ANGOLA: The Ministry of Transport is due to announce in May the winner of a competition to manage the Lobito Corridor that includes the 1 067 mm gauge Benguela Railway. The 1 344 km line was rebuilt in 2002-15 with the help of various Chinese companies after being badly damaged in the civil war from 1975 to 2002.
A public tender was launched in September 2021 for a concession covering ‘the operation, management and maintenance of rail infrastructure for general cargo transport, minerals, liquids and gas’ in the Corridor, which links the port of Lobito with Luau in eastern Angola close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Two bids were submitted by the deadline of January 21; this had been extended beyond the original date of December 7 2021. One came from Chinese company CITIC partnered with Sinotrans and China Railway 20 Bureau Group, which was responsible for reconstruction of some sections of the line. The other was submitted by Trafigura, Mota Engil and Vecturis.
Despite various ‘irregularities’ in the submissions, both were accepted for assessment by the bidding evaluation committee. The concession is expected to run for at least 30 years with the potential of a 20-year extension. It is likely to entail the government setting up a special purpose company with the private sector partners holding a majority stake and the state retaining a minority share.
The terms of the concession cover the management and operation of freight services, including export mineral traffic from the Copperbelt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the transport of fuel and other freight from Lobito to destinations along the Corridor. The region has a population of around six million in four provinces where one-third of Angola’s agricultural produce is grown. The concessionaire will also carry general cargo, but passenger traffic and ‘light freight’ will continue to be handled by Caminho de Ferro de Benguela.
In addition to providing rail services, the concessionaire will be required to build freight terminals in Lobito and Luau, to run the line’s workshops and to manage and maintain the staff training centre in Huambo that was opened in 2017. The concessionaire will be granted access to the recently completed mineral terminal in the port of Lobito ― operation of the port itself was recently put out to a 20-year concession.
Significantly, the Corridor contract will also require the winning bidder to consider the design, construction and operation of a branch from the Benguela Railway into the Zambian part of the Copperbelt, which is expected to generate additional traffic. A feasibility study for this line is reportedly already in progress.
The decision to operate services over the Benguela Railway in the form of a concession repeats a chapter in the line’s earlier history ― it was originally built and run under a 99-year concession that expired in 2001.
Having announced the concession plans in September last year, Minister of Transport Dr Ricardo Viegas d’Abreu later said that further investment would be required. ‘122 years after the beginning of the realisation of the dream and the will of a man and a crown, we are here to give back hope and seek to materialise a new dream, a new hope … with this concession, we want to live up to what was planned in our National Master Plan for the Transport & Road Infrastructure Sector, which provides, among other things, for the connection to Zambia.’
