Experts in the extractive industry say that after 16 years, the performance of Vale and other large companies in the extractive sector “has generated” more losses, mainly indirect, than direct gains and benefits. For the specialists, there was no possible way for Tete to be the promised “El Dourado” that was once thought to be, because the Mozambican government “did not have an agenda to make that province a truly developed area”.
According to economist, Thomas Selemane, quoted by “O País”, the movements of large capital by the mining companies operating in the country were the result of an international dynamic that Mozambique “could not domesticate” not having also taken advantage to “build its own agenda to control the dynamics of the extractive activity.”
Selemane highlights, in this respect, as one of the major problems the fact that the Mozambican government has not outlined strategies from the point of view of development alternatives.
“There was never a national discussion about the different development alternatives. The country made itself available to receive investments from coal investors without there being a genuinely Mozambican discussion internally that could put into different perspectives the problems that extraction brings and all the consequences that go with it,” explained Selemane.
For his part, researcher Boaventura Monjane, also quoted by “O País”, says that what was lost in Tete, with the action of the extractive industry, is more than what was gained.
“Tete was not the El Dourado because extractivism, in its essence, when it happens in peripheral countries like Mozambique ends up not benefiting the other sectors of national life,” said Monjane adding that “what was lost in Tete ends up being greater than what was gained.”
Boaventura Monjane pointed to the loss of biodiversity, loss of livelihoods, loss of employment, among others, as consequences of mining in Mozambique.
