Great Lakes regional govts must come together

Listening attentively to the carefully chosen words by Minister for Finance and Planning Dr Phillip Mpango in Dodoma when winding up debate on the nation’s development framework, it came out quite clear that the project to have the railway uplifted to the international standard gauge is impossible to be implemented by Tanzania alone as it is very costly.
Dr Mpango laid bare facts that for the project to be economically viable governments in the Great Lakes region must also support it, in the sense that the railway’s branches to DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi must also be constructed to the same standard.
In other words, the governments of Burundi, DRC and Rwanda must raise funds to construct the branches running into their territories.
The minister, in his remarks, did not want to commit his government when implementation of the project, which is expected to cost over Sh15 trillion, would kick off, sending a signal that the dream was highly unlikely to come true.
Though Dr Mpango’s openness is highly appreciated and valued Tanzania, as a nation, needs to go back to the drawing board to find out how it could finance the project due to the simple reason that the government has been losing trillions of shillings to finance construction or rehabilitation of trunk roads to the land-locked countries.
On Friday, it was reported that TRL last year failed to accomplish its plan to transport 3million tonnes of cargo, only to find itself transporting a mere 300,000 tonnes.
According to reports from TRL workers, imported substandard wagons, coupled with a lack of a standard gauge railway, hindered them from reaching the set target, causing an enormous loss to the firm when it sorely needed the income. Although the amount of loss was not divulged it must have been billions of shillings.
Today, hindreds of tonnes of cargo to the land-locked countries are being transported by trucks. This is indeed bad!
We understand that construction of the central railway line to standard gauge may be too costly for Tanzania on its own, but with proper planning its construction could be achieved. Waiting first for other governments in Dr Congo, Rwanda and Burundi to raise funds to construct their branches may cause the whole project to reach a dead end.