05 ISSUE II
JANUARY 2025
JANUARY 2025
Dreams of Development
Big infrastructure projects in developing countries like Angola prioritize “business-friendly” agendas yet neglect essential structural elements, leading to superficial outcomes.
By Jon Schubert
In his final official trip abroad, outgoing US President Joe Biden visited the port city of Lobito in Angola to underscore the US’s commitment to the Lobito Development Corridor (LDC). Traveling along a section of the 1,544km railway that links the Atlantic coast to the Angolan highlands and onto the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Biden announced a further US$560 million investment in projects along the line, increasing total investments by his administration into the LDC to $4 billion in total. One element of these ambitious projects is to build, from 2025 on, a second branch of the railway line from Luacano, Moxico Leste province into the Zambian Copperbelt. These investments, according to media reports, would “lay the groundwork for a better future for our people,” by connecting Angola’s economy to the region and the world and, crucially, help the US secure access to critical minerals and counter what is perceived as China’s growing commercial, but also strategic influence in Central Africa.
Following the end of Angola’s civil war in 2002, the government was flush with oil money and set out to reconstruct the country on its own terms. A key piece of its ambitious reconstruction plans was rehabilitating the colonial-era Benguela Railway and the connected port of Lobito. The dreams of development that drove the rehabilitation of the Lobito Corridor aimed to divert mineral shipments from Katanga in the DRC and the Copperbelt in Zambia from their existing export routes to the Indian Ocean to an Atlantic port. Those who dreamed up this plan did not know whether the price would be competitive or ensure infrastructural compatibility between the DRC and Angolan rail system to allow for bulk mineral cargo to cross the border.
And so, ambitious schemes to revive large-scale mineral exports through the port of Lobito have not yet materialized. On the one hand, as former railway workers told me, the rehabilitation was poorly planned and executed, from a lack of spares for the new Chinese and US locomotives to the design of the line. According to them, the Chinese built the curves too tight and the railway beds too high, and the new concrete sleepers can not absorb the vibrations in the rails like the old wooden crossbeams, leading to frequent derailments and speed limitations. On the other hand, the DRC has not modernized its rail line yet. The state of the rails and the rolling stock in the DRC is so poor that the new, heavy-duty, wide-gauge locomotives that Angola acquired cannot reach the Katangan manganese mines. Accordingly, the few mineral cargos exported so far have been transported by container rather than in bulk. These have to be transloaded from the Congolese trains to the Angolan trains at the border train station in Dilolo, and are then exported in Lobito through the container terminal rather than the brand-new minerals terminal, thwarting promises of increased efficiency.
More generally, the limitations of the Benguela Railway point to the limitations of an idea of development based on colonial models of extractive capitalism: although the distance from Katanga and the Copperbelt to Lobito is about two-thirds shorter than the current export route, via road cargo, to Durban (on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast), most mineral exports nowadays are exported to countries like China, Korea, Japan, India, or Vietnam, rather than to the industrial powerhouses of Western Europe of the 1950s. That means the shorter sea travel to East Asia from Africa’s East Coast compared to the longer route around the Cape more than offsets potential savings from the shorter rail route on the Lobito Corridor.
Beyond such practical considerations, the development model pursued in dreams of the CFB’s past glories does nothing to diversify Angola’s economy (nor that of the DRC and Zambia for that matter) away from the extraction of raw minerals and hydrocarbons, and reproduces Africa’s dependency on global markets as primary commodity exporter. ‘Business insight’ publications in the global North have hailed Angolan President João Lourenço’s ‘courageous’ reforms. Yet simply wishing, as its proponents do, economic diversification into existence, hoping that industries and small enterprises will miraculously spring up along the railway line just because it is there does not amount to economic transformation, and will do little to transform the livelihoods of populations largely excluded from national development schemes.
Projects like the rehabilitation of the Port of Lobito and the Benguela Railway follow dreams of development outlined more than a century ago by colonial extractive capitalism. While these infrastructures respond to ‘needs’ of business and help position Angola as a ‘business-friendly’ destination for investment, they reproduce an economy of appearances that focuses on the tangible, concrete dimension of infrastructures with little thought given to the financial, regulatory, and labour elements that would enable their intended purpose.
The push to close “Africa’s infrastructure gap” or to“future-proof” its growing cities through investments in big infrastructure does little to redress global, regional or local asymmetries. Predicating Africa’s “rise” as the LDC does – by perpetuating and even intensifying resource extraction – further entrenches inequalities and dependency, and undermines any potential for sustainable, less ecologically and socially exploitative economic relations.
Jon Schubert is a political anthropologist and urban studies professor at the University of Basel and was a visiting professor in international affairs at The New School in Fall last year.