A familiar refrain that crops up whenever efficiencies or their absence at sub-Saharan Africa’s ports and corridors are under discussion is the so-called “lack of political will” to improve logistics.Intra-trade consultant and director at Africa House, Duncan Bonnett, often talks about it.Long-standing former CEO of the Maputo Corridor Logistics Initiative, Barbara Mommen, cited it as the reason why she left.Like a leitmotif of sorts, peer executives on the speaker circuit regularly lament lacklustre public sector unresponsiveness.Even Deprose Muchena, a regional director for Amnesty (AI), castigated governments responsible for infrastructural integrity and safe-keeping for their inertia.Speaking at an Africa Outlook 2020 conference hosted by auditing firm Deloitte, he said last year’s Cyclone Idai had brought devastation to a region that would be felt for years to come – mostly by already distressed people supposed to benefit from regional prosperity.On top of the damage it wreaked in northern Mozambique, Idai had also laid waste to large swathes of Zimbabwe and Malaw i, Muchena said.“It’s estimated that some R2 billion in infrastructure was lost in those countries, yet only 93% of that was insured.”From a human rights perspective, he explained, it had added to “rising inequality and poverty on a continent that already struggles with g rot esque underdevelopment.“It also means that children are born into an environment that is underequipped to cater for their needs.”Getting back to the devastation of Idai, Muchena argued that “climate change was the biggest inter-generational human rights violation of our time and required us to ref lect on what it meant for Africa and the globe”.Co-panellist and climate-modelling academic from Wits University, Professor Francois Engelbrecht, added that if a category five storm like the hurricanes often seen in the Caribbean were to make landfall over Maputo, “we would be catastrophically unprepared for it”.But not all freight representatives share private sector pessimism about alleged public sector foot-dragging.Speaking at a different conference intended to market the Beira Corridor, ports executive Jan de Vries applauded the Mozambican government’s response in the immediate aftermath of the storm.The head of harbour concession company, Cornelder de Moçambique, he said: “What happened with Idai is a sign of the resilience of the corridor and proof that we can adapt to fast-changing circumstances.”Within a week of “trees that were toppled over tracks and with sections of the line washed away, the freight rail service to the port was reopened”, De Vries said.“Even road transport in and out of the port, with some roads badly damaged and bridges collapsed, was restored within 10 days through extreme effort from the government.”Hospitals, other facilities and the airport at Beira, which at the time had reportedly suffered 90% damage, had been back on line in just over a week, De Vries said.His view that sub-Saharan governments aren’t as non-responsive as some executives claim was echoed by Claudia Furriel, director at the Department of Trade and Industry.Speaking at a conference hosted by the Trans-Kalahari Corridor Secretariat, she said criticism of the continent’s ability to forge ahead with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was largely unfounded and based on a lack of enough information.
INSERT: Climate change is the biggest inter-generational human rights violation of our time.– Deprose Muchena
