by Munetsi Madakufamba
As each month passes, southern Africa makes more and more in-roads to becoming a bustling and self-sustaining regional economic network.
This was said by Thomas Nevin in the African Business, a monthly magazine published in London, after the launch of the multi-billion dollar Maputo Development Corridor by the governments of Mozambique and South Africa in May this year.
But little did he know another regional project was soon to come — the proposed Beira Development Corridor — drawn along the same lines as the Maputo Corridor.
At the beginning of December, a conference was organised in Harare by the Beira Corridor Group to hammer out the “Beira Corridor concept”. The conference, described by participants as a preparatory meeting, drew together government officials and captains of industry and commerce mainly from countries falling within the geographic catchment area of the Mozambican port of Beira.
The main objective was to identify potential investment opportunities and drum-up private sector support in the rehabilitation and construction of infrastructure within the expanse of the corridor whose port, rail, road and pipeline are renowned for having provided a lifeline to many landlocked states during the turbulent political history of the region.
There was a general consensus among the participants on the need to include other countries in the Joint Technical Unit, which is currently dominated by Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The group was set up to study and refine the corridor concept and advise their respective governments on the way forward.
Marking the official opening of the conference, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe noted that the “concept of development corridors is based on the realisation that many projects, which may not seem individually viable, can become a collective viability if they are planned together, as groups of complementary projects in specific areas making up a development corridor.”
He added that since the Beira Development Corridor spanned several countries, it was one practical step of facilitating market integration in the Southern African Development Community (SAD C) region.
Perhaps one of the most encouraging achievements was that all the governments represented a conference agreed, at least in principle, to sign a legal protocol, as early as February next year, in 0 to formalise the development corridor.
Once concluded, the project is set to benefit Mozambique’s central provinces of Sofala, Manica. Zambezia and Tete as well as Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and even Zaire.
At present, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe are connected to the port of Beira by both rail and road links while Malawi’s rail route to the port has been defunct for more than a decade and now requires massive rehabilitation.
Although the Beira Corridor Authority wound up its operations in June this year after 10 years of largely successful re-development of the corridor, experts say existing road and railway networks need to be upgraded in order to cope with the expected traffic surge from the proposed projects within the hinterland.
One such project that is likely to strain existing capacity of the corridor is the US$600 million Beira Iron Project, a joint venture involving Mozambican, South African and Zimbabwean companies, located along Zimbabwe’s mineral rich Great Dyke.
At the conference, the private sector also expressed their concern over what they said were unnecessarily expensive bureaucratic delays especially in processing documents at customs offices.
The Federation of Customs and Forwarding Agents of Southern Africa chairman, Mike Colinise, pointed out that the region is losing more than US$60 million annually due to delays at the various border posts in the SADC region, particularly those on the Zimbabwean border through which most of the transit traffic passed.
Alvord Mabena, general manager of the National Railways of Zimbabwe also said that while new roads were being built every day, regional rail highways were last laid about 100 years ago. “Obviously we now need to urgently balance up the transport playing field,” he added, in apparent reference to the below capacity utilisation of the Harare-Mutare line which currently uses only 37.3 percent of the corridor’s existing capacity.
However, chairman of the Federation of Regional Road Freight Associations, Shadreck Matsimbe, argued that traders shun the Beira Port because of delays in ferrying cargo along the corridor. He said for example while it cost more to send cargo to South African ports than to Beira, the faster shipping services at the former more than compensated for the increased costs.
But as the Beira Development Corridor begins to unfold, the positive benefits to the SADC region, and Mozambique’s northern provinces in particular, become more obvious. For long, economic activity in Mozambique has been concentrated in the southern province of Maputo. The focus could now be moving north as the ribbon of opportunities continues to unroll across the whole country.
The closing session generated all the hope and enthusiasm among the participants with the private sector affirming its willingness to venture into this ambitious project, while governments playa facilitating role.
Indeed, the envisaged Beira Development Corridor is a project that will transform not only transport and communication networks, but one that can propel already emerging SADC economies forward and create the much needed jobs for the millions of people throughout the expanse of the corridor.(SARDC)
