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Africa Last Updated: Aug 4, 2020 - 3:09:22 PM


Cabo Delgado and its population have been abandoned
By Andre Thomasbausen, Sunday Tribune, 2/8/20
Aug 3, 2020 - 11:18:07 AM

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Cabo Delgado is about the size of KwaZulu-Natal and has a population estimated at 2.4 million with one of lowest human development indexes in the world.

Since the particularly violent insurgent attacks in May this year, the province and its population have been abandoned. The urbanised population has fled to the provincial capital, Pemba, causing a refugee crisis.

The insurgency in Cabo Delgado has its antecedents. The Portuguese colonial power was for the first time challenged in an attack on September 25, 1964 in Chai, in Mueda District.

These first shots were fired by Makonde General Alberto Chipande who is today the key figure in the economic interest networks in Cabo Delgado.

Just like the Portuguese could not dominate the small warrior nation of the Makonde, post-independence Mozambique struggles to integrate them. The initial preference in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania was to lend support to the Makonde liberation movement Manu (Mozambique African National Union) with a view to incorporating Cabo Delgado into independent Tanzania. But Manu merged with Udenamo (National Democratic Union of Mozambique) and Unami (National African Union for the Independence of Mozambique) to form Frelimo.

Six months after the declaration of independence on June 25, 1975, a group of Makonde officers failed to overthrow the Machel government.

Mozambique remained governed by the south until 2014 when a Makonde candidate, Filipe Nyussi, won the nomination for the party’s presidential candidate. When President Guebuza tried in 2010 to secure permission to do a third term, he did so to prevent a Makonde takeover of the party leadership.

The government’s collectivisation initiatives in the 1980s in Cabo Delgado, known as the “Machambas do Povo”, were widely rejected and lent support to the Renamo resistance movement under Renamo’s Makonde leader Vincente Ululu.

A cultural driving force of insurgency in Cabo Delgado is the African spiritual belief that the land and water are the source of all concepts of deity, because they sustain life.

A paper stamped by some unknown and faceless people living 2000km to the south, in a city calling itself the “capital” of an abstract notion of “nation”, is not a good enough reason to allow foreigners, or worse “white devils” (mulungos), to fence in areas, dispel the people living there, cut trees, kill the animals, divert rivers to dig up colourful stones, and establish alien settlements.

This, however, is what happened when former LNG concession holder Anadarko (now Total) appropriated in 2015 an area of 7000ha in Afungi, for the installation of storage and processing plants. The land was taken without local consultation. Young men from the displaced families became the initiators of the current insurgency.

The popular perception is that the exploration companies will enjoy a 10-year royalty and tax holiday and thereafter will be allowed to recuperate $30 billion in development costs, before paying any benefits to Mozambique.

A further contributor to the insurgency in Cabo Delgado is Mozambique’s tense and even hostile relations with its neighbours Malawi, in the west, and Tanzania in the north. Malawi-Mozambique relations were already strained in the 1980s when Malawi was actively supporting Renamo. Currently, Mozambique refuses to allow Malawi access to the ocean through navigation rights on the Shiré river.

 


Source:Ocnus.net 2020

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