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Mozambique: New Buses 'Will Solve Maputo Transport Problem'
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
20 March 2008
Posted to the web 20 March 2008
Maputo
With the arrival of 100 new buses by the end of the year, the passenger transport crisis in Maputo and the neighbouring city of Matola will be "completely solved", according to Boaventura Lipanga, spokesperson for the publicly-owned bus company TPM.
Interviewed in Thursday's issue of the daily newsheet "Mediafax", Lipanga declared that the new Volkswagen buses are no longer just a project, but a reality, since "the first 20 are already being assembled in South Africa and will shortly be in Maputo".
This is a dramatic increase in the TPM fleet, since currently the company has no more than 40 buses operational at any one time, which is nowhere near sufficient to cover the transport needs of Maputo and Matola.
Clearly the increased fleet of public buses poses a threat to the very survival of many of the overcrowded and unroadworthy minibuses that supply so much of the capital's passenger transport. Lipanga boasted that many of these private minibuses (known colloquially as "chapas") will be forced out of business.
Previously TPM's Achilles heel has been its inability to maintain its buses. Would things be any different this time ? Lipanga replied that the government and TPM are working to ensure that the South African supplier will guarantee spare parts for the buses.
He recognised that the problem with the last consignment of imported buses was that there were not enough spare parts. 17 Yutong buses were imported from China. The supplier was the company Tecnica Industrial, which is part of the Portuguese group Joao Ferrerira dos Santos.
Tecnica Industrial was supposed to guarantee spare parts, but failed to do so. So TPM itself had to acquire the parts from China. Currently only eight of the Chinese buses are operational. But even when they arrived, TPM discovered that most of them had mechanical defects, leading the company to believe it had been swindled by Tecnica Industrial
Lipanga complained that TPM had been excluded from past negotiations over acquiring buses. "Had we participated, we would probably avoid situations of buses only lasting for a year when, under normal conditions, they should last for at least five years".
The spokesmen for the private operators are not at all pleased with the threat of competition from TPM. Rogerio Manuel, chairperson of the Federation of Road Transport Associations (FEMATRO), claimed the new buses would not solve transport problems and declared "it's just more money that the state is throwing away".
"The public sector will go nowhere without the private sector", he claimed, before suggesting that TPM should be privately managed.
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Yet the private chapa owners, far from being models of good management, are unable even to claim the fuel subsidy that the government has offered to compensate for the fare increase that was cancelled in February. According to "Mediafax", of the over 3,600 chapas in Maputo and Matola only 200 have so far received the subsidy for February, even though payment began on 3 March.
The problem is that, in order to claim the subsidy the chapa owners must show they have paid their taxes for 2007. The poor take-up so far is a clear indication that the majority of these transporters have been evading their taxes.
Pf/ (541)
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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