The High Court has ruled that Marian Chombo is entitled to 45 percent of the value of the rights and benefits attached to the 99-year lease over Allan Grange Farm, ending a property dispute that has outlived her marriage to former cabinet minister Ignatius Chombo by more than a decade.

Justice Philipa Phillips held that while the 3,098-hectare farm, on the boundary of Zvimba and Mhangura, belongs to the State and cannot itself be divided, the leasehold rights acquired during the marriage were a matrimonial asset capable of distribution. She awarded Ignatius Chombo 55 percent and his former wife 45 percent, and ruled that Marian Chombo’s share must include the farmhouse she has occupied since the divorce.

Chombo had argued that the lease carried little or no positive value when the marriage ended, saying banks had financed the machinery, fuel, seed and labour and that he had shouldered the debts alone after the separation. The judge was unpersuaded, finding he had not produced the evidence needed to make that case.

“The court would ordinarily expect financial statements, loan agreements, bank records, valuations or other documentary evidence from which the net value of the leasehold rights could be objectively assessed,” Phillips said.

Marian Chombo told the court she had jointly applied for the farm and was surprised when the lease was issued in her husband’s name alone in 2007. She said she ran the wheat, soya and maize operations along with dairy, beef and poultry projects while her husband attended to his ministerial duties in Harare.

The judge accepted that account, finding the couple had “operated as a farming partnership within the marriage.” She started from an equal split and trimmed Marian Chombo’s share by five percentage points to reflect the liabilities her former husband carried after the divorce. “Benefits come with liabilities, we take the good with the bad,” she said.

The couple married customarily in 1985 and in a civil ceremony in 1993. Divorce proceedings began in 2009 and were granted in August 2012. Each side was ordered to pay its own costs.

Sources: ZimLive; NewZimbabwe.com.

A passenger ferry has returned to the Kariba–Chalala route on Lake Kariba, six weeks after the disaster that killed 97 people and left lakeshore communities cut off from the town of Kariba.

The MV Silverstone, a privately owned vessel with a carrying capacity of 60 passengers, was launched at Lake Harvest Harbour and will work the corridor previously served by the RIDA-operated Mbuya Nehanda, which capsized on 11 August. The route takes in the Kings Camp and Musambakaruma fishing camps.

The launch was performed by Kingstone Magaya, a director in the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development, standing in for the permanent secretary. Magaya used the occasion to argue that the August disaster had exposed the danger of leaving a critical transport corridor in the hands of one operator.

“Lake Kariba is too important to depend on one operator. Had there been alternative operators on the Kariba-Chalala corridor, the economic shock after 11 August would have been minimal,” he said, as reported by NewZimbabwe.com. He said liberalisation of transport corridors, including inland waterways, had become a plank of government policy.

The vessel’s owner, Mr Mangove, said the Silverstone was not meant as a replacement for the lost RIDA ferry. “We are not coming as a replacement to RIDA Mbuya Nehanda but to cover the gap that they left after the sad 11 August incident,” he told NewZimbabwe.com. He told The Herald the project had been in development for some time, but that the tragedy had accelerated the need to bring it into service.

The suspension of services has bitten hard. Fish traders around the lake have lost catches that spoiled for want of transport, and families have struggled to move between Kariba’s rural settlements and the town, particularly since schools reopened.

Fares on the new service are US$8 to Kings Camp and US$15 for a direct trip between Kariba and Chalala.

Sources: NewZimbabwe.com; The Herald.

The National Railways of Zimbabwe has brought 100 refurbished high-sided wagons and three locomotives back into service under a US$2.8 million partnership with ferrochrome producer Zimasco, as the state operator pursues a far larger financing package to rebuild its fleet.

The rolling stock was commissioned in Harare on Thursday by Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Felix Mhona, who described the arrangement as a model for reviving idle railway assets without an immediate call on the treasury.

“This partnership exemplifies a win-win financial engineering model. By funding the overhaul of idle wagons in exchange for freight charge offsets, Zimasco has secured a reliable supply chain route to international markets,” Mhona said.

Under the deal, Zimasco financed the refurbishment of idle stock in return for freight charge offsets and dedicated capacity to move chrome and ferrochrome towards the regional ports of Beira and Maputo.

Mhona said a functioning railway was essential to Zimbabwe’s stated goal of reaching upper-middle-income status by 2030, describing rail as the cheapest and safest way to move bulk cargo. He argued the investment would ease logistics bottlenecks and spare rehabilitated roads the damage caused by heavy trucks.

The commissioning forms part of a wider recapitalisation effort led by the Mutapa Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund to which NRZ was transferred.

Fund chief executive John Mangudya said the strategy was aimed at restoring the railway’s commercial viability. Among the planned interventions is a US$115 million facility being negotiated with the African Export-Import Bank, which would fund 10 new locomotives, 315 wagons and the rehabilitation of key infrastructure.

Government is also pursuing track and signalling upgrades and a resource-backed arrangement with China Railway International Group.

Mhona said US$10 million had been secured for the Chicualacuala–Plumtree and Machipanda–Harare lines through tripartite cooperation with Mozambique and Botswana, and that cooperation with South Africa on the North-South Corridor had been revived.

NRZ has been hollowed out by years of under-investment, and freight volumes remain a fraction of what the network carried at its peak in the 1990s. Mhona urged other mining companies, farmers and fuel importers to take up similar partnerships.

Sources: NewZimbabwe.com, 263Chat, Sowetan, MINING.COM, Business Day.