Daily Times

Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo are pinning hopes for economic revival on the revamp of an iconic African railway connecting mineral-rich inland areas to the Atlantic Ocean. Earlier this month, Luanda and Kinshasa granted a group of investors a 30-year concession to operate the line linking Angola’s seaport of Lobito to Kolwezi, a southern city in the heart of the DRC’s copperbelt. Partially funded by the United States, the $555-million project is expected to boost mineral export and intra-African trade and cements Angola’s diplomatic pivot to the West, analysts said.

“Unlocking the Lobito corridor with American funding… is a historical watershed,” said Alex Vines at British think-tank Chatham House. Currently stretching about 1,700 kilometres (1,050 miles), the railway was completed around 100 years ago by British investors interested in getting copper out of Africa. The Angolan section of the line was closed during the height of the country’s 1975-2002 civil war and remained in disuse afterwards due to damage.

Rebuilt by a Chinese company, it reopened in 2015 but traffic has struggled to take off. Only about one train every two weeks currently runs over it, according to Vecturis, a Belgian railway operator, part of the consortium awarded the railway concession. The Congolese stretch dates back to colonial times and is poorly maintained, said Marcel Lungange, head of infrastructure at the DRC’s national railway company, SNCC. “We have an average of three derailments a day due to the dilapidated state of the tracks, with our locomotives running at two-kilometres-per-hour in many places,” he said.

Mining firms prefer to transport metals via truck to other often congested ports in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa — but such journeys are expensive and take weeks to complete. With the International Energy Agency expecting global demand for critical metals to quadruple by 2040 as countries race to tackle climate change, new export routes are badly needed, said Louis Watum, who heads the DRC’s Chamber of Mines, a trade group. DR Congo is respectively the world’s and Africa’s biggest producer of cobalt and copper. Both minerals are used to build solar panels, wind farms and electric vehicles.

“We already have huge queues of lorries” at border posts, Watum said. The consortium, which includes global commodity trader Trafigura and Portuguese construction firm Mota-Engil, hopes the revamped railway will slash transit times from the DRC to Lobito to under 36 hours. It wants to have at least six trains a day crossing in and out of the country within five years.

To that end it plans to pour $455 million on upgrades in Angola, including buying more than 1,500 new wagons and locomotives, reinforcing bridges and welding rails. Another $100 million is earmarked for the DRC, with the concession agreement also envisaging extending the tracks to neighbouring Zambia. About half the money is expected to be financed by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government agency. The commitment comes at a time of heightened competition between Washington and Beijing over access to critical minerals. It puts some flesh on the bones of US President Joe Biden’s pledge to go “all in” on Africa and bolster trade with the continent, said Vines. It also reflects a shift in Angola’s diplomacy.