eBusiness Weekly
Tapiwanashe W Mangwiro
Today more than four billion people live in urban areas globally, in Harare alone over 2 million people call it home and the figures are projected to grow to over 3 million in the next census. The growth of Harare is here to stay, and as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the travel of millions of people to and from work every day is a reality of the modern world.
The dwelling structures of Harare were designed in such a way that our people commute for hours on end, travelling kilometres to the hub of opportunity. This results in between one and two hours stolen daily from their lives, leaving citizens depleted of energy and unable to perform at their best.
As if this is not enough, the authorities banned private commuter omnibuses in favour of the ZUPCO franchise, which has left citizens in even worse situation on transport issues as they now spend over two hours in bus queues at the termini. This has resulted in the country this week reintroducing the mobile intracity trains.
It surely is a noble idea, with the system being used world over to cause de-congestion of the city, which is another problem in itself in the city.
Several countries on the African continent have adopted this as a method to improve mobility into the city, looking to first world countries for tried and tested systems to implement.
The reintroduction of the ‘Freedom Train’ is not new in Zimbabwe, and it usually comes during a time of transport woes when it comes to clean the surface for a few months and disappears. In February 2019, the train was brought back but did not last as it was abandoned silently a few months later.
Commuter trains were then brought back again in October 2020 but were abandoned in December the same year as they were said to be operating at a daily loss of ZWL$7,600 at the time.
So, one will ask again if the plan is sustainable in the current state, or it is another colour of lipstick on the same pig.
This is not a transport plan for the future as it fails to take into account technological changes in transport modes.
It’s fixated with a government bias, it’s like putting a Boeing 777 jet on a regional route and a turbo-prop on a main city route. It doesn’t make commercial sense and misses a golden opportunity to invest in our productive sectors.
No doubt that railways make sense for longer journeys, as is often discovered by many countries when they re-do or re-plan the transport system within a given city such as Harare.
It is important that at last someone saw the need for buses to ferry people from the railway stop to the inner suburbs in order to reduce walking distance and create interest in the train service.
However, it is not that the Zupco franchise was not good, it was crippled by lack of adequate buses.
With the look of things, buses will definitely queue at the train stops, but they still will be few and people will have to walk long distances from the station to their destination. The solutions to the problem they want to solve with the ‘Freedom train’ are either to acquire more buses or to let private platers fill the gap left by the parastatal.
On investment $10 million would be needed to get the country’s other four commuter rail lines back on track.
Today, NRZs have fewer than 100 locomotives and a few hundred wagons, providing erratic links between the country’s main cities and a very limited freight service to transport sugar, chromium or cut stones.
From the time of its splendour – from the colonial period to the 1990s – the railway network proudly displayed 600 locomotives and 3,000 passenger wagons linking neighbouring countries. It was the heart of the rail network in southern Africa.
Some locomotives of the “freedom train” still bear the initials RR of Rhodesian Railways, named after Zimbabwe before its independence.
In all fairness, this is a development that should have been made years back, but it is the implementation, efficiency and sustainability that will be key in such noble developments. We hope the team under local governance.
e will be up to the tsk to design a framework that encompasses even those in Mazowe, Marondera, Chitungwiza and Nyabira as they all do work in and around the City of Harare.
