Throwing the Tanzania-Zambia Railway a Lifeline

By an IPS Correspondent Reprint | | Print |

The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line has about 900,000 passengers who use the railway annually. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 11 2013 (IPS) - Some say it’s the journey, not the destination that matters. Hop aboard the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line at Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port and begin the 1,860-kilometre journey to Kapiri Mposhi, a small town in Zambia’s Central Province, and you may find yourself pondering this adage.

For a large number of passengers using what is known as the “Freedom” or “Great Uhuru Railway”, it is about getting from point A to point B safely. The railway line is a necessity today, given that some roads in southeastern Tanzania are poor, impassable or nonexistent. “Try and travel on those buses … You’ll pray you arrive,” Lawrence Pangani, a pension scheme manager who is listening to music on his portable stereo, tells IPS.

Pangani, along with a number of Zambian and Congolese businessmen, are travelling in TAZARA’s first class cabin as the train crosses the Rift Valley. He is making his way from Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, where he was working, to his home in Kabwe, which lies west of Zambia’s capital Lusaka.

The railway was built in the 1970s with an interest-free loan of about 412 million dollars from China. At the time, it was the largest single foreign-aid project undertaken by the Asian country. TAZARA was handed over to Tanzania and Zambia in 1976.

It became a significant alternative transport system for Zambia, a copper-rich but landlocked southern African state which, at the time, was sanctioned by still-colonised neighbouring regimes for supporting the liberation struggle of many of those countries.

But in recent times TAZARA has veered off track. Just over five years ago the railway was said to be “on the brink of collapse” after accumulating debts of up to 45 million dollars.

In 2011 China, described by TAZARA spokesman Conrad Simuchile as the railway’s “surrogate mother”, signed a protocol with the Zambian and Tanzanian governments, writing off roughly 50 percent of their debts. Simuchile tells IPS that most of the support for TAZARA, in the form of equipment and expertise, has come from China. He stresses that there are no conditions attached to the assistance.

But even with this help, the railway is still struggling. In September it was reported that revenue had averaged 1.53 million dollars per month against an estimated average expenditure of over 2.5 million dollars. A two-week strike, which began in August over the unpaid wages of 1,067 workers, cost TAZARA 1.4 million dollars and inconvenienced 46,000 passengers.

The company desperately needs recapitalisation, says Simuchile. “We are doing so badly right now. But this is not a write-off. This company, TAZARA, is not a perpetual loss-making company [as some places have dismissed it],”  he says from his office at the railway’s Dar es Salaam headquarters.

“All we need is just maybe three or four major customers and this company will break even, make a profit. And we have clients knocking on our doors everyday. They want us to move their cargo.” He says government ministers have recently given the company leeway to look for smart partnerships with the private sector without necessarily affecting the shareholding structure. Simuchile is optimistic the line will be extended to Lusaka in the next two years.

“It’s very convenient for our customers but [we are not just transporting] minerals – copper, cobalt, manganese. We are also moving a lot of imports from Asia, from all over the world. They come in through Dar es Salaam and they go on to Malawi, Congo, Zambia, and the Great Lakes countries of Burundi and Rwanda.”