Congo Approves a US$1.26 Billion Railway for the Lobito Corridor

DR CONGO · MINING & LOGISTICS

The Lobito Corridor railway has moved from communiqué to cabinet approval. Congo’s Council of Ministers has adopted a draft US$1.258 billion collaboration convention with Mota-Engil Africa covering the financing, rehabilitation, operation and eventual transfer of the 1,004.5 km Dilolo–Sakania line, according to Zoom Eco’s 3 August 2026 report on the minutes.

What the Lobito Corridor railway deal actually covers

The convention is broader than a construction contract. It bundles financing, rehabilitation, modernisation, operation, maintenance and the eventual transfer of the line back to the state, Zoom Eco reported, citing the Council of Ministers minutes.

That structure matters more than the headline number. A concession that includes operation and maintenance puts a private operator, not a ministry, in charge of whether trains actually run on time.

Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Jean-Pierre Bemba presented the file. The counterparty is Mota-Engil Africa, the African arm of a Portuguese group that has been building on the continent since 1946, when its founder opened a construction business in Angola.

One caveat belongs in the open. Zoom Eco places the relevant Council of Ministers sitting on Friday 31 July 2026, while earlier Congolese reporting dated approval of the underlying public-private partnership to the 94th Council of Ministers on 10 July 2026, when the file was tabled by the Minister of State for Planning standing in for Bemba.

Those are two stages of the same file rather than a contradiction. What has not happened yet is a signature.

Why 13.7 million tonnes is the number to watch

Congo’s problem has never been ore in the ground. It has been getting the ore to a ship.

Copper and cobalt from Katanga have historically travelled thousands of kilometres south and east, mostly by road, to ports in South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique. Trucking is slow, expensive and exposed to every border queue on the way.

A rehabilitated line running progressively to 13.7 million tonnes a year changes that arithmetic. It shortens the journey to the Atlantic and moves a large share of volume off the road network.

For anyone modelling Congolese copper, the freight cost per tonne is the variable that moves. Rail capacity is the lever behind it.

The Atlantic route versus the eastern route

The Lobito Corridor is the reason this contract carries geopolitical weight. It runs west, from the Congolese copper belt through Angola to the Atlantic port of Lobito.

Washington and Brussels have both promoted the corridor as an alternative to the eastward routes, where Chinese-owned mining groups and Chinese-financed logistics dominate. The Dilolo–Sakania section is the Congolese piece of that map.

The choice of contractor complicates that framing rather than settling it. Mota-Engil is Portuguese and Porto-based, but China Communications Construction Company, the Chinese state-owned builder, holds 31.00% of it and has a vice-chairman on its board, according to the company’s own filing to Euronext Lisbon on 27 April 2026.

A corridor promoted as the Western alternative would therefore be built and run by a European contractor that is itself close to one-third Chinese state-owned. That is not a scandal, but it is the kind of detail that gets lost in the political framing.

Nor does the corridor remove China from the upstream picture. Chinese groups still own much of the production the railway would carry, a reminder that a corridor changes who moves the metal, not necessarily who owns it.

The money Kinshasa does not have spare

The convention lands against a stretched budget. Under the Budget Ministry’s commitment plan, the state intends to commit CDF 13,538.6 billion — about US$5.97 billion — between 1 July and 30 September 2026, Zoom Eco reported on 4 August 2026.

Defence takes the single largest quarterly envelope at CDF 2,343.3 billion, or roughly US$1.03 billion. Interior and security receive CDF 815.4 billion, about US$359 million.

Put plainly, Congo expects to commit roughly four-fifths as much to its army in a single quarter as the entire railway is said to cost. That is the fiscal context in which a concession structure becomes attractive.

A concession shifts the upfront capital to the operator and repays it through traffic over time. It is also why the traffic forecast, rather than the construction schedule, is the assumption that deserves scrutiny.

What to watch next on the Lobito Corridor railway

Three things will show whether this is real. The first is the financing package.

The US International Development Finance Corporation signed a letter of interest with Mota-Engil’s African engineering arm on 5 December 2025 covering up to US$1 billion. That is an expression of interest subject to full review, not a committed loan.

The second is the tariff. A corridor only wins volume if the door-to-port cost beats the trucking alternative that miners use today.

The third is the Angolan side, where Mota-Engil already holds 50% of Lobito Atlantic Railway, the consortium running the roughly 1,300 km from the port of Lobito to the Congolese border under a 30-year concession. The same operator on both sides of the frontier should ease coordination.

It also concentrates pricing power over Congolese exports in one company, a question Kinshasa has not answered in public. Until these land, the safest reading is that Kinshasa has approved the intention rather than signed the outcome.

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Sources: Council of ministers minutes (via Zoom Eco, 3 August 2026); Congo Budget Ministry.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief