Digging Tunnels that Don’t Meet
By Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba
Regional Development, a coordinated Effort
Following my comment on Hon. Charles Milupi’s Public Private Programme initiative, I was taken to a development matter I encountered in 2013.
As Permanent Secretary of Western Province, I visited Shangombo, a far flung area that lies to the far west of the country.
You have to endure a 170km long, dusted, rutted and gravel road, and a pontoon from Senanga to Shangombo.
I had also arranged a bilateral meeting with the Governor of the Cuando Province of Angola.
My journey was designed to tackle the the control or end livestock diseases and embark on joint programme of vaccination and disease control between the two provinces.
Zambia shares one of the longest borders with Angola. Large volume of livestock are informally and freely traded between the two countries using these border areas.
The planning team of the Governor shared with us Angola’s cross-border development plans.
The Government was collaborating with Zambia on a $40million channel across the Rivungo River.
The Shangombo-Rivungo canal is a joint venture project by the Republic of Zambia and Angola through their two border towns of Shangombo and Rivungo.
Angola had also planned a rail-line from Luanda to Shangombo and hoped that Zambia could plan a rail line from Shangombo to Mulobezi, to join the Zambia Railways network.
He also informed us that the neighboring Moxico Province was also planning similar links.
Government with the help of the Chinese revived the Benguela Railway, a major project in Angola done at a cost of $1.2billion, that constitutes the last part of the east-west trans-continental link that connects the Indian and Atlantic oceans, crossing Tanzania, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Lobito corridor is also significant in a regional perspective. It provides a much
shorter route to a port from the mineral-rich areas in DRC and Zambia.
This brought me to our development agenda as Zambia.
We had invested over $300million on the Mongu-Kalabo road.
We had also planned to do the Kalabo-Sikongo road and build border facilities.
While we were developing our trade routes with Angola through Sikongo border town, 70km west of Kalabo, the Angolan government appeared to have plans for Shangombo and Jimbe and not through Malundu border town at Sikongo.
What was probably feasible and commercially viable for Zambia was the Chingola-Solwezi-Jimbe railway plans to connect both Copperbelt and Northwestern to the Lobito corridor and the proposed Shangombo-Mulobezi rail link.
CONCLUSION
Planning for trade routes and sea access requires that Zambia follows regional planning and transport corridors adopted by SADC and the African Union for development.
This is to avoid digging tunnels that don’t meet as seen by our investment on the Mongu-Kalabo-Sikongo route while Angola has investment on border links through Shangombo and Jimbe.
SADC has approved the Regional Infrastructure Master Plan for the transport sector and contains four major programmes in the SADC region, namely:
- North‐South Multimodal Corridor;
- Central Corridor including the Walvis Bay Corridor.
- Beira and Nacala Multimodal Corridor; and
4.Southern African Hub Port and Rail Programme.
As a landlocked country seeking to be land-linked, our infrastructure development must seek to link us to Lobito Bay, Walvis Bay, Nakala and Beira, Durban and Dar-es-Salaam by developing routes and links that provide the linkages.