Having recently purchased 167 buses for a state-owned transport company, Transportes Publicos de Maputo, the government has now announced plans to buy another 222 later this year. The move is an attempt to address the severe problems that have plagued the sector since earlier this year (March 2011, The political scene). What has been called a "crisis" in urban transport followed a poorly conceived crackdown earlier this year on private operators of chapas, the 15-seat minibuses that have dominated urban transport in Mozambique for two decades. Many operators' licences were suddenly revoked or withdrawn and police enforcement stepped up. The result has been to throw public transport into chaos. The government's preferred option is to promote the use of larger buses and build the capacity of the state-owned bus company, neither of which is capable of filling the void left by the chapas in the short term. In an address to parliament on March 16th the transport minister, Paulo Zucula, did not acknowledge how unhelpful the government's intervention had been. Rather, he blamed the decline in the number of chapas on the roads on a decision by operators to withdraw from less profitable routes. Otherwise his address focused at length on the investments that the government is making in urban transport, drawing from the recently created Transport Development Fund.

Meanwhile, Mr Zucula has signed a preliminary agreement with an Italian company to build a subway train route linking Maputo with the suburb of Matola. The company is to co-finance a feasibility study into the project. There is concern that the authorities are increasing state spending and subsidies on urban transport without due cause, as this is an area in which the private sector, and particularly the chapa operators, has hitherto broadly met demand. The state bus company is known to be operationally inefficient, with a large proportion of its buses out of operation at any given time. That the government is contemplating a costly subway system is regarded as an extravagance for a poor country such as Mozambique. It would also result in an increase in public debt, which has been occurring at an alarming rate in recent years since the government benefited from a write-off of its debt stock under the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative. Much of the new debt has been for politically driven spending decisions or prestige infrastructure and other projects weakly integrated with national priorities for poverty reduction.