Good afternoon. For more than a decade, Mozambique’s vast offshore gas reserves have been presented as the foundation of the country’s future prosperity. Governments, investors and much of the country’s political elite have spoken of transformation, industrialisation and fiscal stability built on LNG exports from the Rovuma Basin.
Yet Mozambique today remains heavily indebted, fiscally constrained and economically fragile. That contradiction is at the heart of a new study by the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP) examining the fiscal returns generated by the country’s gas sector.
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The report focuses on the Coral Sul floating LNG project, the one LNG project already in operation in Mozambique, but its implications reach beyond that single concession. Its central argument is that Mozambique has gradually built an economic model around anticipated LNG wealth that will arrive slowly, unevenly and under increasing global uncertainty.
That matters because Mozambique has not treated gas simply as a resource. It has increasingly treated LNG as the country’s development strategy itself.
Coral Sul already generates exports and tax revenues. But the CIP study points out that the state’s own participation through ENH produces limited immediate gains because much of the company’s revenue is absorbed by debt servicing linked to its stake in the project. Under current arrangements, ENH’s net dividends from the project will remain zero until 2034.
