Mozambique · Liquefied natural gas
A twenty billion dollar gas project promised jobs to Cabo Delgado. The insurgency arrived first.
What does an unmet corporate promise cost the people who believed it? Palma is where that question is sharpest, and where a company is managing the fallout of a presence that became part of the conflict.
- Sector
- Liquefied natural gas
- Places
- Cabo Delgado · Palma · Maputo
- Case lead
- Sarah Cechvala
- Work package
- WP2
- Questions
- RQ4, RQ5, RQ7
- Fieldwork window
- 2026-2027
The ground
Cabo Delgado is Mozambique's poorest and northernmost province, and it sits on top of one of the largest gas discoveries of the century. The first attacks came in October 2017, on the police stations of Mocímboa da Praia. The movement behind them had been forming for a decade, out of the slow radicalisation of young men in the province's north, and it turned to armed jihadism in the mid-2010s. In March 2021 an attack on the town of Palma killed civilians and contractors, and the onshore project was suspended a month later. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. Work on the site restarted in January 2026.
The corporate question
A French energy multinational operates the onshore liquefied natural gas development. Its equity stake is a minority one. The project was sold locally on employment, economic growth and reduced inequality. Whether that promise was ever deliverable at the scale it was communicated is one of the questions here. Whether its non-delivery fed the insurgency is a second and much harder one.
The operator changed in 2019. The French company bought out the American firm that had taken the project to its final investment decision, and the commitments made under the first operator did not carry cleanly across to the second. What a company inherits when it buys a social licence is part of the question here. In November 2025 the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a criminal complaint against the operator with the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, alleging complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearance over civilians detained at the entrance to the site between July and September 2021.
What we ask here
We ask what people in Palma and the surrounding districts were told, by whom, and what they did on the strength of it. The corporate side of that runs through former staff, contemporaneous documents and the record the project left behind, since most of the people who made the promises have moved on. And we ask what a firm owes people whose expectations it raised, and what changes now that the project has started again.