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Mozambique: 'Cahora Bassa is Ours,' Declares Guebuza
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
27 November 2007
Posted to the web 27 November 2007
Songo
"The last mark of 500 years of foreign domination in our country has finally been removed", Mozambican President Armando Guebuza told a cheering crowd on Tuesday, as the country celebrated the handover of a majority participation in the Cahora Bassa dam to the Mozambican state.
Guebuza was speaking at the dam town of Songo, overlooking the Zambezi river in the western province of Tete, after he had accompanied four other heads of state around the dam wall and power station.
They included Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, whose country is a already a consumer of Cahora Bassa power, and Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi, which has expressed an interest in purchasing electricity from the dam. Also on the tour were Presidents Festus Mogae of Botswana and Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia, and the Prime Minister of Swaziland Absalom Dlamini.
Monday and Tuesday saw the conclusion of a series of technical documents on the transfer of shares in the dam operating company, Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), from Portuguese to Mozambican ownership, and on the financial arrangements.
In essence, the deal is simple - Mozambique is paying Portugal 700 million US dollars to acquire 67 per cent of the HCB shares. This pushes the Mozambican state's holding in HCB up from 18 to 85 per cent, while the Portuguese holding falls from 82 to 15 per cent. One logical result of this is that the new board of directors will no longer be dominated by Portuguese appointees: for the first time, it will have a Mozambican majority and a Mozambican chairperson.
The money for the transfer has been lent to the Mozambican government by a consortium formed by the French bank CA Lyon and the Portuguese Investment Bank. They will recoup the money from the sale of Cahora Bassa power. The government has pledged that not a money from the Mozambican state budget will go towards paying this debt.
"Cahora Bassa is ours !", Guebuza declared to the Songo rally."As from today Cahora Bassa joins the other resources of Mozambique to participate in implementing our national anti-poverty agenda".
Guebuza dismissed those who have argued that, because the money has been lent, HCB really belongs to the banks and not to Mozambique. It was just like any other loan, he said: "When someone invests in a flour mill, or a fishing boat, or a mini-bus taxi, that equipment belongs to him, and not to the institution that lent him the money. So all Mozambicans should feel proud that they are now the owners of Cahora Bassa".
Guebuza pointed out that this is the second largest hydroelectric dam in Africa. Cahora Bassa can generate 2,075 megawatts of power, not far short of the 2,100 megawatts of the Aswan dam in Egypt. Transfer of ownership to Mozambique, he said, "will favour an attractive environment for further undertakings to generate electricity for the national grid".
One example was the planned dam at Mphanda Nkuwa, also on the Zambezi, some 70 kilometres downstream from Cahora Bassa. "Our dream is that the day will come soon when we exploit our full potential of more than 12,000 megawatts", declared Guebuza.
Mozambican control over Cahora Bassa, he added, "opens up the possibilities of accelerating our industrialisation. The availability of more electricity will be a strong factor in making investment projects, public and private, national and foreign, viable in our country".
It had taken 32 years since Mozambican independence to achieve the transfer of Cahora Bassa. "These were 32 years of advances and setbacks, 32 years of hopes and frustrations", said Guebuza.
He gave no details, perhaps to avoid hurting the feelings of some of the guests. For certainly the biggest frustration of all was that, during the war of destabilisation, the apartheid-backed Renamo rebels, blew up hundreds of pylons carrying Cahora Bassa energy to its main consumer, the South African power company. Eskom.
And among the guests were the two Mozambicans most responsible for this sabotage - Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, and the former Renamo chief of staff, Raul Domingos (who now heads his own party, the PDD - Party for Peace, Democracy and Development). Last year, Domingos told AIM that he had given the order to blow up the pylons, and he felt no regret about it.
The sabotage meant that for almost two decades HCB could not sell power to Eskom. So the original debt incurred in building the dam just grew larger and larger, and was borne by the Portuguese treasury. One of the sticking points in the long drawn out negotiations was how to deal with HCB's debt to Portugal, which the Portuguese government claimed had reached 2.5 billion dollars. Eventually this was knocked down by 90 per cent to 250 million, paid off in a lump sum from HCB's coffers in 2006.
Guebuza praised the successive Mozambican negotiating teams who "knew how to prioritise dialogue, and the building of consensus, and were always guided by the supreme interests of the Mozambican nation".
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He noted that several banks had offered to lend Mozambique the 700 million dollars for the transfer, which he regarded as "a demonstration of trust in the political stability and economic environment of Mozambique".
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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