CHISHALA MUSONDA, Ndola
THE Zambian and Malawian governments have shown interest to revive transportation of petroleum products using Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (Tazara) line.
Malawi transports freight using Tazara from Dar-es-Salaam to Mbeya where they have a government-owned inland container depot and storage tanks for fuels. From Mbeya, the cargo is moved by road into Malawi.
Company deputy managing director Betram Kiswaga said Tazara has improved its operations and increased cargo transportation in volume.
This follows renewed confidence shown from its customer base following improvement in Tazara’s operations which confirms that it has now attained some levels of stability.
Briefing the media recently, Dr Kiswaga said the authority has received positive response from key customers who have increased their monthly volumes of cargo transportation.
“We have received renewed commitment and are expecting huge volumes of freight from customers that had lost confidence in Tazara including the Zambian and Malawian governments that will be resuming transportation of petroleum products using Tazara line,” he said.
Tazara is determined to continue building on its achievements to raise its operation performance even higher even though it faces challenges.
“The authority faces challenges, but we take these challenges as an inspiration and a motivation to every employee to work even harder to survive and turn around this great facility,” Dr Kiswaga said.
In November, Tazara received 10 diesel-electric locomotives and 18 coaches and Dr Kiswaga said this will help improve operations for the company.
The equipment was bought through the 15th Protocol of Economic and Technical Cooperation, a tri-lateral loan agreement signed by the governments of China, Tanzania and Zambia on March 26, 2012 in Lusaka.
Dr Kiswaga also said the firm is expected to haul 150, 000 tonnes in freight before the close of the 2015-16 financial year this June, and improve further in the coming years because the market is able to offer more.
“For a railway that was built with the capacity to transport five million tonnes in a year, even a break-even point of 600,000 tonnes per year would not be good enough because the market is able to offer a lot more freight for the railway if only we could improve our service delivery to satisfy the demand of our customers,” Dr Kiswaga said.
Dr Kiswaga said the authority’s problem had never been the market as was evidenced by the handling capacity at the Dar-es-Salaam port whose throughput had been growing over the years from 12 million tonnes in 2012 to 14 million tonnes last year.
Throughput is expected to increase to 18 million tonnes in 2018.
Source: Daily Mail

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