Maputo, 10 May (AIM) – The Mozambican Transport Minister, Mateus Magala, has challenged the publicly owned Ports and Rail Company (CFM), to increase the volume of cargo using the railway system to 60 percent of the total mineral cargo handled at the Port of Maputo.
Magala, who was speaking on Thursday, in Maputo, on the sidelines of a Conference of the Maputo Port Development Company (MPDC), wants the company to reach the target within three year.
“One of the fundamental challenges we face is rail-port integration”, he said. “Improving the ratio between what goes on the road and what goes on the railway is our commitment. It’s about increasing the efficiency of the transport corridor, but it’s also about helping to reduce environmental impacts and increase the sustainability of our operations with greener logistics systems”.
The Minister also encouraged the main players in the activity to make continuous efforts to reverse the current scenario, whereby more cargo reaches the port by road than by rail.
“We have to reverse this scenario”, Magala said. “That’s why we’re challenging all those involved in the Maputo corridor logistics chain, and especially CFM and MPDC, to achieve this turnaround, this change that we want, over the next three years”.
CFM representative Aboobakar Mussá said “we are working hard and I believe the capacity is there. There are improvements in CFM’s efficiency, which supports the idea of developing and implementing first-class solutions to achieve the figures proposed by the Minister.”
For his part, the MPDC executive director, Osório Lucas, said that there are efforts to improve the rate of use of rail transport for handling minerals in the port, which has to be constantly modernized by buying locomotives or wagons for the activity.
“If we don’t have a customer-centred approach, we’re spending money and not investing. That’s why it’s important to ask why a single lorry arrives in Maputo and not a train”, he said.
(AIM)
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