The escalation of what appears to be an Islamic extremist-driven conflict in northern Mozambique could derail the economic bonanza the country is expecting from the natural gas deposits in the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of the Cabo Delgado province.
But the conflict has also intensified the spotlight on a shadowy Russian private military contractor called the Wagner Group.
The group — whose alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has close ties to the Kremlin and is considered a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin — has drawn increasing media attention, most recently from the Daily Maverick, which published an overview of its alleged activities in at least 20 African states.
It is in Cabo Delgado that Wagner has most recently intervened, following the emergence of apparent Islamist extremist cells in the province. But beyond that, a new research report suggests the group has been conducting social media influence operations in the country too.
Cabo Delgado, which borders Tanzania, has had over 300 attacks since October 2017, with 24 in November alone. The most recent, on November 13, targeted Afungi, the village where a huge liquefied natural gas (LNG) project is being constructed to exploit the offshore resource.
The Rovuma Basin deposit is considered to be one of the largest discoveries in the world in the past two decades, and has prompted the interest of multinationals such as Anadarko, Total and Exxon Mobil.
But the resultant influx of money and people has coincided with an increasingly violent form of extremism. In October, seven military contractors linked to the Wagner Group were killed; four were beheaded after being shot.
Neither Russia nor Mozambique has given details of the attacks, and their embassies in SA did not respond to questions from the FM.
The reasons for the rise of extremism in what were once peaceful Muslim communities are more complex than just the discovery of gas, says Dani Ribeiro, a technical co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth Mozambique, an NGO working on human rights and environmental issues related to the gas project.
"In the north of the country there is a strong Muslim community and most of them support the spreading of Islam in a peaceful and nonviolent way," says Ribeiro. "But the main issue is that conditions have created a breeding ground for extremist ideologies."
Ribeiro refers to the high level of illiteracy and the lack of schooling, which have left locals unable to take advantage of the jobs being created.
"At the same time, these groups — largely subsistence farmers and fisher folk — are losing land via abuses committed by the political elite and the numerous companies looking to supply the needs of the gas boom," says Ribeiro.
The government has compounded the issue by suppressing civil society and preventing constructive solutions from being found. "This has created a perfect storm," says Ribeiro.
It all comes at a time when Russia is reasserting itself on the global stage and looking to expand its influence following debilitating sanctions imposed by the West after it annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
The latest initiative is an extensive engagement with African states, highlighted by the recent Russia-Africa summit that was attended by the continent’s 54 leaders, including President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The summit, held in October in Sochi, promoted broad-ranging ties between Russia and Africa, including cultural exchanges, trade promotion and military co-operation.
Wagner, which moved in on the back of agreements between Russia and Mozambique, appears to be acting as a proxy for Moscow while providing plausible deniability for the Kremlin, says Jasmine Opperman, Africa associate at the UK-based think-tank Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism.
But far from improving the security situation, Wagner may be making things worse.
"The Russians have underestimated the insurgents. The insurgents have splintered again, and [the Russians] have underestimated their ability to gather intelligence simply because they are not familiar with the population and do not speak the language," says Opperman.
"The community does not trust Mozambican security forces because of indiscriminate arrests, so while they have all this hardware, they are not even sure what to do when they pick up [insurgent] movement."
Antagonism between the Russians and Mozambicans is reported to be rising.
At the same time, ruling party Frelimo is trying to contain political fallout from what is essentially a proxy war being waged on its behalf by a foreign army.
Opperman thinks the genie is out of the bottle. "The Islamic State Central Africa has claimed credit for 19 attacks," she says. "There is a humanitarian crisis brewing; the people being attacked are subsistence farmers and fishermen, and they are not going back to their farms. The LNG plant is exacerbating the environment of vulnerability, which is ripe for extremist ideology — and the Islamic State has noted this."
But it would seem that Wagner’s involvement in Africa is deeper than just boots on the ground.
An October 29 report by the Cyber Policy Centre of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), "Evidence of Russia-Linked Influence Operations in Africa", suggests Wagner and other entities tied to Prigozhin have been surreptitiously operating a social media influence operation in Africa. The group has apparently targeted Mozambique and five other countries — Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo — through a collection of Facebook pages since April 2018.
The campaign included creating "news" pages and websites, and pages purporting to belong to politicians and political parties. In total, the investigation uncovered seven Instagram accounts and 73 Facebook pages with "likes" from 1.72-million accounts.
The page managers were quite active — in October alone there were 8,900 posts, according to the research report.
In the case of Mozambique, the pages were created just a month before the October 15 parliamentary and presidential elections, which Frelimo won with a landslide 73%.
Opposition party Renamo had hoped to challenge the election results in court, but its bid was thrown out by the country’s highest court last week.
One of the report authors, Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the SIO with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, says the research team also uncovered a clear case of a "fake news" article directed at Renamo, in which it was accused of concluding an agreement with the Chinese government to store nuclear waste in Mozambique.
"For the pages with a regional slant, like Cabo Delgado, the content was very pro what the ruling party was doing to fight the insurgency," says Grossman.
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