The most difficult section of the Kicevo-Ohrid motorway, ten kilometres long, will open to traffic in the coming months. The entire motorway is meant to be finished and handed over by May next year. Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Aleksandar Nikoloski announced this during an appearance on Kanal 5.

This is the most complex part of the route - galleries, bridges, viaducts and the longest tunnel in the country, with two tubes of two and 2.1 kilometres.

Eighty percent of an entire ministry on a single project

One sentence from Nikoloski is more interesting than the deadline itself: "We spend around 80 percent of our time and energy on Ohrid-Kicevo, and 20 percent on all the other projects." The minister said it as an explanation of inherited problems, and he is probably being honest.

But stop there for a second. A transport ministry serving an entire country spends four fifths of its capacity on one stretch of road. That is not a statistic about success - it is a diagnosis of how expensive decades of delays, project revisions and changes of contractor on this motorway have been.

Nikoloski simultaneously lists 1,200 open construction sites across the municipalities, six motorways being built in parallel - which, as he puts it, is unprecedented in the country's history - and work on rail Corridors 8 and 10. For Corridor 8 towards Bulgaria an inter-ministerial meeting was recently held in Sofia, and a joint letter was sent to the EIB and EBRD seeking financing for the tunnel. The end of August brings new meetings in Skopje, while studies for the British-backed project are due by 31 August, with construction expected to start in early 2027.

Kicevo-Ohrid deadlines have a history

Anyone following this route knows that "the coming months" and "by May next year" are not the first dates to have been spoken aloud. The project has changed deadlines, governments and ministers. What is different now is that the hardest part really is close to done - the tunnels are bored, the bridges are standing.

May next year would mean the journey to Ohrid could finally run on a motorway instead of the old regional road. For the travellers who spent another summer queuing in columns towards the lake, that is a concrete difference. If the date holds.