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The end of a post-independence civil war in Mozambique brought a lot of optimism among the citizens but almost three decades later, real progress continues to elude the vast resource-rich southern African country that continues lurching from one crisis to another.
Writes Charles Mangwiro
Mozambique is in the throes of a fresh insurgency that has been dragging on for nearly eight years now, making life uncertain for its citizens as well as foreign investors who are priming themselves to reap huge windfalls from the huge gas discoveries in the northern part of the vast resources-rich southern African country.
The bloody insurrection in Cabo Delgado Province by an Islamist-linked armed group calling itself Ansar al-Sunna (supporters of the tradition) is generally believed to be linked to the marginalisation that locals in Cabo Delgado and other remote northern provinces have always complained of at the hands of the ruling elites in Maputo.
Cabo Delgado province is a multi-religious part of Mozambique but predominantly Islamic, hence the narrative of a jihadist insurgency. Mozambique boasts of vast but yet-to-be-explored mineral resources, yet poverty rates are high in many parts of the former Portuguese colony.
While Cabo Delgado has become a magnet for investors who are scrambling to have a share of the pie and the people there live with images of multi-million investments in extractive industry projects, none of it has cascaded down to them or amounted to any tangible benefits.
THE YOUTH UPRISING
Eight years ago, youths in Cabo Delgado, a resource-rich province on Mozambique’s northeastern coast, launched an uprising against the government.
The region’s vast ruby and gold fields have swelled state coffers in the capital, Maputo, 2,400 kilometers away, while Cabo Delgado remains poor and underdeveloped. Untapped gas fields have attracted massive investments from the U.S.’s ExxonMobil and Total, but few locals have benefited.
Frustrated, young people in the region, seeking jobs and government services lit, the fires of an insurgency that simmered for four years, largely out of the international spotlight.
In 2019, the insurgents pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, marking the first Islamist-linked conflict in southern Africa and alarming the world. At the same time in 2019, the Mozambican government hired Russian mercenaries, the Wagner Group, now known as Africa Corps, to end the insurgency. The group withdrew after two months, with several deaths in its ranks.
Analysts say the Wagner Group failed, in part, because it refused to coordinate with Mozambican forces. The nature of their relationship is uncertain, but in March 2020, the fighters launched a brutal attack on the port town of Palma, close to the gas projects, that left dozens dead. By April, the militants controlled a significant chunk of territory in four of the country’s five provinces.
This resource-rich province is one of the poorest regions in the southern African nation, with most of its residents earning a living through peasant farming or fishing.
Once a favoured target of slave traders, its Muslim-majority population was later repeatedly pressed into forced labour for the production of cotton and other cash crops during 500 years of Portugal’s colonial domination.
WAGNER IN CABO DELGADO
Radicalization has a long history in Mozambique’s northern province of Cabo Delgado.
Russian military personnel, identified as Wagner mercenaries, who were fighting against so-called “insurgents” in the Mozambican province of Cabo Delegado alongside the country’s Defense and Security Forces, withdrew after a short stay in Cabo Delgado but headed to the port of Nacala after suffering a series of casualties as reported by multiple media outlets including the British newspaper Times of London.
The publication said in the latest attack, the rebels made a sea raid against a “safe zone” for foreigners involved in gas exploration but gave no other details about it.
Jasmine Opperman, a South African expert on terrorism issues, was quoted at the time as saying that the episode “revealed acceleration in the sophistication and boldness of attacks which are also increasing in number”.
“There were 25 attacks recorded in just one month alone,” and it was reported that 10 Russian mercenaries were killed since the group of around 200 arrived three months earlier.
There were reports of mercenary offensives against rebel bases, but also of Russians who were reportedly killed and beheaded by the rebels.
In another report, the Russian newspaper Moscow Times confirmed that the mercenaries had faced difficulties due to the lack of infrastructure and the fact that Russian fighters were not used to the type of terrain in which the rebels operated.
The newspaper quoted an unidentified military expert as saying that due to the dense bush at the site of the operations, “all the high-tech equipment that the Wagner group brought with them was no longer effective.”
“The Russians arrived with drones they cannot use,” the same source said.
The Moscow Times cited two sources in the Mozambican Defense and Security Forces as confirming growing tensions with Wagner group mercenaries “after the failure of several military operations,” which “led to a breakdown in trust in the Mozambican defense forces.”
“Joint patrols were practically over,” said one of the sources cited by a Mozambican newspaper.
The Moscow Times revealed on the other hand, that two other companies had been contacted to supply military forces before Mozambique decided on Wagner.
The organisations contacted were Osprey Asset Management (OAM), headed by a former soldier in the then Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) forces who said he had submitted a plan in August, and Hawk, headed by Dolf Dorfling, a former colonel in the South African armed forces.
The Mozambican government preferred to hire the Russian company because it presented lower costs, the newspaper concluded.
‘MOZAMBIQUE EXPECTED RUSSIAN ARMY, NOT WAGNER’
Former Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi’s government refuted the Russian presence at the site, saying that Moscow has only supplied equipment as part of military cooperation between the two countries.
The terms of the agreement under which Russian military personnel were deployed to Mozambique have never been made public. Likewise, neither the cost of the mission nor who was funding it was revealed to the Mozambican people. Two months after its mobilization, in November 2019, the Wagner Group withdrew from Cabo Delgado due to allegations of disagreements with Mozambican troops. The Wagner Group soldiers wanted to bomb the locations identified as insurgent bases, while their Mozambican counterparts rejected this plan. The ensuing confusion probably contributed to about a dozen casualties in the Russian ranks.
It emerged that the Mozambican government expected Russian military personnel to be deployed as opposed to a private military contractor.
After the Russians had left and with the calls from all corners of the country for President Nyusi to request international assistance, he (Nyusi) eventually conceded to accepting foreign intervention, which had been on offer for several months from other African nations, especially the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as well as the European Union and the United States.
But this took a lot of time because President Nyusi insisted that the kind of assistance Mozambique wanted was training, weaponry, and money but not boots on the ground.
WAGNER’S HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
But, during Wagner’s short stay in Mozambique, and while working with local armed groups, they were accused of committing serious human rights violations.
Adriano Nuvunga, the Director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights, a non-profit Mozambican civil society organization established in 2018, says Russian mercenaries and the Mozambican military have “summarily executed and forcibly disappeared several dozen civilians” since December 2022. The Maputo-based organization says the Wagner paramilitary group has also destroyed and looted civilian property and allegedly tortured detainees in an army camp.
Before leaving the troubled Cabo Delgado province, the Russian group was involved in shady business dealings during a short stint in the southern African nation and some of the things they did were the recruitment of young Mozambicans into its ranks.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE YOUTH
Many women who are victims of terrorism have seen their husbands murdered, their sons kidnapped and their daughters used as sex slaves.
Mozambique has been the victim of terrorist actions since October 2017, with the province of Cabo Delgado being the main stage of this armed conflict, which has resulted in destruction and looting, kidnappings, and murders of civilian populations. The conflict intensified throughout 2020, with attacks on district capital villages, leading to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Because they are more physically fragile, because they are targets of sexual predation by armed young men, and because they are traditionally food producers, women are a recurring target, remaining in a particularly vulnerable position.
Many youths escaped by sheer luck being recruited into the ranks of terrorists with job promises which later turned out to be fraudulent.
Twenty-two (22) year-old Susana´s (real name withheld) childhood dream was to become an electronics engineer working for a big oil and gas company, but her aspirations were shattered after she applied for an online fraudulent job advertisement while in Nampula province where she had sought refuge after fleeing her homeland district of Quissanga in the conflict-ravaged Cabo Delgado.
But she is now back in Cabo Delgado as a trainee engineer, thanks to an agreement between Exxonmobile and Field Ready. Rebeca says she was amongst the many women kidnapped in the municipality of Mocímboa da Praia while looking for a job and taken to temporary camps, located around 30 or 40 km south of the municipality, generally in abandoned villages, transported by the dozens in pickup trucks.
“They rape you collectively and abusively, and, after they have had enough, they introduce sticks and inappropriate objects into you. You, as a woman, were not created to be raped with sticks or with more men, you being unique. What do you have left as a person?” she said of her ordeal in the hands of terrorists.
Cremilda Muiambo, (not real name)21, is a victim of violence in Cabo Delgado who will also benefit from the Exxonmobile-Field Ready agreement.
“I escaped from the District of Palma without my personal documents after I had seen the worst of what terrorists can do. They surrounded the village, coming from various places, and, before I left my village, they burned churches, and a truck, extorted money, and beheaded people including my parents… The following days were filled with silence and pain. So I had no other option but to escape at the first opportunity,” she says while shedding tears during this interview as she narrates her ordeal.
“I saw people being sacrificed terribly and cruelly, the destruction of villages and dreams. Many children were born in the bush with the feeling of displacement and who will continue their lives with the marks of this history.”
Cremilda reveals that she is now a metallurgist at a heavy-sands company.
“I got involved with Food Ready in 2020 a few months after being a victim of violence in Palma district. I fled to Nampula province and then to Maputo where I saw their ads online. They were advertising themselves as an employability platform, especially for engineering students, saying that they would capacitate us with employability skills, technical skills, and applied skills,” she says.
“They said they would make us more ready to get opportunities in the field. I am no longer afraid of the terrorism going on there because I will work for a company that is based in Nampula provinces, which means chances of being a war victim are slim.”
The two young ladies are now beneficiaries of an agreement between ExxonMobil Mozambique, the delegated operator of Midstream for Area 4 of the Rovuma Basin Project, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Field Ready, to consolidate a joint effort aimed at improving employment opportunities in the Oil and Gas sector in Mozambique.
According to Frank Kretschmer, President of ExxonMobil Mozambique, the initiative is fundamental for the future of the sector.
“We are excited to work with Field Ready, which already has an active partnership with the Government of Mozambique. Preparing the local workforce for future Rovuma operations will be crucial to the country’s success,” he said.
In turn, Phil Andrews, representative of Field Ready, highlighted the direct impact of the program.
“This agreement will directly help young Mozambicans to enter the job market with additional qualifications and skills aligned with the needs of the industry,” said Andrews, emphasising the importance of helping young Mozambicans.
