The President of the Republic ruled out this Thursday, August 4, the possibility of the oil company Total abandoning natural gas exploration in Cabo Delgado, advancing that the company has been pressuring the Government for the creation of safety conditions for the resumption of activities.
“We never came to think that Total may not come back and from the conversations I have had with the company’s president [Patrick Pouyanné] this possibility was never raised,” Filipe Nyusi said during the African Agenda Business Meeting of the Community of Presidents of the Boards of Directors and Executive Directors, held this Thursday in Maputo.
According to the Mozambican head of state, the French oil company has been pressuring the government to create conditions for the company to restart its activities, which has been, through community projects, supporting the authorities’ efforts to solve the problem of insurgency in the region.
“It is Total that is pressuring the Government so that the State does its part, which is to return tranquility and security. The company itself has been giving its contribution for the situation to stabilize, supporting the youth”, stated the Mozambican Head of State.
Although he discards the possibility of Total abandoning the project, Filipe Nyusi reminds that the gas will not disappear in case the French multinational decides to definitively suspend the operation.
“We don’t put the hypothesis of Total not coming back, but in case that happens, the gas is there […] there are those who can explore as well. It is not a product that disappears. But we do not think negatively”, stressed Filipe Nyusi, adding that, with support from foreign forces, the situation in Palma district is stable and the business community can now return.
TotalEnergies, whose consortium will invest over 20 billion dollars in natural gas exploration in Northern Mozambique, suspended the project’s development in the region due to a rebel attack in 2021, near the enterprise’s infrastructure, in the district of Palma, province of Cabo Delgado.
Speaking to the media on Thursday in the southern province of Gaza, the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Carlos Zacarias, promised that by the end of this year all conditions will be created for the resumption of the Total natural gas project.
Palma was the target of one of the most notorious attacks carried out by the rebels who have been terrorizing the province of Cabo Delgado since 2017, when on March 24, 2021 the insurgents invaded the headquarters of that district, causing dozens of deaths and injuries, as well as the flight of thousands of people.
Cabo Delgado province is rich in natural gas, but has been terrorized since 2017 by armed insurgents, with some attacks claimed by the extremist group Islamic State.
There are about 800,000 internally displaced people due to the conflict, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and about 4,000 deaths, according to the conflict registration project ACLED. 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 refuge.
