Mozambique's natural gas deposits are good news. But now the bad news

 StrategyPage has a long article on Mozambique.

That country suffered starvation after the Portuguese leftist government left the communists take it over and the communists threw out all the Europeans and mixed race and local educated folk.

How bad was it? Well, the Catholics sent local Mashona nuns there from Zimbabwe to help. Sister E, a friend, said the convents had been looted and she had to sleep on a mat and the food was poor. After two years, she had a stroke from the stress and was flown home. 

So although this blog was originally started to document the atrocities of Mugabe, at least there was not the chaos and civil war as there was in Mozambique.

The presence of South African mercenaries in Mozambique (who were protecting the mines) didn't help because the propaganda types (i.e. the leftist press in Europe) blamed all their problems on evil South Africa.

Presumably if they had left the Cubans (and now Chinese) run the place and loot their resources while killing the minority tribes as their sister colony in Angola did, it would have been a socialist paradise. (/s).

But that was many years ago.

Now the problem is that natural gas/oil reserves have been discovered, and are being developed by French and Italian companies.

The bad news? that means instead of the communist crazies, we have the Islamicist crazies making trouble, trying to stop the outsiders looting, I mean developing this resource, and of course, keeping the politicians rich with bribes etc.

StrategyPage:

The presence of large offshore deposits was confirmed fifteen years ago and, after 2010 natural gas related activity began to show up in northern Mozambique. This meant more business for local firms and jobs for people in the area. That attracted the attention of criminal gangs in Mozambique and throughout East Africa.

The current Mozambique government is something of a political gang itself, which is common in Africa and many other parts of the world.

Local expectations soon exceeded reality and the local politicians and gangsters took advantage of it. They were joined by Islamic terrorists from other parts of East Africa where there are larger Moslem populations. ...

Mozambique, with 30 million people, is 20 percent Moslem and 60 percent Christian. To the north, Tanzania, with 56 million people, is 35 percent Moslem. You don’t encounter a Moslem majority nation until you reach Somalia, which is currently the source of most of the Islamic terrorist activity in East Africa. For that reason, it was Somali Islamic terrorists who were attracted to northern Mozambique and played a role in creating some of the local Islamic terrorist groups. 

Sigh. 

the SP version of what happened there in the past can be found at their site.

short summary: 

The rebels were never a real threat to the colonial government. After Mozambique became independent in 1975, its first government was socialist and run by politicians who wanted to establish a communist police state “for the greater good.” This triggered a civil war in 1977 that killed over a million people, most of them civilians, before it ended in 1992.

and then there is the problem of tribalism and corruption.

Something to remember the next time you read the globalist want to give money to poor countries to atone for climate change: it won't go to the people but to the corrupt politicians and businessmen. 

As for China: Wikipedia has an entire article on Chinese/Mozambique relationship. Lots of this sounds familiar (they do this to us in the Philippines, and in other African countries):

China has also become a major buyer of Mozambican timber; despite local regulations forbidding the export of unprocessed logs, which aim to force foreign countries hoping to gain access to Mozambican resources to invest in setting up processing facilities in the country, many logs are exported illegally. 

Chinese businessmen are not typically involved in the actual practise of logging; instead, it is performed mainly by locals, who then bring the logs to buyers in port cities.[7]

China has also become an increasingly important player in Mozambique's construction industry; over one-third of Mozambique's new road construction is now carried out by Chinese contractors. Contractors from other countries, who have been losing out on business due to their higher costs, complain that the Chinese contractors make no effort to transfer skills or technology to locals, and do not make use of local or regional labour subcontractors, instead preferring to import and manage their own workers.

Sigh.