Luanda | Tuesday
THE Angolan government is considering how to revive the 1 600-kilometre Benguela railway, which it wants to bring back into service after 27 years of civil war, an official said on Monday.
The railway was once part of a massive transcontinental network that linked the Angolan port of Lobito, near Benguela, on the Atlantic with the Mozambican port of Beira on the Indian Ocean.
A team of experts is studying three possibilities — creating a joint public-private venture to run the railway, granting a concessional license to a private company or leaving the state to run the service — the official said.
Angola’s government nationalised the railway at the start of the year after the expiry of a 99-year contract signed in 1902 by the country’s former Portuguese colonisers with Tanganyka Concession, the Belgian-British consortium which built the line.
When fully functioning, the railway ran southeast from Benguela, through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to link up with Zambian rail lines that connected it to railways in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, also a Portuguese colony until 1975.
It was a vital economic and transport link for the region, taking copper and cobalt from landlocked Zambia and the DRC to world markets via Angola.
Angola’s brutal civil war ended practically all use of the line, with only 300 kilometres operational between Benguela and the central farmlands around the city of Huambo between 1975, when the country also gained independence, and the early 1980s.
Angola’s army and the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) signed a ceasefire deal on April 4 in Luanda, agreeing to end a war that has left at least 500 000 dead and destroyed the national economy. – AFP