Botswana’s US$16 Billion Railway Has a Study, a Route and No Start Date

SOUTHERN AFRICA · INFRASTRUCTURE

The Trans-Kalahari Railway now has a finished feasibility study and a price: US$16 billion for 1,500km of heavy-haul track from Botswana’s coalfields to the Atlantic. The minister responsible has also said, in public, that the railway cannot pay for itself as a railway.

What the Trans-Kalahari Railway study delivered

CPCS Transcom, working with Zutari and the Namibian firm Bowmans, handed over the completed feasibility study on 31 July 2026. It was formally received at the project’s joint ministerial committee meetings, closing phase one.

The study took longer than planned. CPCS began the twelve-month exercise in April 2025, and the deadline slipped from April to June 2026 after a two-month extension agreed at a committee meeting in December 2025.

The scheme itself is older than that. Botswana and Namibia signed a bilateral agreement in 2014, and construction start dates have been announced and missed more than once since.

The two governments are represented by Noah Salakae, Botswana’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, and Veikko Nekundi, Namibia’s Minister of Works and Transport, who co-chair the committee.

Why Botswana wants an Atlantic port

Botswana is landlocked. Its exports currently reach the sea through South African ports, which means its trade runs at the pace and pricing of a neighbour’s infrastructure.

Walvis Bay offers an alternative on the Atlantic, and a shorter route to buyers in Asia via the Cape. For a country trying to diversify beyond diamonds, coal exports are the obvious candidate cargo.

The Mmamabula coalfields have large reserves and almost no way of reaching a customer at scale. The design target of around 90 million tonnes a year is aimed principally at India and China.

The first phase is projected to employ about 6,000 Batswana and 4,000 Namibians, which is why the political appetite has survived a decade of delay.

The minister’s own warning

The most striking thing about this stage of the project is the candour of the man promoting it. Salakae has said the railway “as a standalone railway simply cannot generate enough revenue from transport economics alone to justify its staggering US$16 billion cost”.

That is not a stray remark. It is an argument that the line has to be financed as a development corridor, with mines, power generation and industry along its length, rather than as a piece of transport infrastructure.

Corridor financing is harder than it sounds. It requires anchor customers signing long-term offtake before the track exists, and it requires two governments to agree how the resulting value is split.

It also means the business case depends on coal demand a decade out, at a point when the direction of that demand is contested.

The date that does not exist

Reporting on the start of construction does not agree. Botswana’s Mmegi puts it at 2027; Namibian outlets have cited project officials pointing to around December 2026.

Salakae himself resolved it, in a way. He said in early August that he expected timelines for the commencement of construction to be announced soon, which means that as of the study’s delivery no date had been fixed.

Given the project’s history of announced and missed start dates, the honest position is that construction is expected in late 2026 or 2027 and has not been scheduled.

The feasibility study is nonetheless a real milestone. It is the document lenders and offtakers need before any of the rest can be negotiated.

Where it sits in the corridor contest

Southern Africa is now host to competing plans for moving minerals to a coast. The Lobito Corridor runs Congolese and Zambian copper west to Angola with American and European backing.

The Tazara line, rehabilitated with Chinese money, runs Zambian copper east to Dar es Salaam. The Trans-Kalahari would add a third route, this one for Botswana coal.

Each is an argument about which port, which currency and which partner an African export economy attaches itself to, the question at the centre of our Africa: The New Scramble coverage.

The difference here is that Botswana and Namibia are proposing to fund a corridor between themselves, without a great power underwriting it. That is either the project’s greatest strength or the reason it has taken twelve years.

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