Beira railways concession, and its termination
Mozambique's government concessioned the Sena and Machipanda railways for 25 years in 2004 to a joint company in which the state rail enterprise CFM held 49 percent; the Sena line reopened to Moatize more than two years late, carried 266,000 tonnes against a target of one million, and the government terminated the concession on 7 December 2011.
266,000 metric tons, freight carried on the sena line by the end of the project, 2011. 1,000,000 metric tons per annum, target freight on the sena line by the end of the project, 2009. World Bank, Implementation Completion and Results Report, Beira Railway Project (P082618), retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
The government of Mozambique, through CFM, handed rehabilitation and operation of two state railways to a private concessionaire in a 51 to 49 joint company, financed largely by an IDA credit, and took the lines back when rehabilitation ran late and traffic did not materialise.
Preconditions
- A state rail enterprise able to supervise a concessionaire, which a 49 percent shareholding in the same company undercut
- A traffic forecast tied to coal mines whose own concessions were being negotiated in parallel by another ministry
- A dispute mechanism or independent arbiter, which the concession lacked
Limits: The source is the World Bank's own completion report on a project it financed, so the lender is grading a failure it shares, and the independent review of that report found its cost tables mutually inconsistent: the text claims a cost overrun of more than US$50 million while the annex shows actual cost below appraisal, which is why no cost figure is used here. The ICR also dates the termination both to September and to December 2011. The 266,000 tonnes is coal moved in the months after the line opened in August 2011, against a target set for 2009, so it measures lateness as much as capacity. The concession covered two lines in the centre of the country, not the national network. The termination ended the partnership but not the asset: CFM kept operating the rehabilitated Sena line, and later coal traffic on it is not in this record. Blame is contested: the report faults the concession design, the state's 49 percent stake and ineffectual Bank supervision as well as the private operator.