The Political Economy of Gas Governance in Mozambique

In this paper, we argue that Mozambique has seen a profound reform process separating the commercial and regulatory functions of key institutions in the extractive and gas sectors respectively. Reforms in the oil and gas sector since the early 1980s have been driven by the need to provide the necessary regulatory frameworks to support major investments within the sector, most importantly those related to Sasol’s gas pipeline in the 2000s and again in 2012, as well as the emerging LNG industry in 2014. These reforms have generally been supported by international donors and financial institutions, which the different Frelimo governments have tended to embrace only hesitantly. A key feature of the reform process has been the ability of the dominant ruling elite to use these reforms to reproduce its power and use the gas sector for purposes of its own accumulation, thereby securing resources for the Frelimo party related, for example, to energy generation, with participation by party-owned companies (see Section 3).
We argue that, while the regulatory and commercial aspects of the gas sector have been separated over time, with some core expertise being established in what resemble Pockets of Efficiency (PoEs) in the National petroleum Institute (INP) and the Tax Authorities (TA), the dominant ruling elites in and around the executive have used this expertise to ensure that rents from the gas industry can be extracted, despite the extent of the reforms. But the picture more generally seems to be that ruling elites have starved the technical units of resources even in places and situations where one could and should expect dominant ruling elites to be concerned with setting up and supporting PoEs. This has been underpinned by considerable discretion being vested in the executive due to the hesitation with which the reforms have been implemented and technical capacity has been promoted and used.