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Livingstone Marufu Business Reporter
GOVERNMENT has made a commitment to assume $348 million National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) debt with a view of laying a strong foundation for the new investors to start on a new chapter.

The assumption of debts will free NRZ’s bal­ance sheet and enable the investors to concentrate on new projects which include the refurbishment of the current fleet and purchasing of new wagons.

Talks for possible debt takeover with the Of­fice of the Pres­i­dent and Cabi­net, the Min­istry of Fi­nance and Eco­nomic De­vel­op­ment, the Min­istry of Trans­port, the State En­ter­prises Re­struc­tur­ing Agency and the At­tor­ney-Gen­eral’s Of­fice are still underway.

NRZ public relations manager Nyasha Maravanyika told The Herald Business that though the Government is yet to finalise the debt assumption deal, stakeholders are buoyant that a debt free and capitalised NRZ will go a long way in reviving the parastatal.

“Government has made a commitment to take up the NRZ debt in a bid to make sure that new partners are off to a perfect new start with no debts. Negotiations are underway and going on well.

“We need the proposed $400 million for capitalisation purposes to go to new projects to steady our ship which hasn’t been stable for quite some time now,” said Mr Maravanyika.

Di­as­pora In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Group (DIDG/Transnet), which in­tends to roll out $400 million on ac­qui­si­tion of new lo­co­mo­tives and wag­ons, is expected to bring their proposals from mid-September going forward to gauge the viability of the deal.

The proposed deal was that $150 mil­lion will be spent in the first year to buy 24 main­line lo­co­mo­tives and 13 rail shunters or shunt­ing lo­co­mo­tives.

Twenty lo­co­mo­tives that are part of the cur­rent fleet will be re­fur­bished. Of the 160 lo­co­mo­tives the NRZ has, 60 are run­ning. Over­all, only 20 are re­li­able.

A $100 mil­lion chunk will be used to mod­ernise and re­fur­bish the cen­tralised train con­trol and sig­nalling sys­tem and $30 mil­lion will be de­ployed to equip­ping work­shops and re­vamp­ing the pro­cess­ing sys­tem through in­for­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies.

The remainder will be used for improving operational efficiencies as part of efforts to bring the parastatal back to its feet.

He said: “We are at a stage where we are critically looking into the proposals by the consortium where we want to get some specifics correct. We need the clarifications on some specific issues as they are stakeholders like Finance Ministry and other important stakeholders in Government.

“These proposals have to go through parliament questioning on specific issues and after this stage we will discuss contract issues and these process involves Deloitte and Touch whom were appointed our advisors in May last year.

“On September 13 we should be able to know terms and conditions of the deal in an efforts to check its viability. We expect that recapitalisation will be done by December this year.”