eBusiness Weekly
Business Writer
Local industries are reportedly incurring huge transport costs for bulky raw materials due to the The National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ)’s crippled capacity that has hindered business growth.
Within the first six months of the year the railway firm moved only 45 percent of the 160 000 tonnes of chrome exports by Zimasco from Mutorashanga to Beira in Mozambique.
Zimasco chief executive officer John Musekiwa, expressed concern over the crippled NRZ capacity during a recent event held in Mutorashanga to handover two locomotives Zimasco hired from Sheltan Traxtion in South Africa to capacitate NRZ’s operations in moving the mining firm’s chrome destined for the export market.
The deal to hire the two locomotives from the South African company was sealed early this year after Zimasco realised the parastatal’s incapacity.
It is on account of such inefficiencies and incapacities that Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Joe Biggie Matiza has directed NRZ board to expedite the restructuring of the parastatal’s management and bring in “fresh blood” to allow the country’s strategic transporter to boost its operations from low hanging fruits such as business brought by mining firms to NRZ.
“Following the ramping up of our production in the first six months of this year, we have moved 160 000 tonnes from here (Mutorashanga) to port of Beira, and we are targeting to export at least 300 000 tonnes by year end.
“However, in the first six months of 2020, NRZ have only been able to move 71 000 tonnes (45 percent) of our cargo, with the balance of 89 000 tonnes 55 percent having moved via road trucks,” he said.
In 2019, Musekiwa said Zimasco exported 204 000 tonnes of chromite concentrates from Mutorashanga.
“Ideally all this cargo should have been moved to Beira via rail, but NRZ managed to move only 136 000 tonnes, two thirds of the total. The balance of the cargo was moved by road trucks,” he said.
NRZ public relations manager Nyasha Maravanyika, admitted their business has been experiencing capacity constraints for the past decade.
He said the railways firm was seeking a strategic partner to recapitalise operations after Government last year cancelled the US$400 million deal that NRZ and the Diaspora Infrastructural Development Group/Transnet consortium had entered into.
As part of the interim solution to NRZ challenges, the country’s railways operator in 2018 leased 13 locomotives and 200 wagons from Transnet, a rail utility of South Africa.
“Now again, we have also been having challenges with our locomotives because of issues to do with spares and during this period of Covid-19 pandemic, some of the locomotives that we had from Transnet were down and we had to wait for Transnet to bring in the spares.
“In this time of Covid-19, we are actually having challenges with our locomotives, ” he said.
“This is why NRZ has realised that our capacity is not at that level where we expect to best serve our customers well.”
To improve NRZ capacity, Maravanyika said they had also gone into a Public-Private Partnership with Zimasco where the chrome miner has offered to hire locomotives from SheltanTraxtion in South Africa.
“We have actually been progressive, coming up with a PPP with Zimasco and the supplier, and this has resulted in Zimasco receiving two locomotives, which are specifically dedicated for Zimasco.
“Now our duty will be to make sure that we increase the wagons and once we do that, we should be able to improve in terms of our capacity for Zimasco,” said Maravanyika
At its peak in the 1990s, the rail entity moved 14,4 million tonnes against an installed capacity of 18 million tonnes annually. Operational challenges facing NRZ have crippled viability of several downstream companies across the country.
