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China on track to win friends in oil-rich Angola
By John Reed A mural in the Art Deco headquarters of Angola's Benguela Railway shows Africa's colonial rail network in fading tones of sepia and black. During Portuguese rule the line led 1,304km east from the coast to the mines of the interior, today Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Completed by British engineers in 1929, Benguela Railway was bombed and dynamited beyond use during Angola's civil war. Today its longest working stretch ends 150km east of the coast, in the town of Cubal. Passengers ride in or on the roofs of open boxcars on a four-times-daily shuttle between Benguela and Lobito, a coastal city nearby. Now the railway is due for an overhaul costing $300m to $500m, financed by a new foreign partner: China. Three tidy fenced tent camps housing Chinese workers have already sprung up in the muddy fields alongside the line. Ground is due to be broken on the railway's "expedited rehabilitation" this month, with completion planned for August 2007. "We hope to move 30m tonnes of goods and 4m passengers every year," says Daniel Quipaxe, the railway's director. With world markets bidding up prices for commodities, Mr Quipaxe has held talks with his counterparts in neighbouring countries on hauling their mineral ores. The project is just one example of China's expanding influence in Africa, which has rich reserves of many of the raw materials China's booming economy needs. In Angola alone Chinese engineers are refurbishing two other rail lines, government buildings, and a new airport in Luanda, with the help of a $2bn credit for infrastructure from China's Eximbank approved in 2004. President José Eduardo dos Santos, who last stood for election in 1992, said recently that his government needed to rebuild Angola's road and rail networks before holding elections. Originally expected this year, the polls - which Mr dos Santos's MPLA party looks set to win - are now unlikely before 2007. While some government critics claim this is a delaying tactic, his government's record is also at issue, as are the challenges of registering voters in a large country with few decent roads or railways. "In order to win the resounding victory they're hoping for, they need to show they've won the peace as well as won the war," says a foreign diplomat. Angola never held a donors' conference to gather pledges for aid to rebuild infrastructure ruined in the war, which lasted with interruptions from 1975 until 2002. In an interview with the FT last November, José Pedro de Morais, the finance minister, admitted that it was probably now "too late" to hold one. Angola lacks a financing agreement with the International Monetary Fund, in part because of IMF misgivings about how it accounts for the massive revenues it receives from oil. China has proved a more supportive and less critical partner, providing financing and skills to a country that lost many educated people to post-colonial emigration and war. For China, Angola's chief attraction is its oil, of which it rivals the US as the largest importer. Sinopec, the state-owned petroleum company, picked up a share in offshore Block 3 last year when Angola declined to renew a concession held by France's Total. While no reason for the non-renewal was given, some analysts linked it to a criminal case in France that has aired corruption allegations against Angolan officials. A few Angolan commentators have complained about China's reliance on its own experts and imports for its infrastructure projects. "Os chineses", as Angolans call the Chinese bosses, ply the road between Benguela and Lobito in black four-wheel-drive vehicles, and a tanker truck with Chinese characters stands parked at one of the construction camps. Refurbishing the railway will require replacing its rails and substituting concrete sleepers for the colonial-era wooden ones, along with rebuilding 37 bridges and new stations. Posted by: lotp 2006-03-06 |
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