eBusiness Weekly
Business Writer
THE financially hamstrung National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) has been marred by operational inefficiencies rendering the entity uncompetitive with the parastatal taking an upward of 50 days to deliver cargo transported by rail.
NRZ board chairperson, Advocate Mike Madiro, said this in an interview this week saying, the parastatal’s immediate task was to ensure the rail operator becomes competitive.
He said due to NRZ’s inefficiencies, their customers across all economic sectors including manufacturing and mining, a majority of them were opting to use road network to move bulk goods.
NRZ is operating at suboptimal levels largely on the back of antiquated rail infrastructure and equipment.
“The immediate task is to ensure that rail is competitive. At the moment it’s not and this is because of the dilapidated state of our infrastructure in terms of our tracks.
“In that respect rail transport for freight should be defined by the turnaround time where customers must have their freight delivered on time, but NRZ is not able to do that because the infrastructure is inhibiting that efficiency.
“Where we contract with customers to deliver in 14 days sometimes we deliver upwards of 50 days, so you can imagine where raw materials are required for production in industry or mining, customers have got a three months waiting period.
“The underlying fact is we are not competitive where we become the transport of choice and customers end up going the much more expensive road alternative,” said Madiro.
Due to NRZ inefficiencies, concerns have been raised that the country’s road network has largely been damaged as some businesses have opted to use roads for bulk cargo.
At its peak in the 1990s the rail operator which has the capacity to move 18 million tonnes of freight annually, hauled 14 million tonnes.
Presently, due to the existing NRZ’s freight volume stands at under three million tonnes.
“So, the challenge in the immediate is that we need intervention strategies to make sure that in the short-term we ameliorate that limitation, but you realise that the infrastructure as l have said has got what we call cautions (equivalent of potholes in roads), which are a real challenge at the moment.
“We are looking at the necessary funds to make sure that we remove those cautions,” he said.
Zimbabwe’s rail network covers 2 760 kilometres and Madiro is on record highlighting that the rail network accounts for a total of 64 cautions extending a distance of more than 254km.
Consequently, cautions adversely impact on the movement of trains by causing delays or derailments.
“The next immediate task is to get rolling stock (locomotives, trains and wagons) to carry various goods and we don’t have that capacity.
“The amount of locomotives that we have it’s a drop in the ocean and if you look at it from the angle that it takes an average of 24 months to make an order to have locomotives manufactured and delivered.”
Towards the end of last year, NRZ announced that it was close to securing a US$115 million loan facility from the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) from which US$81 million would be used to procure rolling stock from RITES Limited of India.
It is hoped that the balance from that financial package would be used by the State-owned entity for rehabilitation and expansion of its infrastructure.
Under the RITES deal, NRZ is anticipated to receive nine locomotives and 315 wagons.
“We cannot wait until new locomotives are ordered and delivered when we are suffering this challenge, so we need short-term strategies to make sure that we ameliorate the current crisis. I am deliberately avoiding to give you specifics to say we are doing this and that because some of the strategies are still work in progress, so we don’t want to jeopardise those efforts,” he said.
NRZ has in the past engaged a number of its customers including mining houses in the country who have come on board to assist with funding for the refurbishment of wagons and locomotives while the rail operator offsets this with service provision to the concerned miners.
For example, through such Public-Private Partnerships, four locomotives,100 wagons, 100 tankers have been refurbished.
