A twenty billion dollar gas project promised jobs to Cabo Delgado. The insurgency arrived first.

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. An insurgency began there in October 2017 and escalated over the following years. In March 2021 an attack on the town of Palma killed civilians and contractors, and the onshore project was suspended shortly afterwards. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced.

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.

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. We ask the company what its own internal expectation was. And we ask what a firm owes people whose expectations it raised, once the project stops.