3 September 2008
Maputo — Mozambique's Deputy Minister of Public Works, Gabriel Mutisse, on Wednesday warned that the vertiginous rise in the costs of road rehabilitation and maintenance could endanger implementation of the country's ambitious road programme.
Speaking at the opening of a meeting between the government and those donors and funding agencies who support the road programme, Mutisse said the government and its partners needed to take joint measures to cope with this problem.
In the shot term, additional funds were required, he said, while in the medium term measures to consider included revised standards of road construction, research into the use of new materials and construction processes, and more rigorous cost planning.
Above all, stressed Mutisse, absolute priority should be given to the regular maintenance of roads, to prevent them from falling into such disrepair that much more expensive rehabilitation was required.
In some cases, road costs had more than doubled. Mutisse said the reasons for such sharp rises should be investigated. He suggested a specialist study on the matter to be supported by the donors.
Mutisse criticized the government's partners for not all supporting a common fund through which all external funds for the road sector would be channeled. With the involvement of the donors themselves, the concepts and format for such a common fund were drawn up in 2007. Despite this, some of the donors still prefer to put their money into individual projects rather than the common fund.
Some of the government's most significant partners (including the World Bank, the European Union and Italy) are now channeling their contributions to the Road Fund, but others (including the African Development Bank, the United States and Japan) are not.
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