By Collins Mtika

The house where Zita lives in Cateme, a resettlement area about 40 km west of Mozambique’s Moatize coal mines, is cracked by the force of nearby mine explosions.

The soil around it is exhausted and dry. Her late husband, Refo, once made bricks here, the family’s only source of income, but the land is now infertile and far from water.

Cateme is one of southern Africa’s quiet warnings.

In January 2022, a Mozambican ordered Brazilian mining giant Vale to pay about one billion meticais (roughly €15.5 million) in compensation to some 760 families for what it described as “unfair and abusive” conduct during resettlement linked to coal mining and the Nacala Corridor.

Nearly four years later, the ruling remains only partially implemented. Payments are delayed. Promises remain unmet.

Still, governments are once again celebrating the corridor as a model of regional development.

In December 2025, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia signed a declaration committing to rehabilitate Malawi’s railway line and construct a new rail link to Chipata and Serenje in Zambia, a move officials describe as critical to extending the Nacala Development Corridor deeper into the region and eventually toward the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The agreement was endorsed at the 10th Joint Tripartite Meeting of the Nacala Development Corridor Management Committee (NDCMC) in Maputo, where Malawi’s head of delegation, John Bosco Phiri, said it formalised cooperation to improve regional integration, trade facilitation and transport efficiency.

Japan has since pledged an additional USD 7 billion in support, dwarfing earlier investments.

The African Development Bank funded the original US$2.7-billion rail project in 2017, and Mozambique has leased part of the Port of Nacala to Malawi for fuel imports and exports.

On paper, the figures are impressive. In 2024, the port handled 1.4 million tonnes of cargo, a 7.6% increase, including about 100,000 containers. Malawi’s state oil company has now begun importing roughly 15 million litres of fuel through Nacala, cutting transport costs.

Port authorities insist capacity is not the problem.

Nacala Port director Neimo Induna has said the expanded port can handle up to 10 million metric tonnes of cargo a year but is currently operating at only about 40% capacity, evidence, officials argue, of untapped regional potential rather than structural failure.

But behind the metrics lies a familiar pattern: growth that accrues to multinational corporations, foreign logistics firms and political elites, while displaced communities and unemployed youth remain spectators to development built on their land.

Development by displacement

The corridor’s foundations are inseparable from dispossession. Between 2009 and 2010, Vale displaced more than 1,365 families in Mozambique’s Tete province to make way for coal extraction.

Of these, 717 households from four communities were relocated to Cateme.
Along the broader Nacala Corridor, a further 2,000 families were uprooted.

Most were subsistence farmers or brick makers. Few were consulted meaningfully. In Cateme, the houses provided were poorly constructed, and many collapsed during the first rains.

Farmland proved unsuitable. Water sources were kilometres away.

A decade later, an independent livelihoods assessment found that around 30 per cent of resettled families remained impoverished, despite official claims of restoration. Protests followed, drawing international attention and culminating in the 2022 court ruling against Vale.

Implementation, however, has been slow and partial. Meanwhile, the risks of repeating these failures are growing.

A November 2024 report by Mozambique’s Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) warned that the renewed Nacala Corridor strategy reproduces the same weaknesses identified over the past decade: fragile engagement with local communities, limited inclusion of young people and small businesses, and a persistent pattern of forced resettlement, land loss and environmental degradation.

Criminalising resistance

Brick makers were among the hardest hit. When Vale restricted access to the Moatize River, essential for brickmaking, compensation was meagre. Refo Agostinho received about US$940, a fraction of what he earned in a typical month.

When he resisted the settlement, civil society groups documented his arrest by police allegedly acting at Vale’s request. Others were detained during protests demanding fair compensation.

In one 2021 incident, four community representatives were held for three days for advocating on behalf of families whose homes had cracked due to blasting.

Police repression escalated further.

In May 2021, officers dispersed brick makers blocking mine access roads with rubber bullets and live ammunition. The message was unmistakable: state power would protect corporate operations, not community livelihoods.

Promises hollowed out

Since its launch in the early 2000s, the Nacala Corridor has been sold as a catalyst for shared prosperity.

The 2015 Nacala Corridor Economic Development Strategy, funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, promised agricultural value chains, local enterprise development and youth employment.

Officials continue to echo that language. At the latest tripartite meeting, Mozambican delegation head Fernando Sebastião Ouana acknowledged that the corridor remains underused but attributed this to unrealised potential, citing political stability, regional cooperation and World Bank support as reasons for optimism.

On the ground, however, those benefits remain elusive.

The CDD report points to weak coordination, minimal community participation and the absence of effective monitoring. Youth inclusion, a central pillar of the strategy, has largely failed.

Many young people migrated to cities in search of work that never materialised along the corridor.

Local cooperatives were meant to thrive. Instead, freight contracts, warehousing and logistics services are dominated by established firms, often foreign-owned or politically connected.

The infrastructure works efficiently for those already positioned to profit from it. Subsistence farmers, informal producers and unemployed youth are left out.

Who bears the cost?

For Malawi, the corridor carries significant fiscal risks. The country borrowed about US$300 million from the African Development Bank and issued commercial debt at punitive rates, including a 2021 bond with an interest rate of 23 per cent.

By 2020, public debt had climbed to about 55% of GDP.

A joint World Bank–IMF debt sustainability document warned that this burden could crowd out private investment and undermine medium-term growth. Malawi, in effect, is paying heavily for infrastructure whose local developmental returns remain limited.

Oversight structures offer little reassurance.

The Nacala Development Corridor Management Committee focuses primarily on cargo volumes and transport efficiency. Resettlement outcomes, community welfare and youth employment fall outside its core performance indicators.

The system is designed to optimise logistics, not accountability or equity.

A regional pattern

Nacala is not an anomaly. Across Mozambique’s extractive economy, from coal in Tete to liquefied natural gas in Cabo Delgado, large-scale investments have been accompanied by contested resettlements, delayed compensation and heavy-handed policing.

The pattern is consistent: powerful multinationals, enabled by state agencies, versus communities with limited avenues for redress.

The current revitalisation of the Nacala Corridor, backed by Japan’s unprecedented US$7-billion commitment and renewed World Bank support, represents a critical juncture.

Issued ahead of the December 2025 tripartite meeting, the CDD report recommends calls for genuine youth participation, transparent resettlement processes and decentralised, inclusive governance.

These demands are hardly radical. They echo safeguards that multilateral institutions have long claimed to uphold.

But experience suggests that rhetoric alone will not shift outcomes. Without binding enforcement mechanisms, independent civil-society oversight and real decision-making power for affected communities (not performative consultation), the corridor risks deepening the extractive logic of the past.

Young Malawians, Mozambicans and Zambians will continue to migrate in search of opportunities the corridor advertises but does not deliver.

Families like Zita’s will remain in damaged houses, waiting for compensation that arrives late or not at all.

Meanwhile, corporations extract coal, commodities and logistics rents while social and environmental costs are externalised.

The Nacala Corridor does not have to be a failure. Ports, railways and regional trade networks can underpin real development, but only if they are transparent, consensual and deliberately redistributive.

As Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia sign new agreements and celebrate renewed momentum, the direction of integration is clear.

The real question is whether policymakers have learnt anything from Cateme and whether this next phase becomes a turning point or simply another missed chance.