Angola’s Lobito Corridor is being revived – but who stands to gain?

The Lobito Corridor is a massive infrastructure axis linking Angola’s Atlantic coast to the mineral-rich interior of southern Africa. Built in the first three decades of the 20th century to export cheap commodities to colonial Portugal, it later fell into disrepair. Its main railway was rebuilt during Angola’s post-war reconstruction, and more recently it has attracted renewed and competing international interest.

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 1 300 km rail line that connects the port city of Lobito in Angola to the mineral-rich regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of 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. In this way, colonial Angola supplied Portugal with cheap commodities.

During Angola’s post-independence civil war (1975–2002), the line was largely destroyed. As the country entered the peace period, it was able to rebuild its infrastructure thanks to its booming oil sector.

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 to operate the line. The consortium consists of Swiss commodity trader Trafigura, Portuguese construction company Mota-Engil, and Belgian rail operator Vecturis. It has committed to investing 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?

Much more than a regional infrastructure project, the Lobito Corridor 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 technologies. Together, the DRC and Zambia account for about 14% of global copper mine production, while the DRC alone produces 73% of the world’s cobalt.

Control over access to these minerals lies at the heart of growing US–China competition, sometimes described as a “second Cold War”.

As a result, the Lobito Corridor has become a project of global importance.

The railway has attracted high-ranking visits in recent years. In 2024, then US President Joe Biden inspected the line, marking the first visit by a sitting US president to Angola and the first US presidential visit to Africa since 2015. In 2025, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also made the trip – the first visit to the country by a German head of state.

Even the Trump administration appears to have decided not to abandon 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 eastwards and mobilise investment along its route.

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 investment for the corridor worth at least US$2 billion.

As the US and EU seek to counter Chinese investment in Angola and the wider region, the Lobito Corridor is likely to remain strategically significant.

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 in developing the corridor’s “soft infrastructure”, including customs systems and regulatory frameworks. Others have questioned its commercial viability. Ships calling at the secondary port of Lobito face higher costs, and the route also competes with alternatives such as the Chinese-built TAZARA railway, which links Zambia to Dar es Salaam.

Second, the economic model underpinning the Lobito Corridor represents anything but a departure from extractive exploitation. Throughout Angola’s history, primary commodities have flowed out of the country, while hopes for broad-based development have repeatedly been disappointed.

The consortium operating the railway bases its investment primarily on expectations of future demand for critical minerals. While political emphasis on complementary investments is laudable, the corridor does not, as one background report notes, immediately lend itself to linking mineral extraction with wider development.

Moreover, Angola has already experienced decades of large-scale oil exports that have delivered few tangible benefits for the wider population. Instead, they have fuelled corruption and growing public 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 gone further, calling 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 is truly to benefit all, the Angolan government will have to live up to promises that fewer and fewer citizens seem to believe it is capable of delivering. - The Conversation

*Daniel Tjarks is a Research Associate in Human Geography, Saarland University.