Users will be increasingly called upon to contribute financially to the maintenance costs of national roads, as a way to extend the useful life of these infrastructures of capital importance to the country's development.

According to the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Road Fund, this is just the intensification of the user-pays concept that the country has been using for years and whose main objective is to ensure the mobilization of resources needed for the rehabilitation and maintenance of the national road network.

Ângelo Macuácua, who was speaking in an interview to "Notícias", inserted on page two of the present edition, explains that it will not be possible to advance in the installation of toll stations on the entire network of roads and at the same time. 

He recalled that it started with bridge tolls only, a measure that inspired some countries in the region, such as Zambia, which not only copied the strategy but also spread the collection of fees to roads, and is now advanced in this practice.

"It is no coincidence that fundraising is to be intensified. The country faces enormous challenges in meeting the demands of the road sector," he stressed.

Last year, for example, investment was 17,106 million meticais, of which about 7.98 billion were internal financing and about 9.13 billion external.

Of this amount, 43% was for rehabilitation and asphalting of national roads, 25% of which was for maintenance and 15 for bridge construction and improvement.

Ângelo Macuácua affirmed that the limitation of resources has conditioned the level of interventions in the sector, in particular road maintenance, where only 12,258 kilometers were covered by routine actions and about 41 kilometers by periodic works, numbers below the needs of about 30 thousand kilometers of classified network".

For this year, the sector has about 22,174 million meticals, of which 9,095 are financed internally and the remaining 13,078 billion are channeled by partners.