As far as members of the public are concerned, the 296 Botswana Defence Force (BDF) troops in in the Cabo Delgado region are providing regional support to the Republic of Mozambique “to combat the looming threat of terrorism and acts of violent extremism, as an element of the SADC Mission in Mozambique.”
That statement should about do for purposes of public consumption. Why should members of the public have to know about a global corruption scandal involving a senior FRELIMO official, a former finance minister, that has put the Mozambican government in hock to international financiers who are eyeing the Cabo Delgado gas fields – which contain as much as 125 trillion cubic feet of gas? Why should they have to know that if ISIS scuttles that deal, the financiers will be breathing down the necks of Mozambican leaders – who underwrote a corrupt loan deal? What purpose would it serve them in knowing that when the vast gas reserves were discovered, a wave of land grabs in Cabo Delgado took place around the LNG operating site, as well-connected entrepreneurs from outside the province swarmed in and that the government ordered around 500 families to be resettled to make way for an onshore gas storage facility? Why has there been no mention of Total, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Japan’s Mitsui, Malaysia’s Petronas and China’s CNPC alongside that of ISIS?
As Mongabay, a conservation and environmental science news platform has demonstrated, the SADC Mission in Mozambique occurs against a background with a lot of the intrigue of international politics and high-stakes finance – and includes many more actors than the Mozambican government and ISIS.
For decades now, Cabo Delgado has always been a terrorist hotspot. Bordered on the north by Tanzania and coral-filled waters of the Indian Ocean to the east, Cabo Delgado is ironically among Mozambique’s poorest areas. “Ironically” because in addition to the gas project, Cabo Delgado has long been home to vast swaths of Mozambique’s natural resource wealth: forestry resources, largest known graphite deposits and nearly half of the world’s rubies. Portuguese slave traders used its majority-Muslim population for the production of cotton and other cash crops and in the 1960s, the mostly-Christian Makonde group fired the first shots of Mozambique’s independence war in Cabo Delgado. The Makonde would come to dominate the Marxist Frelimo government while marginalising coastal Muslim Mwani people.
Ironically, it was a series of shots fired in another part of the world that brought international attention to Cabo Delgado. After George Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, there was a spike in energy prices, which spike set off a wave of hydrocarbon exploration across the world. Resultantly, a consortium of investors that included the United States-based Anadarko and Italy’s ENI discovered huge offshore natural gas fields beneath the coral-rich waters of northern Mozambique. By some estimates, Cabo Delgado is potentially in the top tier of global LNG producers.
Soon thereafter, however, senior officials in the Mozambican government, including Manuel Chang, the country’s finance minister, leveraged their official positions to get kickbacks from an official loan provided through various international banks. The loans bypassed the Mozambican legislature and were hidden from the public. When the corrupt deal was discovered, the IMF and other donors stopped aid payments, causing shortages of medicines in public hospitals and forcing deep cuts to other services and civil servant salaries.
At the heart of the scandal is Privinvest, a shipbuilding company based in Abu Dhabi and Beirut whose boss is a Franco-Lebanese billionaire called Iskandar Safa. Chang took at least $7million from Safa, whom he met at his home in the South of France. In order to secure its participation in the project, Safa bribed Credit Suisse bankers and officials of President Armando Guebuza’s administration. While three bankers working with Credit Suisse, Andrew Pearse, Surjan Singh and Detelina Subeva, which pocketed $200 million in fees, eventually pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-corruption laws, and half a billion dollars of the loans still remain unaccounted for.
Repayment of the secret loans was premised on the prospect of billions of dollars that Mozambique stood to earn from the gas discoveries in Cabo Delgado.
“The reason why the loan was approved was speculation and projected income from the gas,” Daniel Ribeiro, a researcher with the Mozambican environmental watchdog group Justicia Ambiental told Mongabay. “If the gas didn’t exist, those loans would have been far more complicated to get approved.”
To make matters worse, Mozambique, like the rest of the world, now has to contend with a global public health emergency that has devastated its national economy and a decades-old insurgency that has taken on new life. Civil strife, some of it fuelled by religious tensions and resentment at economic exclusion, has always been part of the life in Cabo Delgado. The resentment has grown in proportion to economic benefits that are expected from the gas project and in one respect, is the government’s own doing.
In what some Mozambican human rights activists saw as an elaborate ruse, “consultative” meetings (which were also attended by armed members of security forces) were held for the purposes of manufacturing consensus to have residents move away from gas fields. Frelimo-aligned elites, most of them from Mozambique’s wealthier south, quickly moved in to grab some of the land that had been evacuated.
Government officials also raised hopes that the gas project would bring the much-needed jobs and resuscitate the local economy. According toJusticia Ambiental, programmes set up to train people in the province for those jobs were poorly implemented and plagued by corruption, with some applicants having to bribe managers to get jobs but were swindled when those same jobs were given to people from outside the province.
Resentment, religious fundamentalism and banditry combustively mixed with the promise of a sense of belonging and material gain to drive some bitter youths straight into the arms of ISIS. To be clear and while the Mozambican government has always denied it, Cabo Delgado has, way before the gas project, always been a hotbed of insurgent activity.
South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies has raised the issue of why the SADC intervention force has been largely concentrated in the gas fields area and not on outlying islands where more than 800 000 have been historically displaced. Only after ISIS struck Palma, which is adjacent to gas projects worth close to P1 trillion, did Islamic terrorism become an issue. In no way did this incident mark the introduction of Islamic terrorism to Cabo Delgado. Only when the insurgency intensified did Anadarko, an oil and gas company based in the United States, sell its stake to Total.
In the past, Total, said it would not return to Cabo Delgado until there is “a sharp improvement” in the security situation around its facilities. This increases pressure on Mozambique to preserve a project it hopes to raise enough money from to pay off bad loans.
Says Mongabay: “Mozambique is still on the hook for the debt incurred via the kleptocratic Credit Suisse deal, which it has agreed to pay down by peeling off a portion of its future gas revenues. If Total abandons the project, Mozambique will likely struggle to find another investor to take it over, particularly as LNG prices have declined and with pressure building for a global move away from fossil fuels.”
On the reasoning that the project will benefit not just Mozambique but the rest of the region as well, SADC has also invested both money and hope in the project. Like Mozambique, SADC has no plans for a sharp improvement in the security situation of the 800 000 displaced people living on neighbouring islands. And there is one more question to be asked: how much influence are western nations exerting behind the scenes to have SADC secure their investments?
