SA truckers’ strike underscores benefit of Swazi Rail

MBABANE – Among the consequences of SA’s great truckers’ strike of 2012 was an awareness by the average Swazi of the benefit of the country’s rail system. In September rail consciousness was raised when Harry Nxumalo, chairman of the Swaziland Fuel Retailers’ Association, drew attention to rail after Galp, unable to truck in petrol from SA, shuttered some stations. Nxumalo reassured a nervous public that the country’s petrol tanks would never fully run dry as long as fuel was coming into the country by rail. “We can bring petrol to Matsapha (the central industrial site where the fuel companies maintain their storage facilities) on the rail lines from South Africa,” he told FTW. This was the first time that the public realised that the country’s 300 km of rail line, which was never designed for passenger traffic, was useful to them in their daily lives and was not just a “donkey to move iron ore and coal,” as Ndwandwe put it. When completed within five years, the 174 km Lothair, SA to Sidvokodvo, will facilitate a greater variety of goods moving east from Gauteng. Swaziland Railway moves about four million tonnes of material annually. 75% of freight moves right through the country as transit traffic, usually en route from Mpumalanga to Durban or Maputo. With the Lothair line operative, the percentage of transit traffic is likely to rise. “Swaziland’s industries and agriculture will remain consistent customers. Most of the new business will come from transit traffic from South Africa,” Stephensen Ngubane, acting chairman of Swaziland Railway, told FTW. Transit traffic constitutes such a large measure of Swaziland Railway’s business and operations that the country’s rail system is termed a “bridge railway”. Ndwandwe predicts that with increased transit traffic from the Lothair line, 90% or more of Swaziland Railway’s business will be transit traffic. However, the line will also offer faster rail transport for consumer goods and other products of daily use which originate in Gauteng. This will allow the system to again make the rail system seem less an abstraction and more of a pleasing relevancy to Swazis. CAPTION Stephenson Ngubane ... ‘New business will come from transit traffic from South Africa.’