The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering by Gediminas Lesutis

Author:Gediminas Lesutis [Lesutis, Gediminas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000521108
Google: CVtQEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 59789391
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-30T12:37:03+00:00

These lost livelihoods demonstrate how the structural violence of spatial capitalist abstractions, resulting in dispossession, constitutes the precarity of the resettled populations by denying them opportunities to practice their livelihoods that were dependent on the space from which they had been mandatorily relocated.

Alongside the loss of livelihoods and the access to Moatize, the dispossession triggered by the extractivist enclosure has also resulted in ongoing problems of landlessness in Cateme itself. According to the agreement made between Vale and the Mozambican Government, each relocated household was supposed to receive 2 hectares of agriculturally productive land as a form of compensation. However, confirming the documented concerns raised by national and international civil society groups (see CIP 2012 ; Human Rights Watch 2013; Mosca and Selemane 2011), during my stay in Cateme I learnt that all resettled families only were given 1 hectare of land. To date, the second hectare has not been distributed; this has resulted in the ongoing struggle to receive a financial compensation for the lost land. By August 2017, three official petitions had been submitted by Cateme’s representatives to the provincial government authorities. However, the issue remains unresolved. Nine years after the resettlement process completion, seven families in Cateme, opting out from this claim, made a separate official complaint not only to be compensated for the second hectare of land but also to receive a financial remuneration for the lost years of agricultural production that they could have had if the originally promised second hectare of land had been distributed on time.

Further exacerbating the ongoing issue of landlessness, most households in Cateme have also experienced problems with the 1 hectare of land that they had received. The resettlement site was built in the locality that was already occupied by autochthonous populations. In Moatize, under a private-public partnership agreement, the land within the mining enclave was leased to Vale for 35 years, effectively making it a private property. However, the land in rural areas outside of the mining enclave is governed by the customary tenure written in the Mozambican constitution. As Mamdani (1996) observes, such coexistence of two land governance systems results in a bifurcated state that is characterised by the dual legacy of different systems of authority. In this context, in spite of a de facto private land ownership, Vale also intersects with the customary system beyond its enclave. In order to make space available for the populations relocated from Chipanga, Vale negotiated the land distribution in Cateme with the population native to the area. This process, however, unfolded unevenly. On the one hand, some within the native population claim that, not informed about the resettlement plans, they only found out about the land ownership transfer when cleaning and land-partition works were initiated before the dispossessed populations from Moatize arrived to Cateme. Realising this, these families approached Vale in order to negotiate financial compensation. On the other hand, others within the native population admit having been compensated by Vale for their land distributed to the resettled population.

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