3.8trn/- set aside for railway, road and port renovation

BY DAVID KISANGA

26th August 2013

At least 3.8trn/- has been set aside to help renovate railways, roads and the ports authority in an effort to improve the nation’s ability to handle transit goods from domestic producers as well as across the country’s borders.

Currently, the central corridor handles only one million tonnes of transit goods annually. “We must increase capacity to handle goods along the central corridor to at least 5 million tonnes annually by 2015…” said Ashraf Khan.

The leader of ‘Big Results Now’ (Transport Lab) from the Ministry of Transport made the announcement during the inauguration of the Ministerial Delivery Unit.

He noted that to achieve the goal will depend heavily on the capacity and speed to handle goods at Dar Port, improved efficiency in road and railway networks and enhanced efficiency in transportation of the goods.

“Dar es Salaam Port managed to capture 14 percent of import and export of its neighbouring countries in 2012. This was after the port increased its throughput from 7.4 in 2007 to 12.1 million tonnes in 2012,” Khan said. 
At the same time, the country experienced high domestic growth (7 percent per annum between 2005 and 2010) and now expects a growth of 8 percent annually.
“This will in a way result in increased demand for domestic transport by 16 percent by 2020,” he explained.

However, the port remains as the major setback and source of poor performance. At the moment 67 percent of time is wasted in waiting time/holding time, cargo discharge, documentation and payments.

“It takes nine days for one to complete cargo clearance at the port which increases costs of doing business because of time delays,” Khan noted.

He stressed that it is only possible to improve operational processes of the Dar es Salaam port if the bottlenecks are eliminated and cargo dwell time is reduced from nine to four days.

According to Khan, the port should enhance operational efficiency, maximise spatial efficiency, strengthen institutional administration, upgrade ports on different lakes and undertake infrastructure modernisation.

On the other hand, the bad conditions of the railway infrastructure have contributed to the decline in number of tonnage transport by train.

This has contributed to inefficiency of the port since even if goods were cleared on time, they could not be transported in large quantities due to the poor infrastructure.

Citing an example of the Central Railway Line which had the capacity of transporting at least 1.5 million tonnes in 2002, he said this dropped to merely 0.2 million tonnes in 2011.

The railways, according Khan, only transport 200,000 tonnes of goods per year instead of 3 million tones.

Next are the roads along the Central Corridor which have also contributed to heavy congestion.

Khan noted that this is because of the numerous weigh bridges and police checks along the roads whose efficiency is too low delaying the check process.
He said 30 percent of time is wasted on barriers and other related road activities when transporting cargos.

“Reducing 17 non-tariff barriers to only three, will significantly reduce the travel time,” he suggested.

Khan pointed out that the average time taken on all weighbridges is 480 minutes (8 hours) per truck travelling from Dar es Salaam to anyone end–border post.
Advised is the introduction of weigh-in motion systems which will allow better flow of traffic and reduce 91 percent of travel time.

“…there are plans to introduce motion system weighbridges that take only 45 minutes…” Khan revealed but conceded that they will not be in place before 2015.
The meeting was attended by 47 members and 27 agencies in the country.
 

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN