Mozambique’s founding President, the late Samora Moises Machel, is famous for having coined and popularised the slogan Aluta Continua! (Portuguese for ‘the struggle continues’). He used it to rally combatants from his Frelimo movement in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, which culminated in independence in June 1975.

I have seen a video in which the slender soldier-cum-politician, speaking to a crowd of adoring supporters in the afterglow of independence, utters the slogan. Being the consummate orator that he was, he pauses for a few seconds and then beams his trademark smile before posing the question: “The struggle continues against what?”

The ensuing silence is deathly. He flashes his big smile again and starts rattling off the new targets of the African struggle: strife amongst ourselves, poverty, unemployment, poor healthcare and a lack of development, to name a few.

Samora, as he was affectionately known, understood that investment in infrastructure like roads, bridges and railways was a key catalyst for development. His government, however, did not implement any major infrastructure projects, as fighting off an insurgency by the so-called Mozambique National Resistance Movement drained State coffers dry and there was not much of an appetite for Mozambican projects by Western financiers, given the new government’s Marxist-Leninist posturing – that was a cardinal sin in those Cold War days.

That, however, did not stop Samora from conceptualising big infrastructure projects – in the forlorn hope that financing would be forthcoming one day. One of the big-ticket projects he hoped to implement during his lifetime (which was cut short on October 19, 1986) was a bridge over Maputo Bay as part of the capital city’s urbanisation initiative.

The World Bank was keen on the project but the Mozambican civil war put paid to any plans to implement it. It was not until 2010 that the plan was revived; that was when then Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates offered to fund the project’s construction. For some reason, the Portuguese baled out, giving an opportunity to our friends from the East – the Chinese – to fund the project as part of their Link Roads initiative.

Following a lengthy delay, caused mainly by protracted resettlement negotiations with local residents, China Road & Bridge Corporation moved on site about four years ago and the bridge was officially opened earlier this month. The construction tab totalled $785-million, all of which was picked up by the Chinese. It is not clear how the loan will be repaid, but one hopes we are not going to see a repeat of what happened in Sri Lanka, which was forced to hand over to the Chinese the Hambantota seaport and 6 070 ha of surrounding land for 99 years in exchange for the cancellation of $1.1-billion in debt. But that’s only a tiny portion of what the country owed, with media reports indicating that, by 2016, China had extended $6-billion in loans to the Sri Lanka government.

Hovering about 60 m over the azure waters in Maputo Bay, the new facility is the longest suspension bridge in Africa, at 3 km. It starts in Maputo and ends in the town of Catembe. Before its commissioning, this accolade belonged to the Matadi bridge, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The opening of the new Maputo–Catembe bridge was significant for South Africa as well, as it created a much shorter route between the two countries. Previously, it took South Africans about six hours to travel from Kosi Bay – a border post in KwaZulu-Natal – to Maputo and surrounding holiday destinations, owing to ridiculously bad roads. This has been slashed to 90 minutes, and the shorter travel time is a boon for tourism and trade between the two countries.

Samora may have died more than 30 years ago but his dream of a multibillion-rand bridge connecting Maputo and Catembe has now come to fruition. What he did not realise when he first shouted the Aluta Continua! slogan was that the struggle to develop Africa’s economic infrastructure would continue long after his death.