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Dear MCLI Readers,
Below find an
article with the following said by the Mozambique Minister of
Transport Mr. Mungwambe:
“This year, the government
cancelled the lease, and now the Maputo-South Africa line will be
rehabilitated by the Mozambican port and rail company, CFM, on its own, in
2006.”
Watch your
MCLI newsflash on Monday for an update on the CFM Ressano Garcia Rail
Rehabilitation Project!
Wish you a
magic week-end!
aim
news 2/11/05
91105E PRIVATISED RAIL MANAGEMENT IN
SERIOUS TROUBLE
Maputo, 2 Nov (AIM) - The policy
of leasing out Mozambican
railways to private management has failed in
two of the country's
three main rail corridors.
Answering questions
from deputies in the country's
parliament, the Assembly of the
Republic, on Wednesday Transport Minister
Antonio Mungwambe said the
situation with the railway from
Maputo
to South
Africa was so bad that the government
has
cancelled the lease.
The lease contract for the line was signed,
after years of
negotiation, in December 2002 with a consortium headed
by the
South African rail company Spoornet.
Yet the consortium
never moved to take over management of
the line, or to invest any money
in it. Reports reaching Maputo
suggest this was because of a
dispute between Spoornet and its
consortium partner, the Mauritius-registered
New
Limpopo Bridge
Project Investments
(NLPI).
This year, Mungwambe said, the government cancelled
the
lease, and now the Maputo-South Africa line will be
rehabilitated
by the Mozambican port and rail company, CFM, on its own,
in
2006.
The situation on the northern railway, from the port
of
Nacala to Malawi, is also a matter of
concern, though here the
leaseholder, the Nacala Corridor Development
Company (SDCN) in
which the main foreign partner is the American
Railroad
Corporation did at least take over management early this
year.
But some of the management decisions alarmed the
government -
notably the closure of railway stations and the
dismantling of the
communication system between the stations and
the trains. Nor did the
leaseholder operate the promised regular
service on the branch line
between the cities of Cuamba and
Lichinga, in Niassa province.
After
pressure from the government, SDCN reinstated the
communication system,
but many stations remain closed. Mungwambe
also insisted that passenger
trains must stay a reasonable time
in each station, to allow passengers
to get on and off trains in
safety.
SDCN's main excuse is that it
does not have enough traction
power - i.e. locomotives. This supposedly
made it impossible to
run a regular service on the Cuamba-Lichinga
line. So there was
one train to Lichinga in June, one in August, and
one in October.
Mungwambe said that four more locomotives arrived in
Nacala
in September, which should make it possible to ensure that
there
is at least one train a month to Lichinga.
Due to the poor
state of the roads, the easiest, and
certainly the cheapest, way of
supplying Lichinga has always been
by rail. The poor state of the
branch line, however, means that
the journey is extremely
slow.
Mungwambe insisted that there must be at least one train
to
Lichinga in November and one in December, to guarantee that
the
city receives supplies for the festive season.
The Minister
stressed that the government is not satisfied
with SDCN's performance,
and is assessing how the consortium is
implementing the clauses of its
lease contract. The government
now wants SDCN to produce a plan and a
timetable for implementing
it.
The government can take some comfort
from the central rail
system, leased to the Indian consortium Rites and
Ircon
International. Here work, notably on rebuilding the Sena
railway
from the port of Beira to the Moatize coal mines in
Tete
province is advancing according to plan.
Furthermore, the
problem of the silting up of the entrance
channel to Beira port seems on
the way to a definitive solution.
Mungwambe said that emergency
dredging of the channel will be
complete by early 2006, and that a
further two dredging vessels
are being acquired.
(AIM)
pf/
(586)
111105E
INVESTMENT
SOUGHT "FOR ALL PARTS OF THE COUNTRY"
Maputo, 2 Nov (AIM) - In the first
six months of 2005, the
Mozambican government approved 64 investment
projects, 49 of them
involving direct foreign investment, Planning and
Development
Minister Aiuba Cuereneia told the country's parliament,
the
Assembly of the Republic, on
Wednesday.
The
proposed projects would involve total investment of
about 166 million
US dollars, and would create around 5,000
new
jobs.
Cuereneia
was replying to questions from deputies of the
former rebel movement
Renamo who claimed that foreign investment is
concentrated
in industry and in the south of the country.
The
minister stressed that the government wants to attract
investment,
foreign and domestic, to all sectors of the economy
and all parts of
the country.
He pointed to plans to set up a "Special Economic Zone"
in
the northern port of Nacala, to the mining of heavy
mineral sands
in the coastal district of Moma, to the plans to revive
the port
of Quelimane, to tourism ventures in Cabo Delgado, Niassa
and
Nampula, to fisheries projects - particularly fish farming -
in
Sofala, Zambezia and Cabo Delgado, and to irrigation
and
agricultural projects in the Zambezi valley. All of these
investment projects
are in the centre and north of the country.
The government, he added,
was also committed to attracting
investment by improving the country's
transport, communications
and electricity infrastructures. He
specifically mentioned the
rebuilding of the Sena railway from
Beira to
Moatize in the
western
province of Tete.
It is this railway that
will make viable the huge
investments planned by the Brazilian
Companhia Vale do Rio Doce
(CVRD) in the Moatize coal basin.
Renamo
also claimed there was "little complementarity"
between mega-projects
and "the national economy" (as if the mega-
projects were not part of
the economy).
Cuereneia disputed this, pointing out that some 200
other
Mozambican companies are now supplying goods and services
to
mega-projects such as the MOZAL aluminium smelter on
the
outskirts of Maputo.
Nor was it correct to imagine
that mega-projects only
benefitted the area where they are located.
Cuereneia argued that
the benefits, in terms of the Gross Domestic
Product, from MOZAL,
or from the SASOL gas treatment plant in Inhambane
province, or
from the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi, "go to the entire
country".
Renamo
also attacked the tax exemptions enjoyed by
investors, claiming that
they damaged the balance of payments,
and contradicted the government's
stated fiscal policy.
Cuereneia retorted that the opposite was true -
by
encouraging investment, and the import substitution
that
investment often produced, the tax incentives had a
positive
impact on the balance of payments.
Nor was it true, as the
Renamo written question suggested,
that the incentives were only
available for foreign investment -
they applied to all approved
investments, whether the capital
involved was national or foreign, and
they covered all sectors of
the economy except wholesale and retail
trade in urban areas.
The government had revised the table of tax
exemptions in
2002, and "in due time" it could be revised again. "But
we can't
do this frequently", said Cuereneia, "otherwise we will give
the
investors an image of instability".
(AIM)
pf/
(520)
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