Not long at all! The president of Mozambique was caught last year taking a million, though I have to imagine it’s not much, much more. 74 percent of the country are agrarian farmers, yet the deals they made with ExxonMobil, ENI (Italian oil giant), and now Total (TotalEnergie from recent merger, France oil giant), for three LNG factories totaling $62 billion are truly massive, combine it would have been the biggest infrastructure in Africa ever. It’s been slowed and scaled down a bit due to an insurrection in Northern Mozambique by some rebels. Although American companies are prevented from bribing governments to win projects) since 1977 under the (FCPA) and the Europeans ‘forbidden’ since 1999, the Chinese and the Africans aren’t. They can freely give and receive bribes. Why is that important? Because the Chinese are actually the major investors in these massive projects and the US-EU energy giants are the builders and engineers. The Chinese are the buyers, and all the gas will go onto tankers and carted off to China. So no one knows if any suitcases of cash came off the plane from China in the hands of the government.
But the African leaders apparently did not make good deals, as no gas is scheduled to make power plants in their own country and give electricity to everyone, which would have been life changing. Instead, a certain cut of the funds will go into government coffers and the excess gas can be shipped through Mozambique to South Africa via a Chinese pipeline. The people get the shaft; local officials get super rich. Angola and Nigeria already have LNG factories, and Senegal is building one offshore to ship new gas directly to the EU (BP made the deal in 2018). In Cameroon, the Chinese are taking all gas from offshore directly onto boats to China. Nothing probably gets to shore. It’s hard for “the poor”, or citizens, to benefit because the deals are made behind closed doors with massive western law firms and investment houses deeply financed and experienced with a few local politicians with neither of those. Very sad to see.
