Good afternoon. It would be a chilly day in hell if the Mozambican government decided to stop complaining about how the media reports on the war in Cabo Delgado province. Defence minister Cristóvão Chume has returned to this traditional subject, grumbling that there is too much discussion of insurgent activities (see below). Chume claims that pessimistic media coverage is affecting investment in the province. That is unlikely to be true. Major investors like TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, the lead developers of the big gas projects, have security consultants to advise them about the security situation; they do not proceed on the basis of the latest headlines. Nor do people flee their villages because of media reports. What media coverage does affect is how Mozambique is generally perceived abroad by people and organisations who lack expert knowledge of the situation.
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Chume points to what he claims are 4,000 people working on TotalEnergies’ gas project as evidence for how Cabo Delgado cannot be unsafe. (That number must include people indirectly involved with the project, working in support services such as quarrying stone or logistics, as well as people directly employed by the project). In fact, Zitamar News and others have reported on the increasing preparations to resume work on that project. It is just that we have also not avoided reporting on insurgent activities, which seem to be timed to coincide with those preparations. But the government, as usual, would rather the media did not say anything about Cabo Delgado.
