The Road Fund’s Chairman, Ângelo Macuácua, recently revealed that the institution observed during the current year a deficit of capital to finance emergency works for the past rainy season (2021/2022).
According to Macuácua, the total needs pointed to eight billion meticais, but the Road Fund was only able to mobilise 457.4 million meticais, which represents a 93% deficit.
“In 2022, eight billion meticais were needed to deal with the damage that was caused by the rainy season. That amount was to put the road sector in place, to maintain the country’s roads. However, with the amount mobilized, we could not even maintain one kilometre of roads. Therefore, the situation is very worrying,” said the leader.
For this rainy season, the source said that it is expected that these may affect around 2,500 kilometres of roads across the country, and 14 bridges may also be affected, among other damage to the road network. The estimated cost to deal with these expected damages is three thousand million meticais.
In order to revert the scenario of high funding deficits, Ângelo Macuácua explained that it is necessary to create a fund dedicated to emergency works, through the support of development partners to the State Budget (OE), as well as the use of emergency funds available in several funding windows.
In addition, the Road Fund’s Chairman added that it was necessary to train the sector’s technical staff in the preparation of projects attractive to the various sources of funding, in a proactive way.
