The poor state of repair of national roads 1 and 6 in Mozambique, along the Inchope-Caia and Beira-Inchope sections, respectively, is leading some transport companies to transfer their cargo from the port of Beira to the port of Durban, in South Africa, according to Mozambican daily newspaper Notícias.

The newspaper also said that the provincial government had said it was making efforts to minimise the problem by carrying out emergency repairs whilst it doesn’t have funding to completely refurbish the roads.

The Associations of Carriers said recently that its associates were happy to pay for tolls as long as those sections of road allowed trucks to travel along them without breaking down, as happens at the moment due to the poor state of the road surface.

Work to improve the Beira –Inchope road, over a distance of 135 kilometres, is delayed and a source from the National Roads Administration (ANE) said that the government has been putting pressure on MCA Moçambique, the Mozambican subsidiary of Portuguese company MCA, to speed up the work and establish new deadlines for conclusion of the work.

The contract for the work was signed on 28 November, 2011 and work is scheduled to take 12 months.

The slow rate of work means that the daily circulation of around 3,000 vehicles to and from Mozambique’s landlocked neighbours, such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is affected, and the same is the case with traffic between Inchope and Caia, a section along which potholes are also being repaired. (macauhub)