Maputo — The Mozambican government and the African Development Bank signed a loan agreement in Maputo on Friday to finance three projects in water supply, sanitation and roads.

20 million dollars will go towards emergency rehabilitation of the Massingir dam on the Elephants river in the southern province of Gaza. The dam suffered a rupture in one of its floodgates on 22 May, causing localized flooding.

A discharge pipe at the bottom of the dam, which was over 30 years old, had burst. A subsequent report found that two consultancy companies, the French firm Coyne et Bellier, and BKS Consulting Engineers of South Africa, hired to prepare the earlier rehabilitation of the dam, between 2003 and 2006, had not done their job properly.

Despite the fact that their contracts obliged them to consider the bottom outlet structures, the report found that neither firm had inspected those structures. It was on the basis of the recommendations of BKS and Coyne et Bellier that the actual work on repairing the dam was done.

Despite this damning report, no legal action was taken against BKS or Coyne et Bellier. Instead, the ADB, which financed the 2003-06 rehabilitation, is now lending the government more money to pay to repair the damage.

The government is paying a further 13 million dollars for the emergency repairs, bringing the total bill to 33 million dollars.

The ADB is also providing credit of 27 million dollars to improve water supply and sanitation in Lichinga and Cuamba, the two major cities in the northern province of Niassa. This will rehabilitate and expand the entire water extraction, treatment, storage and distribution system, with the result that a further 160,000 households will benefit from supplies of clean water.

This will raise the clean water coverage rate for Lichinga and Cuamba from nine per cent of the population to 70 per cent by 2015.

The third loan is for 160 million dollars to tar the road between Cuamba and the city of Nampula, which will facilitate access from landlocked Niassa to the port of Nacala.

The total cost of the road is 280 million dollars, with the rest of the money coming from Japan, South Korea and the Mozambican government itself.

Speaking at the ceremony, the Minister of Planning and Development, Aiuba Cuereneia said that the ADB funding for the Massingir dam would make it possible "to start immediately on far reaching interventions to rehabilitate and strengthen this infrastructure, which is vital for the development of agriculture in Gaza province".

When working properly, the dam would play "a fundamental role in increasing agricultural production and productivity", in line with the government's Green Revolution strategy aimed at guaranteeing self-sufficiency in food production.

The project, Cuereneia added, would benefit over 16,000 peasant farmers in the Limpopo Valley districts of Chokwe and Xai-Xai, and would guarantee the water supply for Massingir town.