Mozambique: Road maintenance costs 800 million dollars a year – AIM report

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: Road maintenance costs 800 million dollars a year – AIM report

7:51 CAT | 22 May 2021

Photo: Ministério das Obras Públicas, Habitação e Recursos Hídricos-MOPHRH

Mozambique needs 800 million US dollars every year to guarantee maintenance and paving of the national road network, according to the Minister of Public works, Joao Machatine.

Speaking on Thursday, at the opening of the annual meeting of the Integrated Road Sector Programme (PRISE), he said that, to avoid resort to outside financing or to the state budget, the country has adopted the principle of “the user pays”, through the construction of toll gates.

Currently there are very few toll gates in Mozambique, due to resistance by the motoring lobby. There are still protests that vehicles must pay a toll to cross the suspension bridge over the Bay of Maputo – even though the tolls are cheaper than the fares that used to be charged by the ferries the bridge replaced.

Machatine, cited by the independent television station STV, insisted on the need for transparent management of the money collected at the toll gates in order to achieve the intended results.

“It is not enough just to collect the revenue”, he said. “It’s important that the Road Fund has management models that meet the expectations generated by this new approach”.

The money from the tolls musr be handled “in a careful rigorous and transparent manner”, he continued, and that was why he had appointed Angelo Macuacua as chairperson of the Road Fund. He described Macuacua as “a person of recognised competence for managing this institution, as a way of guaranteeing that the resources allocated, and the resources collected at the toll gates are used solely and exclusively for the maintenance of the roads”.

Machatine admitted it would take time before the money collected at the toll gates is sufficient to guarantee the maintenance, and so the Road Fund must find short and medium term solutions. The Minister said this would mean “finding ways to anticipate future revenue in order to respond to immediate needs”.

He added that the roads sector has not been able to comply with its maintenance and paving targets, because funds had to be diverted to repair roads and bridges damaged in natural disasters.

Source: AIM