
Maputo, 3Mar (AIM) – The French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies seems determined to resume work on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado – despite the warning by the French government that French citizens should not visit much of the province.
According to a report by the Zitamar News Service, the head of TotalEnergies’ business in Mozambique, Maxime Rabilloud, last week toured the districts of Palma and Mocímboa da Praia, in clear defiance of the French government’s warning, which had named those two districts as too dangerous to visit.
The travel advice from Paris specified Palma and Mocimboa da Praia, plus the Cabo Delgado provincial capital, Pemba, as particularly dangerous. That advice, published on 14 February, “strongly recommended” not travelling between these towns or on the roads between them, owing to the risk of insurgent attacks and kidnappings.
In fact, there have been no terrorist attacks in Pemba, and the Mozambican armed forces and their Rwandan allies have secured Palma and Mocimboa da Praia towns (though not all of the surrounding countryside.
As for kidnappings, the French embassy is woefully ill-informed. The vast majority of kidnappings have taken place in Maputo and the adjoining city of Matola, not in Cabo Delgado.
The travel advice seemed to take TotalEnergies by surprise. According to Zitamar, the company complained to the French foreign service about the timing of the warning.
The warning clearly annoyed the Mozambican authorities. President Filipe Nyusi himself was irritated by the travel advice, and by the fact that the LNG project had not yet resumed.
“In my opinion (the restart of the project) should have happened yesterday, or last month”, Nyusi said
TotalEnergies is continuing with preparations to lift the “force majeure”, which it declared in April 2021, following a major terrorist attack against the town of Palma. Work is now under way at the project workers’ camp on the Afungi peninsula, where a huge entrance has been built to accommodate heavy vehicles imported for the project. Turnstiles and fingerprint reading machines control the entry of individuals.
The site, Zitamar reports, is protected by an 800-strong force of Mozambican police and military, and a 200-strong Rwanda Defense Force contingent. The military presence is paid for by the project partners, but under a new arrangement since the original agreement, which saw TotalEnergies paying the military directly, was criticized by independent humanitarian expert Jean-Christophe Rufin, in a report commissioned by the French company.
Charter flights run from Japuto to Afungi twice a week, full of TotalEnergies staff and those of contractors like Mota-Engil, a Portuguese engineering company in charge of some of the works already underway on site.
Zitamar understands that agreeing finance, rather than security, is the main obstacle remaining to the formal restart of work on Mozambique LNG. The project was to be mostly financed through 15.5 billion dollars in loans from export finance institutions and commercial banks.
The five billion dollars of debt previously committed by the Export-Import Bank of the United States is currently pending approval. When agreed, it is expected to lead to the unlocking of loans from other export financiers, such as Korea Eximbank and Atradius of the Netherlands, and other banks.
While in Pemba, Rabillloud also attended ceremonies to donate eye drop kits to a hospital in Palma, to deal with an outbreak of conjunctivitis, and to inaugurate a district government office in Mocímboa da Praia town.
The visit to Mocimboa da Praia was clearly a demonstration that TotalEnergies did not take seriously the French government travel warning.
Rabilloud also attended the symbolic laying of the first stone of a new three kilometre paved road linking the resettlement village of Quitunda, built by Mozambique LNG to house people resettled to make way for the project, with Senga, the community which provided space for the resettlement, and land for the new arrivals to grow food. The new road cost four million dollars, and includes a ford over a seasonal river, which will make the route passable throughout the year.
TotalEnergies funded these projects, but in future all social projects will be sponsored by the Pamodja Tunawesa (Together we can) Foundation, an independent institution created under the recommendations of TotalEnergies adviser Jean-Christophe Rufin. The foundation will have a 200 million dollar budget funded by the shareholders of Mozambique LNG.
As for the formal resumption of the LNG project, Zitamar’s sources say this has been delayed, and is now tentatively scheduled for late June.
(AIM)
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