In this issue
Resource curse
+ Ending corruption in Moz & Syria
+ Gas $s for climate jobs?
+ Hard line from Namibia’s first woman president
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This newsletter in pdf is on https://bit.ly/Mozambique-655
Corruption
Make officials use public schools and hospitals
Across many developing countries there is a reinforcing loop: schools and hospitals are poor, so government officials and elites send their children to private hospitals and schools, so they demand more money (or take illicit fees) to pay private fees, and they no longer notice public services are poor.
In a talk last week, economist Thomas Selemane said the first essential step to combat corruption is to demand that civil servants and elected officials must use public services, including health and education. The second step is that asset declarations by this group must be public. Third, foreign holidays can only be taken if the source of funds in declared.
In order to stimulate local production. Selemane proposes “no product is exported without processing” and there should be “no importation of basic food basket products”. Selemane’s talk was at Severino Ngoenha’s Philosophical Workshop on 29 October. The talk is on: https://bit.ly/Moz-Selemane-corruption
Hand in your luxury car keys
Ten months after taking power, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa called a meeting of 100 civil servants who had been insurgent fighters. Sharaa remarked on the large number of Cadillac Escalades, Range Rovers, Chevrolet Tahoes and other luxury SUVs parked outside the meeting. “I didn’t know the salaries the government pays were this high! Have you been tempted so quickly?”
“Have you forgotten you are the sons of the revolution?” Sharaa rebuked the gathered officials and business leaders. Sharaa ordered civil servants with luxury cars to hand over the keys or face being investigated for illicit gains. Some keys were handed in as people filed out at the end, the attendees told Reuters. (31 October)
Could Mozambican President Daniel Chapo do that?
Gas
New round of negotiations confirmed
TotalEnergies head Patrick Pouyanne and President Daniel Chapo have both confirmed that TotalEnergies has lifted force majuere but this does not mean a major restart to the project. There will be more negotiations. TotalEnergies has had more than 1000 workers on site at Afungi for some time, doing site preparations. But the start of the installation of the gas liquification trains depends on the next round of negotiation.
The contract was signed with Anadarko 20 years ago and the global situation has changed twice, leading TotalEnergies head Patrick Pouyanne to propose a key change, to extend the contract for 10 more years. The contact is for 30 years, and when Anadarko signed it probably expected work to start in a decade. But when TotalEnergies bought the Anandarko controlling stake in the project in 2019, the world had changed.
By then, the climate emergency was the top of the agenda with demands to keep global heating below 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels. Even the gas companies accepted the natural gas demand would peak in the 2030-40 decade and then fall dramatically; they publicly said they would work to reduce climate change. Within five years this had changed again. Today gas companies reject the idea of a climate emergency, say gas will not damage the climate, and thus expect to keep pumping gas into the 2050s.TotalEnergies suddenly sees a long term future profit from Mozambique’s huge gas field, and wants to extend the contract to 40 years – effectively to 2065. Could Mozambique trade distant profits for short term gains?
Could Chapo negotiate to create jobs now – and respond to climate
Climate change has already hit Mozambique with stronger cyclones, more torrential rain, deeper floods, and droughts. The gas companies turnaround means it will get much worse. The key demand of the both recent demonstrators and of the insurgents in Cabo Delgado has been job creation. Protecting against climate change means building stronger houses, raising roads above flood levels, irrigating farms, and so on. This will require tens of thousands of workers with skills at the level of three-year apprenticeship.
In our new book Moçambique recolonizado atraves da corrupçao, we note that the South African government runs three year apprenticeship programmes at a cost of $20,000 per trainee. Estimates of the cost of creating a workplace – equipment, etc – vary from $10,000 to $30,000. So if we assume $50,000 to train a worker and create a workplace, it would cost $1mn to train and create jobs for 20 people.
TotalEnergies head Patrick Pouyanne wants an extra decade of profit at billions of dollars per year, causing more serious climate change. In the coming negotiations, could Chapo make a deal with Pouyanne to create jobs now? For example, could TotalEnergies promise $500mn over the next five years to build a climate emergency training and job creation centre, which would create at least 10,000 skilled workers with jobs related to climate change. This would show young people that they were benefitted from the gas money not just creating job, but also responding to the climate emergency. In exchange, TotalEnergies would get its longer contract.
Chapo will build his reputation if he could use gas money to create jobs and respond to the climate impacts.
ExxonMobil will not start work on gas until next year, at the earliest, but on 30 October it signed a memorandum of understanding to create at $40mn training centre in Maputo.
Looking to the neighbours
New Namibia president starts at top:
sacks minerals minister for corruption &
fells foreign companies ‘the era of looting is over’.
“As a daughter of this soil and as a leader who refuses to watch her country’s destiny be stolen by greed, corruption and foreign manipulation, today I stand before you with a message: Effective immediately from this moment onward, the resources beneath our feet, our diamonds, our uranium, our oil, our lithium, our copper will no longer be treated as personal property by politicians or playgrounds for foreign companies. They belong to the people of Namibia and no one else,” declared Namiba’s President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah on 26 October, just seven months after she took office.
She dismissed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industries, Mines and Energy Natangwe Ithete. “He has placed personal greed above national duty. He’s engaged in corrupt dealings that have undermined the sovereignty of our country and the dignity of our citizens. I will not stand for it. Not under my watch,” she said. She later named Defence Minister Frans Kapofi to the post.
She said to Ithete: “You will answer for every dollar, every contract, every foreign handshake that sought to sell our resources to outsiders for your own benefit. We are cleaning our house and no one is above the law. Let me make this absolutely clear to every minister, every governor, every senior official sitting comfortably in their offices.”
She took office in March and on 26 October said “I was not elected to serve foreign corporations. I was not chosen by my people to be a puppet for the West or for anyone else. I was elected to serve Namibia and I will do exactly that. For far too long, Africa has been a continent of wealth, but a continent of poor people.”
“We signed deals that made us servants in our own homes. We celebrated foreign investments that built nothing but dependence.”
“Every foreign company operating on our land must understand that the era of looting is over. This is the era of fairness, the era of accountability. And yes, we will still engage globally. We will still trade. We will still cooperate, but we will do it on our terms. We will do it as equals, not as beggars.”
“From this day forward, Namibia will reclaim every inch of its economic sovereignty. We will ensure that every barrel of oil, every ton of uranium, every ounce of lithium benefits the Namibian people first. We will not allow middlemen to sell our resources in secret. We will establish transparent systems where citizens can see where their wealth is going. We will create local industries to process our minerals right here instead of shipping raw materials abroad and buying them back at 10 times the price. And to my fellow African leaders, this is your call as well.”
“This fight is not just for us. It is for every African nation that has been robbed, deceived, and left behind. Namibia will rise. And when we rise, others will follow. We will prove that the wealth of Africa can finally make Africans rich. Not foreigners, not corrupt elites, but ordinary men and women who work, who dream, who build.”
Could President Daniel Chapo follow Nandi-Ndaitwah’s lead?
