Good afternoon. Two media outlets report today in two quite different ways on the long-running project to repair the N1 highway, Mozambique’s only real north-south tarmac road, spanning almost the whole length of the country (see below). For years, the N1 has been in a terrible condition, placing severe restrictions on people trying to use it to transport goods and passengers and limiting the speed of vehicles. The World Bank has offered $850m of grant funding to repair about 1,050km of the road, of which $400m has been signed off, but even this first instalment of money is taking a long time to spend.
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While state-controlled newspaper Notícias says optimistically on its front page that the “government reassures that it is still preparing the project”, the independent newssheet Mediafax leads with the headline “From promise to promise… now they speak of ‘coming months’”. It then notes caustically that the previous government of President Filipe Nyusi made “almost permanent” promises to start work on the project, but that it left office without making real progress on the work, which aims to make the road fully traversable.
