Bar Association demands Vale pay compensation for botched resetlement

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Bar Association demands Vale pay compensation for botched resetlement

10:10 CAT | 11 Jan 2022

File photo: OAM

The Mozambican Bar Association (OAM) has demanded that the local subsidiary of the Brazilian mining giant Vale must compensate about 760 households from the Cateme community, in Moatize district, in the western province of Tete, because of the “unjust and abusive” way in which they were resettled in August 2010.

According to an OAM press release, the resettlement arose from the mining contract that the government signed with Vale in 2007. A huge area in Moatize was allocated to Vale for open-cast coal mining, covering an area on which over 1,000 households were living.

Between 2009 and 2011, the government approved a Resettlement Acton Plan covering the households affected by the Vale mine. 1,365 households were resettled, and the OAM says that 760 of them suffered losses.

Over a decade later, says the OAM release, the housing conditions in the resettlement area remain “precarious and problematic”. The land is stony, and unfit for cultivation. The households who were moved there face problems of hunger, access to clean water, transport, and alternative sources of income.

Compensation was agreed years ago, but has not yet been paid in full, the OAM accuses, thus denying the households their right to decent housing, to productive land, to health and to human dignity.

Under the law applicable in this case, Vale is obliged to provide fair resettlement for the households affected and to pay fair compensation, the OAM points out.

It was initially agreed that each of the Cateme households would receive two hectares of land for farming, but in fact they only received one hectare each. Vale replaced the second hectare with a cash payment of 119,000 meticais (about 1,900 US dollars, at the current exchange rate).

“The reasons for this substitution are unclear”, said the OAM release, “as are the criteria on which the sum was based”.

The OAM took the case to the Administrative Tribunal, calling on the tribunal to oblige the then Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development to fine Vale-Mozambique ten per cent of the total value of the mine, for its non-compliance with the resettlement agreement.

In April 2019, the Tete provincial administrative tribunal ordered Vale to repair all the Cateme resettlement houses that had structural problems. Vale did nothing to obey this court order.

The OAM says it has contacted Vale several times in its attempts to protect the rights of the resettled households. But Vale has still not paid up, and in 2020 the OAM demanded that Vale be forced to pay compensation of 1.18 billion meticais (about 19 million dollars) to the households affected.

Whether the households will ever see any of this money must be in doubt, since Vale is scuttling out of Mozambique. The OAM says it as concerned to find that Vale has reached a binding agreement to sell its coal assets to Vulcan Minerals for 270 million dollars. It insists that the company must meet its legal and contractual obligations before leaving the country.

Source: AIM