The elected Municipal Assembly is expected to approve the fare rise at its next session, on Wednesday and Thursday.
According to the City Councillor for Transmort, Joao Matlombe, cited in the Sunday paper “Domingo”, the decision to raise fares came after consultation with local officials, such as neighbourhood secretaries and block chiefs.
Matlombe said the message was that there is no way to improve the transport situation in Maputo without putting the fares up. He claimed that the population accepted the need for a fare rise.
Much of the passenger transport in Maputo and the neighbouring city of Matola is provided by privately-owned minibuses (known colloquially as “chapas”), whose owners have long demanded a substantial rise in fares.
In return for the fare increase, the chapa owners and drivers are expected to end the practice of shortening their routes. Chapas are licensed to follow particular routes, but increasingly their owners have been cutting the routes in two, forcing the passengers to catch at least two buses.
Matlombe warned the chapa owners that only by scrupulously observing the routes would they be able to avoid a “negative reaction” from the public to a fare rise.
“Negative reaction” is a euphemism for rioting. The last time an attempt was made to hike the fares was in February 2008 – it resulted in severe rioting for a day on the streets of Maputo, and the sacking of the then Transport Minister Antonio Mungwambe.
The rioters attacked both chapas and publicly owned buses, and threw up barricades on many of Maputo’s main thoroughfares. The police were completely unprepared for the scale of the rioting. Within 24 hours the fare rise was withdrawn, replaced by a subsidy on the diesel that the chapas use.
The subsidy is still in force – whenever the price of diesel rises above 31 meticais a litre, the government is committed to paying licensed chapa owners the difference (those who are not licensed do not benefit from the scheme). The current price of diesel at the Maputo pumps is 36.81 meticais per litre.
The 2008 fare rise was 50 per cent, somewhat larger than the 40 per cent now proposed. This time, the Council is clearly hoping that the public will buy the promise that chapas will no longer shorten their routes. If the chapas do ply their whole routes, then passengers travelling long distances may actually find the fares a little cheaper – one fare of nine meticais rather than two of five.
The City Council is trying to rationalize the chapa system by confining the 15 seater mini-buses (which it had once tried to ban altogether) to the shorter, seven meticais routes, while only 25 seater buses will be allowed to take the longer nine meticais routes.
Matlombe said that the Council is working with Mozambican Federation of Road Transport to try to put order into the chapa routes.
Post published in: Africa News