TAZARA Looking for USD1.2b Private Investment to Increase Freight Volume

The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) needs about USD250m of investments in the short term and about USD1.2b in the long term.

For this, Bruno Ching’andu, Managing Director at the Authority, called on private investors to partner with TAZARA and achieve the desired investments.

The announcement was made at the 7^th East and Central Africa Roads and Rail Summit 2016 in Dar es Salaam on September 27^th 2016.

Ching’andu explained that the Tanzanian and Zambian governments are currently revising the TAZARA Act in order to make the company more commercially viable and attractive to private players.

He added: “The private sector can take advantage of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models to partner with us in the running of the Dar es Salaam Commuter Train, whose demand is massive and cannot be satisfied at the moment.”

With the desired investments, TAZARA plans to achieve a breakeven freight volume of 600,000 tons per annum in the short-run and 2m tons in the next 5 years.

TAZARA already increased its annual freight traffic to 130,000t in 2015–2016, from 87,000t in 2014–2015, representing an increase of 49%.

In July 2016, TAZARA signed an agreement with African Fossils Limited of Tanzania to transport 18m liters (18,000t) of petroleum products to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the next year.

The fuel order is the second import consignment to be secured within a month, following the transportation order for 48m liters (48,000t) of petroleum for Malawi, secured in the end of June 2016.