The Lobito Corridor is a massive infrastructure axis linking Angola’s shore on the west of Africa to the mineral-rich interior. Built in the first three decades of the 1900s to export cheap commodities to colonial Portugal, it later fell into disrepair. Its main railway was rebuilt during Angola’s post-war reconstruction. More recently it has attracted renewed and competing international interests.
Daniel Tjarks has researched Angola’s political and economic geography, the spatial development of colonial Angola and the current role of international actors in the country. Angola’s post-war spatial development and the government’s plans to promote more balanced and equitable growth also feature in his PhD dissertation. He questions some of the celebratory political claims made about efforts to revitalise the corridor. In particular, whether it will help Angola diversify its oil-dependent economy and benefit ordinary citizens.
What is the Lobito Corridor?
The Lobito Corridor is a logistics corridor. At its heart is a 1,300km rail line that connects the port of the Angolan city of Lobito to the mineral-rich parts of Zambia and Congo to the east.
Its most important component, the Benguela Railway, was constructed between 1903 and 1931 under Portuguese colonial rule by Scottish engineer Robert Williams.
At the time, it was one of three separate railways linking the colony’s ports to its hinterland. This way, colonial Angola could provide Portugal with cheap commodities.
During Angola’s post-independence civil war (1975-2002), the line was largely destroyed. As Angola entered the peace period, the country was able to rebuild its infrastructure thanks to its booming oil business.
Chinese capital and construction companies enabled the resurrection of the railway between 2006 and 2014.
In 2023, a western consortium outbid Chinese competitors for a 30-year concession for the line’s operation. The consortium consists of Swiss commodity trader Trafigura, Portuguese construction company Mota-Engil and Belgian rail operator Vecturis. It has committed to invest US$455 million in the corridor’s development in Angola alone. Trafigura CEO Jeremy Weir says it will not only “create a western route to market for goods and materials” but also “boost the development of sectors along the line”.
Why is the corridor attracting so much attention again?
A lot is at stake in the Lobito corridor. Much more than a regional infrastructure project, it has gained strategic importance in the global scramble for critical resources.
Cobalt and copper from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are key to the clean energy transition and modern communication technology. The DRC and Zambia together account for about 14% of the global mine production of copper and the DRC for 73% of cobalt.
Control of access to these minerals is at the heart of growing US-China competition, at times referred to as a “second cold war”.
The Lobito corridor has therefore become a project of global importance.
For this reason, the railway line has attracted high-ranking visits in recent years. In 2024, then US president Joe Biden inspected the rail line, marking the first visit of a US president to the continent since 2015 and the first of a sitting US president to Angola. In 2025, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier also made the trip – again, the first of a German president to the country.
Even the Trump administration seems to have decided it will not break with commitments to support development of the corridor.
In 2024, the US, Europe, the African Development Bank and the three host countries signed a memorandum of understanding to extend the line to the east and mobilise investment alongside it.
At the seventh AU-EU summit in November 2025, European commission president Ursula von der Leyen described these commitments as evidence of the “European model” of investment and the two continents’ “unique and strategic partnership”. The commission promised to mobilise loans and private investments for the corridor worth no less than US$2 billion.
As the US and EU are trying to counter Chinese capital investment in Angola and in the wider region, the Lobito Corridor will continue to play a key role.
Who will benefit from the Lobito corridor?
There are good reasons to remain sceptical about the corridor’s promised benefits.
First, recent background reports point to major challenges facing the development of the soft infrastructure of customs and regulations. Others have pointed to the corridor’s unclear commercial viability. Ships having to call at the secondary port of Lobito will incur higher costs. There’s also competition from other routes – mostly, the Chinese-built Tazara railway, connecting Zambia to Dar-es-Salaam.
Second, the economic model at the heart of the Lobito corridor is anything but a break with exploitative extractivism. Throughout Angolan history, primary commodities have left the country, while hopes for broad-based growth have repeatedly been frustrated.
The consortium that now operates the railway grounds its investment primarily in expectations of future demand for critical minerals. And while the political emphasis on complementary investments is laudable, the corridor does not, as one background report puts it,
immediately lend itself to linking minerals and wider development.
Moreover, the country has already seen decades of large-scale oil exports that have delivered few tangible results for the wider population. Instead they have propelled blatant corruption and growing discontent with a ruling party that has been in power since independence.
Angolan economists Alves da Rocha and Wilson Chimoco have argued that “expectations on the impact on economic diversification are very low”.
Angolan government critic and journalist Rafael Marques de Morais has even called the corridor
a mirror of everything negative the continent endures: Chinese debt, Western opportunism, Congolese blood, Angolan misrule.
For him
if hypocrisy needed a railway, it would look exactly like the Lobito Corridor.
If the project really is to benefit all, the government will have to live up to promises that fewer and fewer Angolans seem to believe it capable of delivering.
Daniel Tjarks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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