By ANDREW PHIRI –

THE Southern African Railways Association (SARA) has called for urgent measures to resuscitate the performance of the railway sector in the region.
SARA acting executive director Victor Kaluila said performance of the railway sector has drastically reduced over the years and requires urgent steps to get it back on track to steer economic development in the region.
Mr Kaluila said the market share of rail transport in Southern Africa had dropped from about 80 per cent in the 1970s to as low as 12 per cent currently.
Mr Kaluila said this during a regional stakeholders’ meeting in Livingstone yesterday attended by officials from Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and Botswana.
He attributed the loss of business in the railway sector to poor state of the railway network, old wagons and delays at border points during clearing of cargo.
The meeting will look at a report which was drafted after SARA conducted a survey with various stakeholders and passengers to determine the root cause of the problem and how best the issue can be addressed through an action plan.
“After realising that there has been a drastic decrease in market share of rail transport in the region, we conducted a survey with stakeholders and passengers and in this meeting, we are going to try and come up with an implementation action plan on the recommendations that were made to see how we can get back our market share,” Mr Kaluila said.
Zambia Railways Limited (ZRL) acting chief executive officer Chris Musonda said Zambia has so far properly utilised the US$120 million Eurobond which was injected into the company by Government.
Mr Musonda said 70 per cent of the funds were used for track rehabilitation which is still ongoing, while the rest of the funds had been channelled towards the purchase of new wagons.
He said track rehabilitation is on-going, and once this is completed, it will help increase track speed as was already evidenced by the increased speed of 40 km/h and 50km/h for goods and passenger trains respectively on the already rehabilitated tracks.
He however, bemoaned levels of vandalism on the tracks and that this could only be redressed through intensive sensitisation against the vice.