With bread and salt and to the sounds of local folk music, the Qukës-Qafë Plloçë road was opened to traffic today. This segment, the works on which have lasted for 16 years, has cost the Albanian state 235 million dollars.
The Qukës-Qafë Plloçë road is 43.4 kilometers long, and traverses the mountainous terrain of the southeast of the country, reducing the travel time from Tirana to Korça to two hours. After the completion of the expansion of Corridor VIII, this distance will be reduced to one and a half hours.
According to the Minister of Infrastructure and Energy, Belinda Balluku, the road began with a project from 2010-11, which, during the inauguration walk where Prime Minister Edi Rama was also present, she considered "indifferent to the geology of the area" or "the atmospheric conditions and the connections with the villages of the Mokra highlands."
The Prime Minister reinforced Minister Balluku's idea.
"It is the longest, most arduous, most complicated project because it was started backwards. It is a great liberation for the area," Rama declared.
The road belongs to category C1, with two lanes of 3.75 meters on each side and a one-meter auxiliary lane. As works of art, there are two tunnels, one 710 meters and the other 300 meters, and 4 bridges, two of which are metal.
"Now another challenge begins, which is the challenge of maintenance because this is a mountainous area with both frost and snowfall," declared Minister Balluku.
16 years for 43 km of road
The odyssey of the Qukës-Qafë Plloçë road began in 2009, when former Prime Minister Sali Berisha promised its construction.
"A vote with us is a vote for the new Elbasan-Tirana highway, it is a vote for the new Qukës-Plloçë-Pogradec highway," Berisha said at the time, while the cheers of thousands of citizens in the city square of Elbasan "dressed in blue" overlapped his electoral promises.
After the elections, Berisha cut the ribbon to mark the start of the works. The project was later described as “a line without study and with technical errors” by experts from the Albanian Road Authority (ARRSH).
It was designed with the state budget, but after the interruption of works and financial impossibility, the first loan was obtained for it in 2013, signed by former Minister of Finance Ridvan Bode.
The loan, which aimed to complete the work, was obtained from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD), and had a total value of 125 million dollars.
With the coming to power of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister Rama, the project was revised, thus adding additional financial costs.
"This project change was necessary, because if we had continued with the project we inherited, we would have been in an even more catastrophic situation with the Tirana-Elbasan road," said Prime Minister Rama during an inspection of the works in 2017.
They officially resumed in 2015. In 2018, former Minister of Infrastructure and Energy, Damian Gjiknuri, during another inspection, promised that this road would be functional in 2019.
"The companies are doing a good job and with the solutions to the remaining problems of the project, I believe it will be functional in 2019, bringing Korça closer to Tirana," said Gjiknuri.
However, even after the end of this deadline, the road did not end.
During her speech at the Parliament podium in September 2020, Minister Balluku stated that another $105.8 million was needed to complete the works: $56.8 million for the first two lots and $49 million for the third lot.
This need materialized two years later, in 2022, when the government took out another loan from the FSZH worth $49 million to complete the third lot of the road. This lot, which was not foreseen in the initial project.
According to the ARA, the initial cost for the first and second lots was 38 and 63.1 million dollars. While today, the first lot has gone for 74 million and the second lot for 95 million.
As for the financiers, according to the ARRSH, only 2.9 kilometers were directly financed from the state budget. While for the first and second lots, respectively 30 kilometers, the financier was BIZH. For the third lot, 10 km is financed by FSZH.
The socialist government had to start its fourth term to complete this 43.4 km road at a cost that had doubled since the beginning, going to over 235 million dollars./ Citizen Channel
