Death, violence and limitless delay: Inside Africa’s most troubled vitality mission | EUROtoday

Campaigners have demanded the UK authorities pull its funding for a pure gasoline mega mission in Mozambique – alleging that it breaches Britain’s human rights and environmental obligations.

The mission in query is a $20 billion (£15bn) liquified pure gasoline (LNG) improvement situated within the Cabo Delgado area of Mozambique. The mission, referred to as Mozambique LNG, has been halted since 2021 after violence from an Isis-backed group led to 183 contractors being trapped in a lodge for 2 days, with 10 individuals killed when apparently attempting to flee, together with British nationwide Philip Mawer. In all, the continued insurgency within the space has resulted in an estimated 6,000 deaths because the battle started in 2017, with some 600,000 individuals displaced.

In a letter seen by The Independent, marketing campaign group Oil Change International (OCI) argues that the violence and different points over the safety of the mission makes a possible $1.15bn funding by UK Export Finance, a division of the UK authorities untenable. Continuing to finance the mission can be not appropriate with environmental commitments made in 2021 to not finance fossil fuels overseas, OCI argues.

A story of violence, delay and authorized motion was by no means meant to be the story of Mozambique’s foray into pure gasoline, after some 180 trillion cubic toes of gasoline was found off the nation’s coast in 2010. In 2016, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected 34 per cent GDP development for Mozambique by 2021. However, precise financial development was round 2.5 per cent.

TotalEnergies, the French vitality agency, is at the moment within the means of attempting to re-start the mission by the center of this yr. “The safety scenario has improved,” CEO Patrick Pouyanne told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Gas conference earlier this month.

Pouyanne’s ambitions received a big boost in March when the US Export-Import Bank re-approved financial support worth $4.7bn for the project, boosting TotalEnergies’ hopes of restarting the project.

But the future of Mozambique LNG remains up in the air, with the British export credit agency still considering whether to recommit to its $1.15bn pledge – having joining with 33 countries, including the US, to sign a pledge to end public finance for fossil fuel projects abroad while hosting the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021.

According to OCI campaigner Adam McGibbon, if the UK pulls out of the deal then the entire financial arrangement is expected to collapse. “We know of at least one major bank involved in the deal that has said they will also pull out if the UK does,” he says.

The legal letter sent by OCI argues that the funding of the LNG project in Mozambique goes against the UK’s obligations under international law to promote human rights in business both domestically and abroad. The letter highlights the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which state that companies and nations must ensure that human rights are respected in relation to business operations.

A UK Export Finance spokesperson said: “UK Export Finance is currently in talks with project sponsors and other lenders regarding the latest status of the LNG production project in Mozambique.

“We take reports of alleged human rights infringement extremely seriously and are looking further into the matters.”

‘The Qatar of Africa’

Observers at the time the gas was discovered off the coast of Mozambique suggested that the country – one of the world’s poorest – could transform into the “Qatar of Africa”. A number of massive projects aiming to ship the gas around the world in the form of LNG were soon proposed.

TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project stands out for its sheer size, with the $20bn in financing a figure roughly the same size as Mozambique’s entire GDP. The 65 trillion cubic feet of gas it was expected to deliver is the equivalent of six years of current EU gas demand.

But in March 2021, the “force majeure” declaration was made, which enables parties to renege on an agreement due to unforeseen external circumstances. It came after Islamist insurgents captured swathes of territory in the Cabo Delgado region, and at least 1,400 people were left killed or missing presumed dead.

Earlier this year French authorities began investigating TotalEnergies over potential corporate manslaughter, after survivors and relatives of victims of the event accused the energy giant of failing to protect its workers.

In a statement shared with The Independent, a spokesperson for TotalEnergies said that they will “cooperate with this investigation”, but that “the company categorically rejects” the accusations.

“Mozambique LNG’s teams provided emergency assistance and mobilised their resources to evacuate more than 2,500 people (civilians, employees, contractors, and subcontractors) from the site where the Mozambique LNG project is located at the time of the attacks,” the spokesperson said.

But some say the need to resettle people so that the land can used for the project has aided recruitment for the insurgents.

“The local population is being deprived of jobs, in a scenario where pressure on land is increasing, where people are losing access to land, losing access to natural resources,” wrote local analyst Joao Feijo earlier this year.

“The discontent that is created here is very great and this kind of discontent is capitalised on by these violent groups. Many individuals joined this group because they had no other alternative,” he added.

Signs of discontent can be found in villagers claiming that they have not been sufficiently compensated for giving up land that most rely on for subsistence farming, according to evidence collected by local NGO Justica Ambiental, after Mozambique LNG was given rights to 6,625 hectares of land to build its liquefaction terminal.

“We agreed that the company would take our areas, but when they took our areas – the forests and fields – and they didn’t want to pay us, they denied it,” said Neto Agostino Paulo resident of Macala Village, in footage captured by Justica Ambiental in summer 2024.

Fellow Macala villager Adija Momade Sumail Nkabwi said: “The company came here to lie to us that they were going to compensate us for our property that they had occupied, leaving us with false expectations”.

The spokesperson for TotalEnergies told The Independent that prior to the force majeure announcement, 89 per cent of compensation payments had been paid within six months of the signing of compensation agreements, and 66 per cent were paid within 90 days.

“The Force Majeure situation has prevented the full implementation of the relocation and compensation process and has slowed down the exercise,” they said.

‘Drill baby, drill’

For OCI’s Adam McGibbon, the violence and displacement witnessed in Cabo Delgado is a “classic example of the resource curse”: The phenomenon where resource-rich countries with abundant natural resources ironically end up with a multitude of problems.

Nigeria and Angola – both oil-rich countries plagued by corruption and inequality – are oft-cited examples of countries to have suffered this fate in Africa.

At the same time, it has also been said that given the low living standards of countries like Mozambique, any opportunity to bring in billions of dollars of foreign investment is a good thing. Some, like former Irish President Mary Robinson, have argued that African nations should be allowed to extract natural gas to develop.

But there are growing concerns that the economic benefits originally conceived in Mozambique LNG might not ever materialise, even if the project goes ahead as planned.

For all the talk of “Drill baby, drill” coming from Donald Trump in the White House right now, the prospects of a major new LNG production terminal are much weaker than in 2020.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and subsequently shut off pipeline gas flows to Europe, planned new LNG facilities in the US and Qatar have driven up projections of global LNG capacity. An increase of nearly 50 per cent is currently on the horizon, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

This “LNG glut”, as the IEA describes it, is exacerbated by renewables continually beating targets in Europe and Asia, as well as a global push for “energy security” that did not exist in 2020, and which is making governments less inclined to rely on expensive liquefied gas imports for energy.

“If and when TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project gets off the ground, it will be adding further supply into a market characterised by oversupply and lacklustre demand,” says Simon Nicholas, from IEEFA, a think tank.

“This can hardly be a surprise: There is a long history in Sub-Saharan Africa of fossil fuel projects doing nothing to boost development in the host country.”

If global gas markets are oversupplied, there is a risk that Mozambique LNG will become a “stranded asset”, which will plummet in value – or even become a liability for Mozambique.

Even a “moderate-paced transition” away from fossil fuels globally would lead to Mozambique seeing gas revenues of just 20 per cent of what they would be in a slow-paced transition, a report from the think tank Carbon Tracker has found. The authors described countries looking to exploit oil and gas assets for the first time as making a “significant gamble”.

‘Huge economic costs’

TotalEnergies has also structured its LNG deals in a way that activists have warned is disadvantageous to Mozambique, with revenues Mozambique set to come in the mid-2030s and 2040s, think tank IISD has said. This means that if the project does not see out its lifespan, TotalEnergies and other partners will have seen an outsize share of profits so far, with Mozambique losing out.

Mozambique also faces “substantial economic risks” related to investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a separate report from Columbia University found last year. ISDS are lawsuits where foreign investors sue countries where they have invested if they believe the government has violated the terms of the agreement.

Mozambique’s international investment agreements allow foreign investors to bypass the national judicial system in such disputes, the report found, while “stabilisation clauses” protect investments from unexpected regulatory changes or new fiscal rules, potentially preventing Mozambique enacting new legislation to transition away from fossil fuels.

“What they have basically done is said Mozambique cannot invest in climate action without paying huge economic costs,” says Daniel Ribeiro, a Mozambican activist with Justica Ambiental.

Such an arrangement is likely to “only amplify social tensions in Cabo Delgado,” if little money is seen to reach local people while a Western company makes large profits, warns Ribeiro.

Given the insurgency, delays, and economic concerns, it might seem the simplest thing for Mozambique to do would be to try and pull out of the deal.

However, the country has racked up government debts since gas was discovered, using expected future gas revenues as collateral for borrowing. But expectations have not matched reality.

The year 2016 also saw a corruption scandal rock the country after it was found that members of the Mozambican Government had secretly taken out loans for themselves from London-based banks, using assurances of future LNG gas revenues to do so. A 2023 report from Debt Justice found that the Mozambican government has been paying back some of those loans.

Mozambique’s external national debt more than doubled between 2010 and 2018, according to CEICC data, while Friends of the Earth has warned that potential corruption arising from the “mere promises of LNG development” may have already cost the country more than any actual profit the project could generate for the country over its lifetime.

For Ribeiro, who lives in the Mozambican capital of Maputo, the priority for the country should be investing in renewables and climate change adaptation. “My main message is that the cost of climate change is going to be far greater than any profits from Mozambique LNG, and that should be the priority,” he says.

The country is considered one of the most climate-vulnerable on the continent, exposed to extreme weather concerns including cyclones, droughts and floods. Cyclone Kenneth, which hit Cabo Delgado in 2019, caused damage estimated at $300m.

But the Trump administration has a special concept about what is nice for the nation. Weeks earlier than confirming its $4.7bn mortgage for Mozambique LNG, the US authorities shut down the USAID-backed Power Africa programme’s operations within the nation – with an emphasis on renewable vitality – which has been main efforts to spice up vitality entry, in a rustic the place solely 40 per cent of the nation’s inhabitants has entry to electrical energy.

‘Cycle of death’

The push to renew the Mozambique LNG mission additionally comes although the Islamist insurgency very a lot stays a menace. While insurgents not management full cities and villages, they’ve turn into extra agile, and have stepped up the variety of highway blocks in latest weeks, in line with native media.

“There are still believed to be several insurgency units of hundred or so people, and they still have the ability to make attacks and destabilise the area,” says Ribeiro.

“And every time they suffer losses, they continue to be able to recruit. Why? Because we are still not dealing with the economic and social drivers of the problem,” he provides.

The EU is at the moment funding Rwandan troops to assist defend the area – however this association can be below menace on account of accusations Rwanda has been supporting rebels within the Democratic Republic of Congo, in addition to allegations that the Mozambican authorities is utilizing models skilled by the EU for protest suppression.

For Marisa Lourenço, an unbiased threat analyst in Southern Africa, the specter of violence is “definitely still there” in Cabo Delgado. She believes that whereas TotalEnergies will be capable of securely lock down its website on the coast, it stays unclear if doing so is definitely worth the cash.

“TotalEnergies can secure the site. But is the infrastructure cost worth it? Will it recoup its sunken costs? Probably not. TotalEnergies rushed into taking on this project, and I think it regrets it,” she imagine.

For Mozambique, in the meantime, it stays clear for Ribeiro that the most suitable choice is for the nation to tug out of the mission.

“Pulling out will cause a whole host of problems in the short term, but it will help us emerge from this cycle of death,” he says.

So lengthy because the mission continues, the Western world can flip a blind eye to what’s occurring in Mozambique, by imagining that it’s financially supporting the nation, believes Ribeiro. But if the mission fails, then the nation can deal with different improvement pathways that truly profit the individuals.

“It’s like a chronic condition that keeps flaring up, for which there is no cure” he says. “Sometimes you just need to take the bullet.”

This story has been produced as a part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid sequence