Friends of the Rail Forum

NEPAD & THE RAILWAYS OF AFRICA
Railways Africa
Friday, 25 July 2008

New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) / The value of infrastructure in an emerging Africa: African Press Organisation (APO), 21 July 2008 -

“With the adoption of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in 2001, there has been a renewed interest in infrastructure development in Africa, with much of the debate centring on the need to enhance private sector participation in the provision of infrastructure. The apparent interest emanates principally from the growing realisation that developing
Africa's physical infrastructure is critical to ensure poverty eradication and to set the continent on course towards sustainable economic growth and development. Infrastructure plays a pointed, often decisive-role in determining the overall productivity by lowering transactional costs, facilitating the free movement of people and goods as well as unlocking the vast economic potential of African countries.

“At the inception of independence, most of Africa inherited a highly dispersed and unevenly distributed infrastructure from its colonial past. The fact is the limited infrastructure built during that era was largely driven by the objective of connecting natural resources to export markets and little or no consideration was given to the sustainable economic development of the continent. For example, two-thirds of the African railways built in the colonial period connected mines to a coastal harbour.”

[ “Two-thirds” may please the intended audience but its accuracy is debatable. It is imaginative to suggest that the extensive rail systems built during the colonial era in – for example - Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Egypt and Morocco were constructed as links between mines and the sea. - editor ]

I can't let the editor's comment pass without a comment of my own. He may be right about the exact figure (2/3) and, pedantically, that in most of those countries the resource being exploited didn't necessarily come from "mines". Nevertheless, the article is correct in its main thrust that most of the railways (and indeed other infrastructure) built in Africa during the colonial period was not designed to serve the needs of the people, but to serve the interests of the colonial power. This usually meant resource exploitation, which indeed was one of the major reasons for colonisation. In the post-colonial period, where population centres and economic priorities have changed, the existing ex-colonial transport infrastructure is often inappropriate.