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DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO’S TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE
By Antoine Roger Lokongo
After a quarter of a century of Mobutu’s corrupt and kleptocratic regime, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s transport infrastructure totally collapsed.
In a country the size of the whole western Europe, there are only 146,000 km of usable roads, just 2% of which are paved with asphalt. Owing to poor maintenance, the roads are among the worst in Africa and achieve a fair standard only around the main towns, thanks to the work of the country’s ‘Office des Routes’ (Office of Roads), but now nicknamed ‘Office des Trous!’ (Office of pot-holes). Such is the state of affairs so much so that even the main roads in the capital Kinshasa itself are pot-holed. Here public transport is so scarce that the majority of the city’s six million inhabitants are now used to walk long distances.
Local people in the interior of the country are so deprived because they cannot afford to sell their goods to the cities from which they are cut off due to lack of a good road network. So there is hunger in the city while essential agricultural products are rotting in the countryside.
When the late President Laurent Désiré Kabila came to power, the government of public salvation which he led devised a three-year programme of ‘national reconstruction’, at the heart of which was the rehabilitation of the country’s transport infrastructure in order to secure free movement of people and goods. The main route linking Kinshasa with the Atlantic port of Matadi, known as ‘La Nationale N0 1’ was totally rehabilitated. So was ‘La Nationale N0 2’ stretching from Kinshasa to Bandundu, the chief city of Bandundu province, the bread basket of the capital. This nationwide effort was cut short by a war of aggression launched against the Democratic Republic of Congo by a Rwandan-Ugandan-Burundian coalition backed by well-known superpowers, and with the complicity of some Congolese rebel puppets.
The Belgian-installed telephone network has disintegrated to a point where communications -both internal and international – are becoming almost impossible, except for the privileged who own a telecel, a mobile phone or a satellite telephone.
Regular air lines flights both internal and international are a thing of the past. The Belgian airline company, Sabena until recently monopolised all the flights from Europe to Congo vice versa, until the New Ligne Aériennes Congolaise (LAC), as well as the privately owned Hewa Bora airline were launched. Needless to say that the country’s 232 airports (24 with paved runways and 208 with unpaved runways) require major works of rehabilitation. There are connections from N’Djili International Airport (Kinshasa) to over 40 internal airports and 150 landing strips in normal circumstances. Small planes may be available for charter.
Over 1,600km (1,000) miles of the Congo River are navigable and, in normal circumstances, there are services from Kinshasa to the up-river ports of Kisangani and Ilébo.
The main internal railway runs from Lubumbashi to Ilébo, with a branch to Kalemie and Kindu in normal circumstances, and from Kinshasa to the port of Matadi. There are huge potentialities for opening other lines.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s economic development passes by the rehabilitation of the country’s poor infrastructure for transport and communications, which constitutes a major obstacle to that development. This remains the priority of priorities of the government despite the war, and the transport sector represents a huge potential for both local and foreign investments.
THE MAJESTIC RIVER CONGO
It has been said that African countries’borders with one another were artificially drawn by Western colonisers. That is true to some extent because in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it is the River Congo and its tributaries that give this big country its shape and form. Congo is the second longest river in Equatorial Africa (4,640km) after the Nile. With its tributaries, it drains more than 4,100,000 square kilo-meters. The length of the Congo and its tributaries is 5,000km. For some 320km upstream from Kinshasa to Kisangani –the main navigable section of the river – the Congo is about 6 to 14km wide. Most of the river’s 4,000 islands are in this section.
99% of the DRC as we know it today is located with the Congo River basin, much of which is covered by tropical rain forests.
The river basin lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles. During this tumultuous descent, the river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves 40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts. Each second the Congo River pours 34,000 cubic meters of the water into the Atlantic Ocean, second only to the Amazone River. The river has cut deep into the ocean floor, and the brown of its stilt-filled waters may be seen 50km out to sea.
So great is the drop and the volume of water that these 220 miles have as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined. The Congo river hydroelectric potential is estimated at equivalent to 13% of the world’s hydroelectric potential. The Inga hydroelectric power plant at the mouth of the Congo river consists of two hydroelectric stations and much of its potential is still unexploited. The 1,725-km high-voltage power line stretches over almost the entire width of the DRC from Inga in the west of the country to Kolwezi in the heart of Katanga province’s mining region. However small towns and villages situated directly along the power line have no access to electricity supplies. A few smaller hydroelectric power plants have been installed in other provinces. There are plans to sell power to several other African countries.
The Congo River transport system falls short of its potential largely due to ageing equipment, lack of maintenance of the navigable infrastructure and poor performance of the public waterway agencies. But there is a new hope and optimism that the Democratic Republic of Congo’s new vision and vocation in the world consist in exporting peace, development and security to the rest of Africa and the world. It is not impossible…
As a matter of fact, a staggeringly ambitious plan by a group of Congolese businessmen to pump water from the Congo river to southern Africa and the Middle East was hampered by the current war of aggression. Dubbed the ‘Solomon water pipelines’ or ‘Peace water pipelines’, the project aimed to build two long-distance pipelines right across the African continent. One would have run south and deliver water from the mouth of Congo River to the desert-hit Walvis Bay in Namibia –1,000km away. The other would have run through civil war zones and supply water to the Middle East via Port Sudan – a distance of some 2,000km. It was hoped that this would have not only eased the conflict between Israel and Arab countries but also because the basin of Congo River has water that is among the less polluted of the world and that is easy to treat.
It is no surprise that when evoking his vision of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s economic development, Kamel Morjane, the outgoing Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Koffi Annan, stressed the importance of water in this country. Morjane said he considered water as ‘one of the precious commodities’ that Congo has beside its other untapped mineral and natural resources with which the country is endowed and should be utilised as a means to develop a flourishing economy based on agricultural and hydroelectric energy projects.
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