Online Reporter
THE capsizing of the sole Lake Kariba ferry last month was not only a severe human tragedy with 97 people killed, but also a major disruption for the lakeshore communities along the lake which have relied on the ferry for passenger and goods traffic.
Soon after the tragedy, President Mnangagwa assured these communities that a replacement would be built and launched with interim essential if lower-grade services while this was being organised. Now the President has been making good on his promises.
During his recent working visit to the United Arab Emirates, a major trading partner for Zimbabwean exports, a top team of officials was assigned to investigate the proposed new ferries, considering the expertise for boat and ship building in Dubai.
In line with the standard Presidential maxim that when you replace you go a lot further and “build better” the discussions centred on improvements, including improvements in safety so we never have another ferry tragedy on the lake.
The importance of ordering more sophisticated ferries has been stressed.
Zimbabwe is pushing economic development and the push is very egalitarian, with no place and no person left behind. Obviously, among the places that cannot be left behind are these lakeshore communities that, like the rest of rural Zimbabwe, are moving out of poverty subsistence activities, in their case subsistence fishing.
So besides the updated requirements on safety, passenger capacity and cargo capacity, the team of officials wanted refrigeration so high-quality fresh fish could be moved to market and so earn significantly higher prices for the fishing communities and launch them on their path to accelerated standards of living and quality of life by adding value to their skills and local knowledge.
Dubai ferry and shipbuilders must have a great deal of experience in building suitable working craft with modern facilities which would include refrigeration and the rest of the facilities needed in a high value economy. Those luxury hotels, not to mention the sophisticated urban populations of UAE cities, obviously want a reasonable quantity of fresh fish and the obvious source is their own Gulf shore fishing.
The detailed investigation into the ferry disaster will have reported before the new ferries are built, so we can make sure that their safety recommendations on hardware are included, although much of the safety findings are likely to be operational procedures and directives as the ferry itself does not seem to have been the source of the disaster.
In any case, a ferry that could cope with sea conditions should automatically include all necessary safety hardware. While the Gulf does offer significant shelter, the extremes are more severe than a large inland lake.
The disaster did highlight, with the gross overcrowding on the ferry, that the demand for the service has grown significantly over the years and no doubt the officials were taking that into account.
Once we have a suitable standard design from a reliable supplier we can easily order and commission additional ferries as the traffic continues building up. This is how bus companies and transport concerns operate. When business increases you buy more buses and trucks.
Lake depth on the transport channels and in the harbours, plus the jetties and other infrastructure will impose size limits, just as road curves and bridges impose size limits on buses, so we will be seeing a growing fleet on Lake Kariba.
The ferry service and the fishing villages could also benefit from a rather specialised area of tourism. This does not mean some sort of separate first-class cabin for outsiders since the sort of tourist interested in such a voyage and seeing fishing boats at work and landing their catch will want to be with the community. Numbers will be modest, but there is a definite market for such tourism possibilities.
The one minor problem found was that it would take around nine months from order to commissioning the lead ferry on the lake. So the team investigated buying existing if simpler and less sophisticated craft to provide an interim service and found that was certainly possible. Considering the speed that the Government can move at when essential services are involved means we could soon have such an interim service.
This smaller craft need not be abandoned as the purpose-built lead ferry arrives. It can either supplement the main ferry or be moved to one of the very large irrigation lakes where such a service would be useful and where demand was much lower than on the huge Lake Kariba.
Once again, the President has been demanding fast action and once again he has taken a high level of personal initiative to make sure this action is taken and that we do indeed “build better”.
