The Deputy Director General of the public establishment Transports au Congo (TRANSCO), Flory Bwatuka made a clarification, this Monday, September 2, 2024, following rumors circulating on social networks, according to which, this establishment would proceed with the sale of wrecks of old buses.
In his capacity as chairman of the Commission set up to carry out this sale operation, he clarified that TRANSCO will not sell wrecks of old buses to private individuals, as the disinformation fuelled by social networks and malicious people claims.
According to DGA Flory Bwatuka, his establishment rather sells residues, leftovers or waste from old buses that are unusable after demolition.
“TRANSCO will not sell the wrecks of old buses to private individuals under any circumstances. In fact, the operation will be carried out through a commission responsible for implementing the decision of the senior management and at the end of this work, TRANSCO will instead sell the residues, remains or waste from these old buses that are unusable after demolition. This is contrary to what is being spread on social media, wrongly accusing the TRANSCO authorities and the VPM of Transport of initiating a procedure for the illegal sale of this waste from bus wrecks,” he said.
DGA Flory Bwatuka also specified that this operation only aims to relieve congestion in TRANSCO warehouses in the municipalities of Limete, Masina and N’sele in order to facilitate the parking of new Mercedes-Benz buses acquired thanks to the involvement of the President of the Republic Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi.
He recalled that this operation is not new. It began in 2020 with former CEO Blakson Bongi and is carried out in complete legality and transparency, with the active participation of government experts in the scrapping and decommissioning of rolling stock.
According to DGA Flory Bwatuka, before launching this operation, the TRANSCO Management Committee of which he is a member requested and obtained authorization from the Ministry of Transport and Communication. This, after publication of the report of the experts of the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Works.
It is after having exhausted all the procedures, he explained, that the Commission set up will proceed with the demolition and sale of the waste from the wrecks of these decommissioned and unusable buses.
DGA Flory Bwatuka also stressed that in addition to a few TRANSCO executives and agents, the Commission he heads is made up of experts from the Kinshasa/Matete public prosecutor’s office, the National Intelligence Agency, the Police, the Ministry of Transport and Communication and those from the Ministry of Public Works and Infrastructure.
Let us recall that a total of 337 depreciated TRANSCO buses have been decommissioned. It is therefore the remains of these demolished buses that are being put up for sale.
These buses took up so much space in its warehouses that TRANSCO was until then forced to rent space from private individuals in the commune of N’sele to keep its buses.
In June 2013, the year it was created, TRANSCO received a donation of 500 Mercedes MCV buses, the result of a partnership between the Congolese government and an Egyptian company.
In 2021, after President Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi took power, TRANSCO received a second batch of 440 Volvo buses. A contract for the acquisition of 230 Mercedes-Benz buses made in the DRC will then take place, of which 56 buses have been received to date. This third batch is the result of the partnership between the Congolese government and the company Suprême Automobile.
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2024-09-03 17:56:12
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