CNN’s Connecting Africa Explores South Africa’s Rail Networks

The World Bank estimates that around 300 million tons of freight are carried by rail each year, yet the potential to carry far more remains vast. In the latest episode of CNN’s Connecting Africa, Eleni Giokos and Victoria Rubadiri explore the renewed drive to upgrade rail networks, expand the manufacturing of rail engines and wagons, and link key economic hubs, as countries look to rail as a catalyst for trade and industrial growth across the continent.

Based in Welkom, south of Johannesburg, Galison Manufacturing makes and supplies railway freight wagons and underground mining equipment for countries across Africa. Andrew Thorburn, CEO of Galison Group, explains the breadth of their company, “we manufacture all over Africa. Just in this workshop alone you’ve seen products for South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Zambia.”

Robots have been drafted to ensure critical components are welded with accuracy and precision. Galison’s Managing Director, Gary Wilson, discusses the benefits of these robots: “the robot is a much more sophisticated welding operation. You can pulse, you can weave, and all the parts come out exactly the same. The robot almost becomes one of your best quality controllers because if the parts aren’t assembled correctly, the robot won’t weld them.”

Their latest undertaking is supplying wagons to one of the largest rail projects in southern Africa – the Lobito Corridor in Angola. Thorburn tells Giokos that the majority of the building materials for this are locally sourced, “underground wagons, we’re talking probably 95% are locally sourced. For these freight wagons, in order to be competitive in southern Africa, the local content of actual materials probably drops to 70%. But I still think that’s a significant number.”

In the suburbs of Pretoria, Traxtion, a private freight operator on the continent, is investing $200 million in South Africa’s rail industry through new trains and wagons. CEO James Holley says it’s one of the largest private investments of rail freight in South Africa to date, “being able to unconstrain the capacity in our railways creates the opportunity for significant growth in South African and regional economies that we haven’t seen in the past.”

From moving coal, to copper, and chrome, Traxtion currently operates in 10 countries across the continent. Holley tells Rubadiri about his hopes for growth, “our immediate growth opportunity heading into the next two, three years clearly will be South Africa […]. And we do see this regional connectivity, the uniform nature of this new way of running trains across the region, presenting a huge opportunity for us as an operator to operate trains that traverse multiple jurisdictions, but also for regional trade, of course, and for South Africa and regional countries to start to trade more effectively with each other.”

For Holley, the cost of cross-border trade has been the biggest hurdle to overcome, “it’s cheaper to get a container from China to Dar es Salaam than it is from South Africa to Dar es Salaam. And that speaks volumes for how inefficient it is for African economies to trade with each other.”

Mesela Nhlapo, CEO of the African Rail Industry Association, a non-profit that works with stakeholders to strengthen the rail network in South Africa and beyond, says having a framework like the Africa Continental Free Trade area is crucial to easing the movement of goods. Speaking to Rubadiri, she says, “we have a tendency to work in silos. And I think that there is a greater need that when we plan as Africans and individual states, we can plan as South Africa, Botswana, or any other country, but we must all plan towards one single master plan.”

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Author: Tshegofatso Nkubone from Burson Africa on behalf of CNN.

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