Rail features in all the planning for the development and improvement of logistics corridors in Africa, but there seems to be little real progress in shifting plans off the drawing board.The exception is the Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority (Tazara) railway line, which has been opened to private operators.Calabash Freight started operating on the line in 2018, and in the 2018/19 financial year, Calabash accounted for over 50% of the freight volumes transported on the line, with overall volumes increasing by 60% year-on-year, according to Fitch.“Despite the drop in global demand for copper – Zambia’s main mineral export – Calabash and Tazara respectively transported 197 000 and 182 000 tons of freight in 2019/20, a 4.5% uptick versus total freight volumes transported on the line in 2018/19, followed by reported 26.6% y-o-y growth in 2020/21.”More traffic means there is sufficient revenue to maintain the line, and Fitch expects Tazara to open it up to more private operators.“Demand for freight transport on the Tazara railway will remain robust, as we forecast Zambian copper mine production to exceed one million tons in 2029, up from 880 000 tons forecast for 2022.“Ongoing and planned improvements of port infrastructure in Dar es Salaam will support the transport route's competitiveness vis-à-vis alternative export corridors via South Africa,” states the report.Fitch is not as optimistic about plans for a north-western rail line to connect the Copperbelt with the Angolan port of Lobito.It believes that the planned rail connections to Beira and Nacala in Mozambique will also not gain traction.“While the government’s move towards more business-friendly reforms and an expected near-term agreement with the IMF will improve Zambia’s overall risk profile, the country’s construction industry will retain significant risks, limiting the overall access to rail infrastructure development opportunities for less risk-tolerant companies in particular,” it states.Elsewhere in the region, there are also more plans than implementation.An example is the north-south multimodal transport corridor, which is described by the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (Pida) as “the design and implementation of a smart corridor system for both road and rail on the multimodal African Regional Transport Infrastructure Network (Artin) corridor in Southern Africa”.Its objective is to allow easy border crossings for both passengers and goods between South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.Role-players include the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, East African Community, Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Southern African Railways Association (Sara).According to Pida, the project includes the modernisation of Artin corridors and includes 560 kilometres of highway and 900 kilometres of road.Some 180 kilometres of railway line are to be added to the network, which will also be modernised, according to the project website.However, in a list of 22 projects commissioned since 2013, there is zero reference to rail.South Africa, once the rail powerhouse of the continent, now has crumbling infrastructure and increasingly unreliable service.In March 2020, before the Covid-19 lockdown, Transnet reported that it was cancelling about 170 goods trains a month because of a spike in 2019 in the theft of overhead cables. Data released in May 2021 showed that less than a quarter of all freight in 2020 was moved by rail.Statistics SA reported that rail volumes had dropped to 2008 levels.More than 150 million tons of cargo were transported by road along South Africa’s transport corridors between January and March 2021, compared to just 40 million moved by rail.
