TRANSPORT-AFRICA: Transcontinental Railway Moving Closer to Reality

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

KINSHASA, DR Congo, Sep 10 2002 (IPS) - The 130 year-old dream of linking Africa with a transcontinental railway is moving closer to reality as transportation ministers from over 50 African countries prepare their position papers in anticipation of a forthcoming General Assembly meeting of the Union of African Railways in November.

ôActually, the rail line will be more than transcontinental, though the expectation is that just about all African countries will be linked. The line will be more. To succeed, it must be intercontinental,” says Gideon Mahlalela, outgoing president of the Southern Africa Railway Association.

Mahlalela says the rail line must move northward from the tip of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), through the landlocked nations of the central continent, and up to Egypt’s Suez Canal. From there, the line will meet up with Middle-East rail lines that will in turn link with Asia’s railroad network, while doubling back Eastward to connect with Europe’s rail lines.

ôThe principal beneficiaries of such a system would be shippers,” says Robert Graham, a Johannesburg-based transportation consultant. ôCertainly, there would be passengers along the way, but the length of the route would discourage most tourists and certainly business travellers. But the African Continental Rail Line, if we can call it that, would provide a viable alternative to ocean shipping for containerised cargo.”

Today, virtually all industrial goods and most agricultural products are shipped in large containers that are crane-loaded onto trucks for hauls within countries or across borders, perhaps to ports where the containers are loaded onto ships.

Freight trains can pull a line of container wagons a kilometre in length through a country or across borders, often ending their journeys at seaside ports where goods are transferred to cargo ships for ocean voyages.

ôThe beauty of a continental rail line would be the advantage it offers landlocked nations like Swaziland,” says Titus Mlangeni, minister of transportation for Swaziland, a nation entirely dependent on road and rail links through neighbouring countries to bring goods into local markets and to export industrial and agricultural output.

Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo are similarly lacking in seaport facilities, and the railheads where cranes tirelessly hoist goods containers constitute the ôdry ports” that are the countries’ transportation nerve centres.

A pan-African spirit animates a desire for a continental rail link. This is because each nation where a train passes through would collect a toll, and shipping profits would go to Africans themselves, including some poor nations like Rwanda and Chad, instead of profits going to ocean-going freighters whose owners are Asians and Europeans.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Union of African Railways will hold its General meeting in November, is a poor landlocked country that finds rail connectivity to the outside world an attractive proposition.

Raw materials leaving the resources rich but war-devastated nation already have to pay duties for right of way passage through neighbouring countries en route to ocean ports. One proposition under consideration for the transcontinental railway would be a subsidy system to give poor nations a rebate similar to the customs duty payments that favour smaller nations in the Southern African Customs Union.

South Africa, the regional powerhouse of that union, gives up some tax due to it in order to subsidise neighbouring economies.

ôA country like Egypt is a key link, and is in a position to reap huge rewards because all trains coming up through the continent will converge at Suez to connect with the other continental lines. We will negotiate a protocol to provide some sort of profit sharing for smaller, out of the way nations,” says a transportation official of a landlocked African nation.

Some sections of the Transcontinental African Railway are already under development, while long-derelict links are being revived. The contiguous nations of Cameroon, Benin Republic, Egypt, and Libya are joining rail links, which will expand into neighbouring countries.

The 1600-km Benguela Railway that connects the West African port of Lobito with Beira on the East African coast of Mozambique is being reconstructed after 27 years of disuse. The line was severed during Angola’s civil war.

Zambia Railways is working with South Africa’s transportation corporation Spoornet to create a west-east cross-continental railway.

Mozambique has received a loan from the World Bank to revive its section of a central rail line to Biera, which will also give Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo a convenient route to Biera’s ocean port. As in Angola, nearly 25 years of civil war in the former Portuguese colony brought sabotage that resulted in the line’s closure.

The transcontinental railway is not without controversy or critics. Charles DeVaal, an historian with the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, says, ôThe first railroads in Africa did not serve Africans at all. They were built to link mines with ports, and colonial plantations rather than settlements. The people were excluded. There is a concern about the proposed Trans-African Railroad that it will only serve business interests, and passengers will be excluded.”

Two landlocked countries confirm DeVaal’s assessment. Lesotho in Southern Africa has no railroad at all, because British colonial authorities determined that the country’s goods could be shipped more economically by road.

Unfortunately, the BaSotho people were left with no rail transportation, a situation that was not rectified following national independence due to economic constraints.

In Swaziland, a railroad was not built until 1964, and transporting Swazis was not its goal. A cheap way to move iron ore to ocean ports for shipment to Japan gave birth to the kingdom’s rail line that still does not pass through any major cities.

The Kinshasa meeting of Africa’s rail ministers and corporations will have to consider all the beneficiaries of the Transcontinental line to avoid the mistakes of the colonial past, while at the same time realising that era’s dream for a ôCape to Cairo” rail link.