An American billionaire plans to convert land the size of Israel in southern Mozambique into a mecca of tourism – but at what cost to the local people? Eddie Koch reports
You can see it in the sadness of her eyes. Leah Shibambo would love to believe this strange American’s promises of how his new game reserve filled with wild animals, marinas, lodges, luxury resorts and tourists aboard a steam train will bring peace and prosperity to her village in southern Mozambique.
But in one lifetime she has experienced an almost complete cycle of oppression: forced labour as a child on the Portuguese plantations; the grinding poverty of failed socialism under Frelimo; and then one of the most brutal civil wars waged anywhere in the world this century. It is easy to understand why her face is a portrait of blighted hope.
We have come to Zitundo, a tiny settlement where 160 people live by gathering wild fruits and fishing in the beautiful lake nearby, to hear what the villagers think about an extraordinary decision of the Mozambican government to grant American billionaire James Blanchard exclusive rights to convert 236 000ha of southern Maputo province – a stunningly beautiful piece of land the size of Israel – into a multi-million-dollar mecca of tourism.
”Now,” says Shibabmo, ”it is the time of peace. But it is just peace by word and not by practice. We have no jobs and no food. Even in the colonial times it was better because then we could buy some cloth and rice. This new government does not understand the situation of poor people.”
It is a refrain that is often heard in parts of Africa these days. Colonialism was bad, but it was better than life under a government incapable of fulfilling the promise of economic development after independence. And into the void steps people like James Ulysses Blanchard III.
In the 1980s, the flamboyant free-marketeer helped bankroll an insurgency led by right- wing Renamo rebels against the left-wing Frelimo government. Blanchard stipulated his money was for education, propaganda and medical aid but there is little doubt it helped the rebel army conduct a reign of terror as barbarous as that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. As a result the area around Zitundo, near Mozambique’s southern border with South Africa, became one of the country’s killing fields: a land wasted by atrocities, landmines, and an almost complete exodus of the survivors to refugee centres in South Africa.
Now the war is over and Blanchard has, some say in exchange for supporting the Mozambican peace process, been given a generous concession to help reconstruct this undeveloped tract in the south-east corner of one of the world’s poorest nations.
The plans of his company, Blanchard Mozambique Enterprises (BME), are breathtakingly ambitious. It has rights to develop several hotels, a marina, a golf course, and a series of bush and beach lodges. The heart of this tourism wonderland will be an exclusive game reserve, restocked with all of the wild animals that roamed the area before colonial times, on 15 000ha of land on the Machangulo Peninsula. The promontory on which this nature reserve will be created juts into the Indian Ocean south of Inhaca Island and is surrounded by coral reefs, whale sharks, manta rays, humpback whales, dolphins and some of the last dugongs – mammals who gave rise to the legend of the mermaids – left in the world.
Further south, the company has the right to expand and restock the Maputo Elephant Reserve, currently home to a relict herd that once migrated freely across the border into KwaZulu-Natal.
The concession, which stretches inland to the Maputo River and down to Ponta Do Ouro on the coast, covers an incredibly rich area of plant diversity known as the Maputaland Centre of Endemism because some 4000 species grow only there.
If Blanchard’s extraordinary vision is achieved, this will literally be the only place in the world where it becomes possible to scuba dive on coral and cavort with whales and dolphins in the morning before climbing onto a Land Rover to see elephants and the rest of the ”big five” in the afternoon. And, to prevent spoiling the area with a network of roads, visitors will be ferried around this wonderland in flying boats and on a steam train that runs on a light rail network.
But the scheme has attracted fierce criticism in Maputo. It is seen as an invasion of Mozambique’s sovereignty. Sceptics ask why a man who helped bring the country to its knees should be rewarded in this way.
”Mozambique is being given away and its people don’t even know about it,” land expert Jose Negrao was quoted as saying in a spate of critical media reports earlier this month.
There are also fears that many of the 10 000 residents who live in the area will be removed and denied access to their sacred forests and ancestral graves.
Eugene Gouws, a South African consultant helping Blanchard implement the programme, sits in Zitundo’s central meeting place under a rag-tag Renamo flag that flutters next to the failed icons of African socialism on Frelimo’s pennant.
He tells the people of Zitundo these criticisms are based on misconceptions. The contract between BME and the Mozambican government stipulates that tourism profits must be used to benefit the region’s residents.
They will be given a 7,5% share in the company. Tenders will be awarded to lodge developers with strong social responsibility programmes and schemes to include rural people in joint venture companies. Jobs will be reserved for locals. Modern residential townships will be built with schools, crches and other services of the kind that exist in few parts of Mozambique.
There will be no removals. Access to sacred places will be guaranteed and encouraged. One of BME’s aims is to respect and restore indigenous culture so that it can act as an attraction for visitors.
Modern game fences will be installed to prevent wild animals from entering the villages. All of this, says Gouws, will be done in a way that protects the environment, reintroduces game species that were shot out of the area a long time ago and generates the most vibrant local economy in the entire country.
My colleague Jim Day, a postgraduate journalism student visiting from America, is disbelieving.
”I am not yet convinced that the Blanchard School of Regional Development – with its key lessons in free-market capitalism and the past bankrolling of armies like Renamo and the Nicaraguan Contras in the fight against communism – is necessarily the best thing for the impoverished people of southern Mozambique,” he says in a despatch written after the visit. ”And when you push Gouws for details on how exactly these benefits will be channelled to the people, what mechanisms will be set up so that they actually see a share of the profits, he has only vague answers and a general comment that ‘These are things that still need to be worked out’.”
John Hatton, an academic and independent consultant from Maputo, says the Mozambique state is too weak to enforce the social responsibility clauses in Blanchard’s contract. There is only one non-government organisation, the Swiss-based Helvetus, working to protect peoples’ rights in the area. And local government is factionalised between a Frelimo administrator, a Renamo administrator, and the traditional chiefs.
So far the only impact of Blanchard’s scheme on the livelihoods of Zitundo’s people has been the cancellation of a commercial pine project that, although it would have devastated the fragile ecosystems around Zitundo, had created 250 full-time jobs. Blanchard insisted that Mozaflorestal, a joint venture between Sappi and a Mozambican company to grow water-sapping bluegums along the southern coastal zone of Mozambique, be evicted and the company’s contract cancelled as a precondition for his tourism plan being implemented.
”Up to now we haven’t been properly informed. All we know is that we have lost our jobs,” says Antonio Mabika, deputy administrator of the Zitundo region. ”People are afraid. They don’t like the idea of being surrounded by wild animals. And they fear they will lose their land.”
Gouws explains that BME is working with Helvetus, a Swiss non-government organisation operating in Mozambique, to host a series of workshops to explain the tourism project. Community leaders will be offered field trips to tourism projects in South Africa that have galvanised rural development.
”That will be good,” says Shibambo. ”Maybe the poor people will then be able to see how they will be affected.” But the sadness remains in her eyes.
The irony is that Blanchard’s shift from being a cold-war warrior to a proponent of community-based tourism, what has been called the world’s peace industry, is probably the last and the best chance that this part of the world’s poorest country has for real growth and development. Some time ago Mia Couto, one of the most respected writers and intellectuals in Mozambique, summarised this paradox in a different way.
”To understand it,” he said, ”you must realise that Mozambique hasn’t had bulldozers that work. Now we have one that does.”
That is the enigma of Mozambique today. Those who used their power to cause so much damage to this land and its people are now the ones who have the opportunity to undo it. All they have to do is keep their word.
Eddie Koch is currently working as consultant on the tourism corridor that is being planned between Richard’s Bay and Maputo