Every Friday morning, SAfm's AMLive's radio anchor Florence Letoaba speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday's At the Coalface transcript:

Letoaba: Good morning Mr Creamer.

Creamer: Morning Florence.

Letoaba: Landlocked Malawi has taken another step in its multibillion dollar quest to carve out a navigable waterway to the Indian ocean. Those are ambitious steps by Malawi. Tell us more about this?

Creamer: It's a fantastic resuscitation attempt, because 150 years ago, the missionaries and the explorers used to use the Zambezi and Shire river to get to Malawi, obviously under different names in those old days. But with the Mozambique war, there was a disruption to that process and now the attempts of Malawi to resuscitate this have come against the background of very high transport costs.

One of the negatives for Malawi's local production is that the import costs are so high and, therefore, their production costs are high and, therefore, they are uncompetitive. So there's been a sincere attempt now by the government to create this waterway, it'll be navigable, it'll be 238 km of river and canals that ships can actually navigate and carry cargo. The biggest step we've seen to date is the upgrading of the inland port, in Malawi, the Nsanje port. Portuguese contractors have come in and they've rebuilt that, and already small ships are docking there. There is a second phase coming.

The big opening will need to be at Chindi, in Mozambique, and there's a feasibility study underway now by the Malawi government with funds promised from various international bodies to resuscitate this and also to upgrade the whole infrastructure like around the inland port of Nsanje they're looking at railway, they're even looking at air.

Letoaba: Now the South African government is dangling a R20-billion carrot to encourage South African industry to build big industrial projects. Will industry buy it?

Creamer: Well, already industry has started to bite because this was gazetted very recently, but even with the gazetting we noticed that one company was already coming in, anticipating this. So, the government wants to see a bigger number of large industrial projects, like we used to have in the past, so it's offering this R20-billion and it's officially gazetted it, there is the income tax legislation, which has been in place for a year now and they just wanted to fit this into the new IPAP, which is the industrial policy action plan two, which deals specifically with cutting down on energy use and skills training. This is now available to anyone who's got a project which is a non-alcoholic beverage project because those don't qualify, but anyone who's got a project of R200-million to R1,6-billion can apply for these incentives and they're quite generous because they're talking about 35% to 55% tax allowance.

So say we've got a R1-billion project, it could mean that we've got a tax allowance of between R350-million and R550-million and that's over and above the existing incentives so what we're talking about now is like 135% and 155% incentives so we can see that there's already a nibbling on that and people are getting interested. It does fill a gap because we used to have the strategic industrial projects programme here and that was withdrawn and now we've got this new initiative coming in but to get the full 55%, because you get between 35% and 55%, you've got to earn the points. To earn the points, you've got to be innovative, you've got to have upstream and downstream linkages, you've got to create jobs. But the big thing is also to be able to cut your energy consumption and be demonstrable about that, and also to train people - skills development.

Letoaba: Now it's crazy that the oil industry provides Africa's lighting in the form of paraffin when the continent is blessed with spectacular solar potential. Any measures to utilise what we already have?

Creamer: You know, for people in rural areas in Africa to continue to use paraffin, which is oil based, it's not only expensive but it's dangerous. We find a lot of accidents happening and there are more than 520-million people in Africa, they say, that don't get effective lighting. And what big multinationals are looking at now, saying look, let's forget about paraffin and the paraffin era, let's come in with solar power. And we see a massive initiative by the Dutch multinational Philips, which had a roadshow from Cairo to Cape Town going through 14 different cities. We saw them going through Cairo, Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, Gabarone, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town preaching this message "Let's use solar because we've got new products now that you can take a light-emitting diode and you can charge it in the sun and have four hours of light". So someone wanting to do homework in the night can have this light for four hours after just putting these light-emitting diodes in the sun.

They even demonstrated that you can have flood lighting. So someone who wants to play five-aside soccer at night or there's a local tournament, you can have these light-emitting diodes and it gives you eight hours of light from just recharging, free from the sun. So that is a new initiative and it seems a very worthwhile one and something that should be done in Africa rather than depend on paraffin.

Letoaba: Always a pleasure speaking to you Mr Creamer. That's Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Of course, he'll be back At the Coalface at the same time next Friday.