- President Hichilema announced the 121-year-old bridge is no longer suitable for trucks/trains, with both countries planning a new bridge and railway crossing instead of rehabilitation
- The 1905 arch bridge cannot be economically upgraded to modern freight loads; rehabilitation costs would rival a new build while still limiting capacity to single-track rail and narrow roads incompatible with 500-1,000 daily heavy vehicles
- A new dual-track rail-road bridge would remove a key bottleneck for mining/agricultural freight and complement the Mosetse-Kazungula-Livingstone Railway
Harare- Zambian Head of State, President Hakainde Hichilema has announced at the Engineering Institution of Zambia conference in Livingstone this week that Zambia and Zimbabwe have agreed to restrict the use of the Victoria Falls Bridge by heavy trucks and trains, and that the two countries plan to construct a new bridge and railway crossing to accommodate that traffic.
Speaking to an audience of engineers, the President described the historic 121-year-old structure as no longer suitable for heavy-duty traffic, citing both its age and the structural demands modern freight volumes impose on a span designed in the early 20th century for loads that bear no relationship to a fully laden 60-tonne mining truck.
The announcement is the most concrete bilateral commitment either government has made on the Victoria Falls Bridge question in years, and it reframes a conservation debate that has run in circles since the late 1990s into an infrastructure development decision with immediate commercial and regional implications.
The question the announcement leaves unanswered, and the one that matters most for both Zimbabwe and Zambia, is not whether to restrict the bridge. That decision is structurally sound and long overdue. The question is what exactly gets built next, where, by whom, and on whose financing. The answers will determine whether this becomes the most consequential infrastructure project in southern SADC since the Kazungula Bridge, or whether it joins the long register of announced regional crossings that never break ground.
The Victoria Falls Bridge was completed in April 1905, opened on 12 September of that year, and was designed by George Andrew Hobson of Sir Douglas Fox and Partners. It is 198 metres long with the main arch spanning 156.5 metres at a height of 128 metres above the Zambezi River, a road, railway, and foot bridge. Cecil Rhodes instructed the engineers to build the bridge where trains, as they passed, would catch the spray of the Falls. It was an act of romantic colonial infrastructure ambition, not a freight logistics decision.
Freight trains carried mainly coal into, and copper and timber out of Zambia, but maintenance problems due to the age of the bridge led to traffic restrictions at various times. Trains crossed at less than walking pace and trucks were limited to 30 tonnes, necessitating heavier trucks to make a long diversion via the Kazungula Ferry or Chirundu Bridge. The weight limit was raised after repairs in 2006.
That 2006 repair and weight limit increase bought two decades of operational continuity but did not resolve the underlying structural arithmetic. A bridge designed in 1904 for the rolling stock and vehicle loads of that era cannot be indefinitely upgraded to carry the axle loads of modern bulk freight without either compromising structural integrity or spending the kind of money that would largely fund a new crossing.
There is a temptation, visible in the historical record, to treat the Victoria Falls Bridge as a rehabilitation project, to spend what is needed to bring it to modern load standards and preserve its status as the only rail link between Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as one of only three road crossings. That temptation should be resisted for three distinct reasons.
The first is structural. The bridge's arch construction, its riveted steel members, and its 120-year service history mean that any substantial strengthening works would require invasive interventions across the entire span, connections, chord members, bracing, and the gorge anchorages in conditions of extreme working difficulty at 128 metres above the Zambezi.
Engineering experience with comparable historic structures suggests that the cost of bringing a 1905 arch bridge to modern heavy-load standards can approach or exceed the cost of building a new crossing at a nearby site, while delivering a structure that still carries the heritage constraints and maintenance demands of a century-old asset. The result is expensive preservation, not cost-effective infrastructure.
The second is functional. Even a fully rehabilitated Victoria Falls Bridge cannot become what the corridor needs. The single-track rail configuration cannot be doubled. The road width is inadequate for two-way heavy commercial traffic with overtaking capacity. The gorge setting that makes the bridge a World Heritage-adjacent tourist attraction is precisely the characteristic that limits what civil engineering can do to it. No amount of rehabilitation produces a crossing that efficiently handles 500 to 1,000 heavy vehicle movements per day alongside rail freight, tourist traffic, and pedestrian activity. The functions are fundamentally incompatible at scale.
The third reason is commercial. Since its commissioning in May 2021, the Kazungula Bridge has seen a dramatic rise in commercial traffic, with daily truck crossings more than doubling from an average of 214 in its first year to 491 by December 2025. Assessments indicate weekly freight throughput exceeding 33,000 tonnes in the region, reflecting the corridor's role in regional logistics despite capacity strains from international haulers.
The North-South Corridor, linking the copper belt of the DRC and Zambia to Beit Bridge and the port of Durban is growing faster than any single existing crossing can absorb. The Victoria Falls route is one segment of that corridor, and its capacity constraint is a cost that every shipper, every miner, and every manufacturer on the corridor pays in the form of longer transit times and higher freight rates.
President Hichilema's announcement referenced construction of a new bridge and railway crossing rather than rehabilitation of the existing structure, which is the analytically correct position.
The gorge below Victoria Falls narrows and widens at different points downstream, and the structural geology of the Batoka Gorge offers several potential crossing points within 20 to 40 kilometres of the existing bridge. A new crossing sited several kilometres downstream would separate commercial freight and rail traffic entirely from the tourist zone, preserving the Victoria Falls Bridge for its highest-value use, tourism, light vehicles, pedestrians, and the heritage experience, while creating a purpose-built heavy corridor crossing with modern design standards, adequate lane widths, and a dual-track rail configuration that the existing bridge can never accommodate.
This is not a novel approach. It is precisely the model Zambia and Botswana applied at Kazungula. The Kazungula Bridge is a combined transport configuration including two car lanes in each direction, a single railway track, and pedestrian walkways on both sides. It was designed for the traffic it would carry, not retrofitted around a century-old structure. The reconstruction was commissioned in May 2021 at a cost of USD 259 million, co-financed by the African Development Fund, JICA, and the EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund.
At comparable cost parameters, a new Victoria Falls downstream crossing is a financeable project , it is the kind of infrastructure that AfDB, the World Bank Group's IFC, the EU Global Gateway, and bilateral lenders have demonstrated willingness to fund when the economic case is robust and the institutional arrangements between borrowing governments are formalised.
For Zimbabwe, a new heavy-freight crossing at Victoria Falls removes a structural bottleneck from one of the country's most strategically important corridors. The Victoria Falls route connects Beit Bridge and the Zimbabwean interior to the Zambian copper belt and onward to the DRC, and it serves both the growing mining beneficiation exports that Zimbabwe's Cabinet approved in the Minerals Value Chain framework on 14 April 2026 and the agricultural commodity traffic that flows north and south seasonally. A crossing limited to 30-tonne vehicles, or even the raised post-2006 limits, is a permanent drag on the competitiveness of Zimbabwean logistics relative to the Kazungula and Chirundu corridors that bypass the Victoria Falls bottleneck entirely.
For Zambia, the railway dimension is the critical addition. The Victoria Falls Bridge is the only rail link between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Restricting or eventually closing rail freight on the existing bridge without a replacement rail crossing severs that connection entirely. The Mosetse-Kazungula-Livingstone Railway, a proposed USD 1.5 billion rail extension that would link Botswana's network with Zambia via Livingstone, has entered bankable feasibility study stage following joint ministerial agreements in June 2025, and its route alignment through Livingstone makes a new Victoria Falls rail crossing a natural complement rather than a competing project.
A new dual-track rail-road bridge at Victoria Falls could provide the missing link between the Zambian rail network, the Zimbabwean national railway, and the North-South Corridor's long-term ambition of connecting Dar es Salaam to Cape Town by rail.
The practical obstacle is familiar. Zimbabwe's external debt overhang, the arrears to the World Bank, African Development Bank, and bilateral creditors that the IMF's Staff-Monitored Programme is specifically designed to help resolve, limits its access to the concessional financing that infrastructure projects of this scale require. Zambia does not face the same constraint in the same form, having completed its debt restructuring, and could in theory lead the financing architecture while Zimbabwe contributes in-kind or deferred terms aligned with the arrears clearance timeline.
The SMP Zimbabwe concluded with the IMF in February 2026 and the broader Structured Dialogue Platform for arrears clearance are directly relevant here. If Zimbabwe can demonstrate sustained fiscal discipline through the SMP monitoring window and make credible progress on arrears clearance in 2026 and 2027, it builds the institutional credibility needed to be a bankable co-borrower on a bilateral infrastructure project. The Victoria Falls downstream bridge could be the first major joint project that benefits from that restored credibility, a physical demonstration of re-engagement with the multilateral infrastructure financing system, carrying more visible and durable signalling value than any press release about the SMP.
Equity Axis News
