‘National resources’?:The fragmented citizenship of gas extraction in Tanzania
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- Between December 2012 and May 2013, a series of violent confrontations took place between state police, army forces and residents of Mtwara region in southern Tanzania.
- While this has recently been estimated at more than 57 trillion cubic feet for Tanzania alone, the US Geological Survey estimates that coastal deposits across East Africa could reach 441tcf.
- Citizenship is not about equating citizens but about articulating, codifying and enacting their differences.
Research Methodology
- The first period of fieldwork took place in 2012 and lasted for four months.
- Interviews and focus groups were held with various groups affected directly incipient processes of gas extraction, including (but not limited to); political actors, port and gas industry workers, and groups of men, espeically at Mtwara fish market and adjacent to the redeveloped port.
- Many other individual interviews and informal group conversations were held in Mtwara Town (the nexus of the process at the time), and ten kilometres away in Mikindani (where the researcher was based).
- Other requests for interviews with government representatives to discuss these issues were rejected or ignored.
- Overall, this has been a wide-ranging process of data gathering against which certain specific claims are made.
Citizenship in Tanzania
- Taking resource sovereignty as a point of departure, this section interrogates the way in which citizenship is constructed and enacted in Tanzania.
- This prominent sense of geographical injustice in ‘the south’ is noteworthy, especially given that Tanzania is often portrayed as a country not blighted by the ethnic tensions and political problems associated with other African states and especially those associated within neighbouring countries.
- Mkapa then signed plans for an Mtwara Development Corridor (MDC) in 2004, a huge infrastructure project agreed to in conjunction with the leaders of Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi.
Concluding Remarks
- Discoveries of gas in Tanzania can be seen as only one of many examples of the ways in which the frontiers of extraction are changing across Africa.
- Moreover, geographies of investment in resource extraction are also changing on account of governments renegotiating the terms of access to ‘national’ resources.
- Concern over corruption has been witnessed across Tanzania for some time and was expressed in the context of the emergent gas industry throughout the fieldwork periods represented here: ‘the government agrees these contracts [with multinational companies] but the authors do not see them.
- They develop themselves and the authors just suffer….
- What the authors argue however, is that studies of resource conflict should pay more attention to the contested nature of citizenship and go beyond an uncritical national framing.
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Q2. What are the future works in "‘national resources’? the fragmented citizenship of gas extraction in tanzania" ?
The authors have shown how the politics of resource conflict actually serves to extend the fragmentation or ‘ differentiated ’ nature of Tanzanian citizenship, which also serves to reveal the fault lines of national claims to distributive justice. Here, the physical manifestation of gas, in the form of a pipeline, serves to further fracture an already differentiated citizenship with the state seen by some as more of a conduit for flows of international capital than as an institution committed to distributive justice. In this instance the focus is on the southern Mtwara ( and to a lesser extent Lindi ) region, illustrating a further fracturing of the ‘ national ’ picture in Tanzania and perhaps reflective of a ‘ differentiated citizenship ’. Moreover, this has led to the articulation of an array of alternative ways of imagining the political and economic future of gas extraction with radical alternatives – from further protests to secessionism – forwarded as possible solutions.