

Mozambique’s minister of energy and mineral resources, Max Tonela, didn’t respond to calls and a text message seeking comment on the development plans and their possible repercussions.

Martin Ewi, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, said Mozambique could learn from the history of Nigeria’s energy-rich Niger Delta, where tensions between communities, oil companies and the government since the early 1990s has sparked deadly unrest.

“If these concerns are not integrated into this process we could have a similar situation to southern Nigeria in northern Mozambique,” he said. “The fact that these complaints have already started in Mozambique, and given the current radical group, they are going to exploit the dissatisfaction of these communities and that will actually facilitate recruitment.”

The elder, Saide, was one of only three locals who agreed to speak on the record during a recent visit to the area, after initially refusing for fear of reprisals. Several Palma residents reached by phone said they’re still waiting for news of work related to the gas development.

 Courtesy: www.bloombergquint.com