Thank you, Your Excellency President Filipe Nyusi.

It is an honor for me to visit Mozambique to reciprocate your last visit and this morning I was very pleased to have the opportunity to witness the diversity of cultural arts in the cultural event organized this morning.

Mozambique is a close friend of Indonesia and Indonesia’s first partner of the Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) in Africa. Indonesia remains committed to strengthening our partnership with Mozambique through concrete cooperation, both in the economic and development sectors.

During the meeting, we discussed several issues.

Firstly, related to trade. Since the Indonesian-Mozambique Preferential Trade Agreement came into effect in 2022, trade increased significantly at 78 percent in June this year. We have agreed to optimize the utilization of PTA for business actors through inter-chamber cooperation. In addition, I also support the export of train products by Indonesia’s state-owned enterprise to Mozambique.

Secondly, I welcome the investment plan for end-to-end oil and gas processing by Indonesian state-owned enterprises, the expansion of investment in the power generation sector, as well as the production and distribution of gas sales and distribution by Indonesian private companies. I also warmly welcome the plan to establish a Bilateral Investment Treaty and have assigned related ministers to finalize the agreement immediately.

We have also agreed to strengthen cooperation on health resilience in Mozambique through the procurement of vaccines, medicines, and medical devices, and have requested President Nyusi to lend his support for the registration process of Indonesia’s vaccines.

Fourthly, Indonesia remains committed to bolstering cooperation in the development sector with Africa. Indonesia is also currently in the process of finalizing a grand design for development plan for the upcoming five years in Africa in the sectors of health, food, energy, and other sectors that hold significance for the interest of Mozambique.

Lastly, we have already established a task force to follow up on our previous bilateral discussion and I hope this task force will be able to follow up on our discussion today.

To conclude my statement, I would like to invite Mozambique to participate in the second Indonesia-Africa Forum in the next year.

I thank you.

(RKWSI/AW/EP)