Mozambique’s Minister of Economy and Finance said Saturday that several “friendly countries” are committed to providing training and funding to combat terrorism in Cabo Delgado to try to stop the “risk of widening” the instability to other neighboring areas.
Asked who will bear the costs of foreign troops that are ensuring security improvements in the Cabo Delgado region, Minister Max Tonela said, in statements reproduced by Lusa news agency, that funding issues “are ensured” by mechanisms of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
“At this moment, all the partnership that is being made is at the SADC (Southern African Development Community) level, within the mechanisms that exist for funding. This is not the first time that SADC troops are in a member country and there are mechanisms agreed by the countries of the organization,” said Tonela, in an interview to Lusa at the Mozambican Embassy in Washington, where he participated in the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
“Regarding the cooperation with Rwanda, which is within the framework of bilateral cooperation, it was done taking into account the objective of the countries to control the (terrorist) situation. The vision of SADC and the countries in the region is that if the situation is not contained where it is, the risk of enlargement to all the other countries is very high. So it is in this perspective that we have friendly countries funding, including European countries, and enabling, including the United States of America. The vision is that the situation must be contained and eliminated where it is,” he stressed.
SADC has deployed more than 3,000 troops to Mozambique in mid 2021 under SAMIM – SADC Mission in Mozambique, and Rwanda has sent 2,000 troops to fight the Islamic extremist insurgency in Cabo Delgado.
Cabo Delgado province is rich in natural gas, but has been terrorized since 2017 by armed rebels, with some attacks claimed by the extremist Islamic State group.
The military tension has forced changes to deadlines for the construction of onshore infrastructure for natural gas exploration, but Max Tonela believes it will be possible to make up for lost time.
“We hope that there will be conditions so that the onshore project already started can happen in the short term, and also conditions so that the second project can also – especially given the opportunities generated by the current situation – sooner than initially planned,” he said.
Nevertheless, “we are open to discuss other opportunities with the concessionaires, but onshore projects remain a priority and, by the way, are more economical,” the minister said.
There are 784,000 internally displaced people due to the conflict, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and some 4,000 deaths, according to the ACLED conflict registration project.
Since July 2021, an offensive by government troops with Rwandan support, later joined by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), allowed the rebels to recover areas where they had been present, but their flight has provoked new attacks in other districts used as passage or temporary refuge.
