Mozambique: Shortage of food, tents for people fleeing violence in Cabo Delgado

Metuge is the most visible face of the humanitarian crisis in Cabo Delgado, as it is the district headquarters where hundreds of tents shelter between 10,000 and 12,000 displaced persons from the violence in northern Mozambique.

When the armed groups tormenting Cabo Delgado, classified as terrorists, came from the north and invaded villages in the Quissanga district at the end of March, the exodus to the south began.

Metuge was the first safe place to flee to, close enough to the provincial capital to provide security, but still in the countryside, the natural landscape of displaced people who are mostly farmers.

In the accommodation area between the schools in Manono, Metuge, there are tents that served to shelter displaced people from Cyclone Kenneth, which hit Cabo Delgado in 2019. 

There are also traditional cloth tents, but they are not enough even if each tent houses two families.

The displaced people complain about the lack of space and food.

The fields they cultivated were left behind, abandoned because of armed violence, and the help they receive in the accommodation areas for little more than a porridge in the morning and a portion of rice in the afternoon – each divided by the household.

“I think there’s more food shortage. This is worrying,” says Lusa Mustafá Ali Azito, a shelter officer for Ayuda en Acción, a Spanish NGO that is managing the displaced persons’ accommodation areas in Metuge, in coordination with the Mozambican government and other humanitarian agencies.

In his opinion, the shortage justifies an alert to the rest of the world.

It would be better [to have that alert]. We don’t know when it will end”, in an allusion to the armed conflict, “and the displaced people are not only here”, they are going to other provinces, he notes.

“The food is not enough because we are many,” says Faustino Raul, 37, a former carpenter from Quissanga, one of the displaced who found shelter in Manono.

“Sometimes they deliver 25 bags to 381 people,” in just one of the reception areas. “How do we share? Maybe with half a kilo (of rice or corn) for each person” and each one will have to manage the quantity.

Puet Omar walks between tents and complains: in his case, “the food is corn and it’s little. It’s not enough for the stomach”.

Many people sleep without a roof in Manono and are grateful for today’s offer: the International Organization for Migration (IOM), together with Ayuda em Accion, delivered mats and blankets to the displaced.

“No, I don’t want to trade this for food,” says Casimiro Abdala, 56, a displaced person from Quissanga, upon receiving two blankets and a mat.

“This will make it easier for me to sleep,” he says, now that he’s had to get used to sleeping on the floor since he fled his land.

Food, shelter and household utensils are among the main needs of the displaced persons who have transformed Metuge into a village filled with tents that mend lives, most of them of children and young people.

Metuge is at the same time the front line of what is now considered safe territory, because to move forward, towards the north, is to stand in uncertainty, in the face of the insecurity that has devastated the province for two and a half years. 

At least a thousand people have already died in the conflict to which the ‘jihadist’ Islamic state group has been associated for a year, a war, as the displaced people call it, which has already affected 250,000 people, most of them on the run.