Chapo meets with investors in Pemba

Maputo, 25 Feb (AIM) – Mozambican President Daniel Chapo met on Monday with representatives of private business, and of foreign investors in the country’s natural gas industry, in Pemba, capital of the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

The foreign investors included the French company Total Energies, ExxonMobil of the United States and the Italian energy company ENI, all of whom restated their commitment to investing in Mozambican gas.

But the private businesses did raise concerns about security, the state of the country’s roads and other infrastructure, and illegal taxation. Nonetheless, according to the independent daily “O Pais”, they claimed to be optimistic and willing to contribute to the reforms the government says it is undertaking.

The participants asked for more flexibility in financial management and for less red tape. The meeting stressed the need to boost local content in the mega-projects under implementation, and the investors guaranteed that Mozambican companies have priority in supplying goods and services to the mega-projects.

The concerns over security and the roads are clearly linked to the rioting and road blocks that are continuing across the country, supposedly in protest against the high cost of living.

“Since the elections (on 9 October) we have been experiencing violent demonstrations, though they appear to be on the decline”, said Chapo. “We are monitoring the situation, and we think we shall continue working together so that we can solve this as quickly as possible”.

“We are heading a dialogue, and we shall soon be talking with everybody”, he added. “This will allow us to create a good business environment and to continue developing our country”.

To date, the dialogue has been between the ruling Frelimo Party and the parliamentary opposition. It has not included the man who came second in last year’s presidential election, Venancio Mondlane, although Chapo has publicly insisted that his doors are always open for a meeting with Mondlane.

Earlier in the day, at a rally in Pemba, Chapo repeated his claim that the country is facing three security threats – Islamist terrorism in parts of Cabo Delgado, the peasant militia known as Naparamas, and what he called “violent demonstrations”.

Chapo admitted that when the jihadists had first appeared, the government had wrongly dismissed them as just marauding bands of criminals. But they proved much more organised and dangerous than that.

This was the same mistake, of underestimating one’s opponents, that the first post-independence government had made when it wrote off what was to become the rebel organisation Renamo as nothing more than “armed bandits”.

Chapo admitted that the insurgency of those days was much more than mere “bandits” and possessed an organisation.

As for the Naparamas, when this group was founded in the late 1980s, it was a self-defence militia fighting alongside government forces against Renamo in Nampula and Zambezia provinces. But today’s Naparamas have switched sides, and fight against the government.

Chapo did not think they should be called by the same name. “These are not Naparamas”, he said.

In the most controversial part of his speech, Chapo equated street demonstrations with terrorism, suggesting they were part of an outside hand seeking to throttle the Mozambican economy.

He denied that those who had demonstrated in Pemba were natives of Pemba, or even of Cabo Delgado. He said that when journalists had gone to visit wounded demonstrators in a Pemba hospital, they found that not one of them was from Cabo Delgado.

“They all came from outside”, said Chapo. “It’s clear that there are people who took advantage of the elections to preach a gospel of hatred among Mozambicans”.

Although the high cost of living, poverty and unemployment are real, Chapo denied that they could explain the appearance of terrorism in Cabo Delgado. They were no more than a pretext for the destruction of the Mozambican economy.

One problem is that both the supporters of Venancio Mondlane and the government are using the same word – demonstrations (“manifestacoes”, in Portuguese) – for a wide range of different phenomena, from peaceful marches, to the looting of stores, and the destruction of police stations and of Frelimo Party offices.
(AIM)
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