Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
26 October 2009
Maputo — The conclusion of the rebuilding of the Sena railway line, which runs from the port of Beira to the Moatize coal basin in the western Mozambican province of Tete, has been delayed until January 2010, according to a report in the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique".
After a series of postponements it was confidently stated earlier this year that the line would be finished by November. Now that date too cannot be met, and according to Candido Jone, the Executive Director of the Sena Line Reconstruction Brigade. the latest delay is due to a shortage of concrete sleepers.
Jone blamed the contractor, the Indian Rites and Ircon consortium, for failing to plan the stocks of sleepers. He said the contractor has formally been warned of the possibility that penalty clauses in the contract will be invoked.
"We've sent two letters to the contractor warning him of this", said Jone, "since the deadline for concluding the work has been extended several times".
Reconstruction has now reached kilometre 492, between Cateme and Kambulatsisi, which is in Moatize district. There is just another 54 kilometres to go to reach Moatize town. But the pace of rebuilding, thanks to the shortage of sleepers, has fallen from 1,800 metres to just 400 metres a day, making it quite impossible to finish the line this year.
But the news from the Sena line is not all bad. Jone announced that the reconstruction to date allows the resumption of passenger services from Beira to Mutarara district on the north bank of the Zambezi.
This is the second train service to be reintroduced - the first was from Beira to the sugar town of Marromeu on a separate branch of the Sena line. That service resumed in November 2008. It was over quarter of a century since any trains at all had moved along the Marromeu line.
The Sena Line was comprehensively sabotaged by the apartheid backed Renamo rebels in the early 1980s, during the war of destabilisation. So severe was the damage that the line could not be rehabilitated - instead it has been completely rebuilt.
The main cargo that will use the Sena line is coal from the new mines that are being opened in Moatize by the Brazilian mining giant Vale, and the Australian company Riversdale. But since within a decade coal exports are expected to reach at least 20 million tonnes a year, the Sena Line cannot meet with the full demand.
Other options are being investigated, include shipping the coal on barges down the Zambezi, and building a new rail link across Malawi, connecting with Mozambique's northern rail system, and the deep water port of Nacala.
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