mozambique is rich in gas. that doesn’t mean it’s winning.
foreign firms drill. foreign soldiers secure. the country’s people remain in the dark.
Mozambique is hosting a gas boom. But it isn’t Mozambique that’s booming.
Billions of dollars pour into offshore rigs. Global banks underwrite mega-projects. Rwandan soldiers guard the gas terminals. Western firms extract the profits. And the people of Cabo Delgado, where this gas rush began, are still waiting for electricity.
This is development outsourced: foreign firms drill, foreign soldiers secure, and foreign capital reaps the rewards. Mozambique is not experiencing a resource boom. It is hosting one, for the benefit of international shareholders and a domesticated elite, while most citizens remain excluded from both profit and power.
In the waters off northern Mozambique, billion-dollar gas rigs gleam like science fiction. Offshore, engineers extract some of the world’s most coveted liquefied natural gas. Onshore, Rwandan troops patrol towns scarred and thinned by insurgency. In Cabo Delgado, a province once known for poverty and cashew groves, a new frontier of global energy is taking shape. But not for Mozambique.
TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and Eni have wagered more than $50 billion on Mozambique’s gas reserves, over 100 trillion cubic feet by some estimates. The flagship project, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG, is the largest private-sector investment in Africa to date. Its $20 billion package includes nearly $15 billion in financing from export credit agencies and global banks. The U.S. Export-Import Bank alone committed $4.7 billion, its largest loan ever. Restarted in 2025 after years of insurgency-related suspension, the project comes with new security guarantees and expanded social investment commitments.
Other ventures are racing to follow. Eni’s Coral Norte platform, greenlit last month April, adds another $7.2 billion in offshore expansion. ExxonMobil is progressing toward a final investment decision for its Rovuma LNG project, expected by the end of 2025, targeting 18 million tons of LNG per year. On paper, this is transformative. But the transformation registers mostly on foreign balance sheets. Under current production-sharing agreements, companies like TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil can recover up to 70 percent of revenue through cost recovery and profit oil. Mozambique’s share, nominally the remaining 30 percent, depends on project profitability and often arrives late, when costs have already been recouped. That share even when realized, is vulnerable to elite capture.
To manage its windfall, Mozambique launched a sovereign wealth fund. Its mandate: finance schools, health clinics, water systems, small enterprises. But the fund’s design raises red flags. For its first 15 years, 60% of revenues go to the general state budget, a structure that front-loads spending but delays savings, and that critics warn risks feeding the very same networks of political patronage that gutted past investments. Public trust is strained. In 2016, hidden debts totaling $2 billion plunged the country into crisis. Donors withdrew. Hospitals stalled. No senior official was held accountable then. In 2025, former Finance Minister Manuel Chang was sentenced in the U.S. for his role, too late to matter.
The rot persists. Hundreds of new corruption cases were registered in early 2025 alone. Millions siphoned from public pensions. Mozambique ranks 146th globally for perceived corruption. Ghost soldiers draw state salaries. Children of former ministers and presidents flaunt luxury fleets. What remains of the state too often serves as a cash machine for those in power.
Since independence in 1975, Mozambique has been ruled by FRELIMO, once a Marxist liberation force. It defeated colonial Portugal, endured civil war, and reinvented itself as a party of modernization. But its revolutionary mission calcified into elite patronage. Like the ANC in South Africa, whose 2024 slump revealed popular disaffection, FRELIMO’s legacy now reads less like liberation than continuity, an new elite that inherited a broken colonial state and learned to profit from its dysfunction.
In October 2024, general elections triggered unrest. FRELIMO’s candidate, Daniel Chapo, was declared president with around 65% of the vote. Opposition parties, led by Venâncio Mondlane and the Democratic Alliance Coalition, alleged fraud and demanded a recount. Protests erupted. Security forces cracked down, killing over 300 demonstrators. Human rights organizations condemned the response. Despite public outcry, the Constitutional Council upheld the results. Chapo was sworn in January 2025 amid deepening fractures.
In March, tensions escalated when security forces attempted to disperse a Mondlane rally, prompting additional casualties. Mondlane temporarily fled the country before returning to announce a tentative agreement with the government: a commitment to release political prisoners and compensate victims. But the details remain vague, and critics warn it may be more strategy than substance. Such deals rarely remake the system. They paper over fractures without mending the foundation. Power remains where it was; only the optics shift. These deals buy quiet, not change.
Meanwhile, Mozambique’s people live on the margins. GDP per capita hovers around $647, but that obscures profound regional disparities. From the luxury condos and private schools of Maputo's elite neighborhoods to the conflict-ridden north of Cabo Delgado, inequality is stitched into the country’s geography. Among the wealthiest is Armando Guebuza, Mozambique’s third president and a former Marxist revolutionary who fought alongside Samora Machel. Today, he is one of the richest men in the country. More than three-quarters of citizens survive on less than $2.15 a day.
Cabo Delgado, despite hosting billion-dollar gas ventures, remains among the most neglected: one of the least electrified regions, with crumbling clinics, overburdened schools, and roads that vanish with the rains. Offshore rigs gleam in satellite images; onshore, villages go days without clean water. The resulting desperation fuels displacement and migration, with growing numbers seeking opportunity in South Africa, Tanzania, or urban Maputo. In a nation rich in natural resources, the most valuable export may still be its people.
Mozambique’s postcolonial state was born late and battered: A liberation war resulting with independence in 1975, followed by a 16-year civil war that shattered infrastructure and governance. That fragility made it ripe for elite capture and foreign dependence. What appears today as underdevelopment is better described as structured exclusion.
This exclusion fuels violence. Since 2017, an armed group aligned with Islamic State has waged insurgency in Cabo Delgado, a mix of jihad and grievance. TotalEnergies evacuated in 2021. The response? Not a national resurgence, but Rwanda.
Invited by then President Filipe Nyusi, with tacit French backing. Rwandan forces deployed to secure gas zones. They pushed back militants and reopened investment corridors. Mozambique’s own army, weakened by corruption, stood aside. In 2025, joint counterterrorism coordination deepened, though insurgent attacks have continued.
Violence has spread. In early 2025, insurgents expanded operations into Niassa province, targeting conservation areas and humanitarian projects. On April 19, militants attacked the Kambako hunting camp in the Niassa Reserve, killing two guards and destroying the camp. Days later, they targeted the Mariri Environmental Centre in Mecula district, killing two anti-poaching scouts. These incursions mark a geographic shift in the conflict, one that now threatens biodiversity efforts, local livelihoods, and the broader humanitarian response across northern Mozambique.
Why Rwanda? Because it sells stability. Kagame’s troops are disciplined, transactional, pro-business. French support for Rwanda’s regional policing has grown, evident in joint operations in Mozambique and the Central African Republic. What appears as counterterrorism often doubles as contract protection, a geopolitical arrangement in which France outsources influence to Rwanda in return for boots on the ground.
Gas isn’t the only resource secured this way. In Montepuez lies one of the world’s richest ruby deposits. Mozambique produced nearly four million carats in 2024 alone. One stone, the Estrela de Fura, sold for $34.8 million. But the wealth beneath the soil has attracted more than investors. Jihadist violence has disrupted mining operations before. While Montepuez lies outside the core insurgency zones, it has not been immune to threat. In 2022, jihadist movements near Ancuabe, just southeast of Montepuez, sparked fears the insurgency might spread. The December 2024 attack on the Gemfields-operated ruby mine, however, was not carried out by jihadists, but by over 200 individuals linked to illegal artisanal mining and local unrest. The incident exposed how Cabo Delgado’s volatility is driven less by ideology than by the compounded pressures of poverty, exclusion, corruption, foreign interference and the desperation they produce. In such conditions, insurgency is less a matter of belief than of survival, a violent response to a system that offers no other path.
Gemfields, the London-listed company behind Montepuez Ruby Mining, holds a 75% stake in the project, with the remaining 25% owned by Mwiriti Limitada, a private Mozambican firm founded by retired General Raimundo Pachinuapa, a FRELIMO stalwart and close ally of Armando Guebuza. Mwiriti originally held the concession before partnering with Gemfields in 2011. It’s stake illustrates how many resource deals in Mozambique anchor foreign investment in elite patronage, funneling opportunity through a narrow political class with military ties, rather than through transparent national benefit.
Despite reporting record sales, the company has faced serious allegations. In 2019, it paid a $7.6 million settlement after being accused of human rights abuses, including beatings, shootings, and sexual assault by security personnel. Artisanal miners, many of whom rely on the land for survival, report being harassed or forcibly displaced. Though Gemfields established a grievance mechanism and funds community initiatives, independent monitors have flagged gaps in accessibility, remedy, and outreach. The law firm involved in the 2019 settlement found that affected individuals were often unaware of the mechanism or faced barriers in submitting complaints, including language issues, fear of retaliation, and lack of transparency in resolution outcomes.
Meanwhile, illegal mining syndicates exploit desperate laborers, often trapping them in debt bondage. Many of these miners, known as garimpeiros, operate under dangerous conditions and are sometimes lured into exploitative arrangements by informal bosses. Although Gemfields is not directly responsible for these syndicates, its security practices and expansion have contributed to the exclusion of informal miners from lands they once accessed. The Mozambican government, through its silence and its alliance with private companies, has enabled a regime where violence and marginalization are normalized. The 2019 legal settlement over human rights abuses, including violence by mine security against locals, only scratched the surface. Violence around the mine may be less about opportunism and faith and more about exclusion and poverty.
The site itself was not directly hit by insurgents, but the proximity of past jihadist activity underscored the fragility of security even in nominally stable zones. Mozambican forces continue to guard the mine, though there is no public evidence of direct Rwandan involvement as with the LNG projects.
Foreign firms profit. Locals bleed. And the mines, like the gas fields, operate behind barricades, symbols of wealth ringed by insecurity.
Graphite is another resource following this pattern. Syrah Resources, an Australian-American company, is preparing to restart operations at its Balama graphite mine in Cabo Delgado in next month, June 2025, after a nine-month suspension. The mine, vital to the global electric vehicle supply chain, had shut down amid unrest sparked by contested elections. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation backed the project with a $150 million loan, framed as a strategic move to secure critical minerals for American industries. Syrah holds a 95% stake in the mine through its subsidiary; the remaining 5% was originally held by EMEM, a state-owned firm dissolved in 2021 following revelations of corruption and mismanagement. While the exact current holder of the 5% stake remains unclear, it likely resides with another government-linked entity, highlighting how state involvement in resource projects often lacks transparency and accountability.
Unlike the Gemfields-Mwiriti deal, which handed 25% to a politically connected local partner, Balama gives the state a slimmer cut and even less leverage. Rwandan forces, once concentrated around LNG terminals, are reportedly extending their footprint into southern Cabo Delgado, including Ancuabe, to protect graphite and other resource sites. Though never formally announced by Kigali or Maputo, the expansion is widely seen as sanctioned. It reflects a broader pattern: extraction zones militarized in the name of stability. With state cooperation and foreign security in place, another corridor opens, and with it, another stream of wealth departs the country, bypassing those who live atop it.
This is the deeper paradox: profits accrue offshore; protection is outsourced; sovereignty becomes a platform for extraction. Mozambique didn’t capture its resources. Its resources captured Mozambique, binding the state to foreign capital, donor interests, and domestic elites who benefit from keeping the structure broken.
Mozambique could have improved its army, strengthened its institutions, and negotiated fairer terms. It could have made the state work for its citizens. Instead, it outsourced security, surrendered leverage, and let the machinery of government serve foreign firms, donor priorities, and entrenched elites. Corruption is chronic. The judiciary is compromised. Public services barely function. And above all, it avoided the hardest reform of all: transforming FRELIMO from a liberation dynasty into a party that competes, loses, and governs within the bounds of real democracy
FRELIMO didn’t dismantle the colonial machinery, it repurposed it. The levers of state that once served empire now serve entrenched elites and foreign firms. Today, they steer contracts to loyalists, shield officials from prosecution, and funnel public wealth into private hands. The language is postcolonial. The logic is not.