NIGERIA-TRANSPORT: Chinese to Put Railway Back on Track

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Oct 14 1996 (IPS) - Businesswoman Alice Olabisi nostalgically recalls the heydays of Nigeria’s railway network, when trains ran on schedule and were affordable.

“Train service in those days was cheap and very efficient,” says 60-year-old Olabisi, who retired from teaching a few years ago. “You knew the time a train would arrive and depart from a station. So it was easy to wait at the station for your visitor.”

“I was a teacher in Kafanchan (a town in northern Nigeria) in the sixties and any time I travelled to my hometown in Ilorin, it was like a picnic and sightseeing on the train.”

Times have changed since then. The Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) has suffered a severe decrease in efficiency — trains are often late — as well as passenger and goods traffic in the past two decades.

In the 1960s, the NRC provided the cheapest and most used means of moving goods and people across the vast country, ferrying about 80 percent of goods and 60 percent of travellers between the coast and the north.

In the early 1970s, it was still frequently used: between 1973 and 1974, the railway carried more than five million passengers and 1.6 million tonnes of freight. However, by 1994, this had declined to 1.4 million passengers and 142,000 tonnes of goods, with the NRC losing business to buses and trailers.

Of the some 160 locomotives owned by the 98-year-old NRC, only 41 are working. This, along with inefficiency and the poor condition of its tracks, has forced the corporation to reduce the number of runs on its two routes.

Weekly trips between the south-western city of Lagos, the north central town of Kano, and Nguru, northeast of Kano, have been cut from two to three. There are also fewer runs between Port Harcourt in the southeast and Maidiguri in the northeast.

For years, the NRC has had financial problems, which have resulted in a huge backlog of unpaid salaries and overdue stipends for its some 75,000 pensioners.

In view of all these problems, the NRC’s administrator, Greg Ilukwe, once described the corporation as the worst in Africa.

All this may change though: the NRC was allocated about 72.5 million U.S. dollars in this year’s budget and, under a December 1995 technical agreement between Nigeria and China, Chinese technicians will revamp the railway system.

Beijing is also to supply 50 new locomotive engines, 100 passenger coaches, 400 wagons and up-to-date railway communications equipment. “The more locomotives we have, the more trains we can run, the more money we can make,” said Ilukwe.

During their 30-month stay, the Chinese will also train Nigerians, straighten bends and curves and repair bridges and tracks so that passenger trains can run at up to 150 kms per hour and goods trains can achieve a maximum speed of 80 kms per hour.

Two new lines are expected to be built — Kaduna-Abuja-Jos and Lagos-Benin-Port Harcourt.

The Chinese technicians, who arrived here in March, have already surveyed the NRC’s 3,505 kms of railway track and produced designs to guide repair work, which begins in February 1997.

“The Chinese team is fully equipped for the project. All arrangements have been put in place to ensure that the entire project is completed on schedule,” said Hao Yizhong, General Manager of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. “The Nigerian Railway system will become the best in Africa at the end of the current revitalisation programme …”

Transport experts here share Yizhong’s enthusiasm. They say the job was given to China because of its expertise and the excellent work it did when it built the 1876-km TAZARA line between Tanzania and Zambia, which opened in 1976.

Some NRC employees feared that, without a proper transfer of skills to locals, things would fall apart after the Chinese left Nigeria as happened in the early 1980s after a three-year cooperation contract between the NRC and Indian railway experts.

However, Ilukwe stressed that “the agreement between the government and the Indians was different from the one with the Chinese.

“The Chinese are here purely for the revitalisation of the NRC not to operate it,” he told workers recently. “The Chinese have just a 30-month timeframe to revitalise the rail and at the end of their stay, it is hoped that the rail system would have been improved.”

The prospect of cheap and efficient travel along a greater number of routes has fired the imagination of potential clients, such as Lagos-based trader Kabiru Mohammed.

“It is a thing of joy that the government is trying to reactivate the corporation towards resuming its role of providing cheap service,” he told IPS. “It will reduce the amount we spend on luxury buses when travelling to the north.”