Imagining Booms and Busts: Conflicting Temporalities of Extraction in Mozambique: Imagining Booms and Busts: Conflicting Temporalities of Extraction in Mozambique

This paper presents three sets of divergent and competing understandings of temporalities in relation to the resource boom (and recent coal bust) in Mozambique, in order to explore the complexities of expectations of “development” raised by mega projects of the extractive industry. As it is based on data gathered during recent exploratory fieldwork in the capital Maputo and Tete (central Mozambique), it specifically concerns the current development of a liquefied gas park in the north of the country, and the struggling coal industry in Tete.

The first set of understandings involves a forward-looking, long-term view of the extractive industry’s potential to bring transformational “development” to Mozambique and its people, generally expressed by donors, academics and the extractive industry from “Maputo.” The second set is characterised by expressions of volatility and “waiting” by Tete’s urban elite, the businessmen and women who arrived or invested, who were lured by the promise of the coal-bonanza, and who explained the landscape and urban “development” in terms of before, during and after “the boom”. The third set delves into the experience and expressions of liminality by members of the communities who were resettled by coal mining companies in Tete.

While by no means exhaustive, I hope that by presenting these three sets, the paper goes beyond binary analyses of the local versus the national, and the community versus the company or state, and present a layered analysis of disconnect between understandings of “development” and the promised/expected wealth of resource extraction.