The Lobito Corridor: Europe’s neocolonial vision for plundering Africa

The Lobito Corridor was hailed as a Global Gateway model project by Jozef Sikela during his hearing in the European Parliament on November 20, 2024 after which he was approved as the next European Commissioner for International Partnership. However, this project is far from true development objectives, relies on corrupt and shady entities to implement it thanks to public finance, and risks exacerbating negative human rights impacts and environmental damage linked to the mining practices in the Lobito Corridor’s perimeter.

During last year’s G20 Summit in New Delhi, the EU and US issued a Joint Statement, announcing collaboration on the development, operation, and expansion of the Lobito Corridor, a “flagship” project of the G7-sponsored Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). This revived and upgraded railway infrastructure project – originally built by former colonizers Belgium and Portugal in the beginning of the 20th century and frequently used by Belgium to transport minerals it extracted – aims to connect the mineral-rich zone of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia’s Copperbelt to the port of Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast. By mobilising funding and technical knowledge to run the Corridor, the parties aim to secure fast and cheap access to critical raw materials, including those extracted by Western mining companies in the region such as Ivanhoe, Glencore, KoBold Metals (backed by investors with finance from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos), or Eurasian Resource Group.

The overall cost of the project is estimated at up to $2.3 billion. To help deliver the finance, the EU has extended support to the Lobito Corridor via its own investment strategy closely linked to PGII, the Global Gateway. In October 2023, the Commission and the US government signed three Memoranda of Understanding with the governments of the DRC, Zambia and Angola, the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). Italy has also committed to finance 300 m EUR under its Mattei Plan.

The Corridor investments – as well as PGII and the Global Gateway overall – come amidst the European and US goals of countering China’s investments and dominance in supply chains of raw materials. The demand for minerals located around the Lobito Corridor, such as the much sought-after copper and cobalt, has massively increased on account of the global decarbonisation agenda and development of the electrical vehicle (EV) industry. In this context, the Lobito Corridor project can be regarded as a textbook case of both the Global Gateway and the Critical Raw Materials Act.

Over two-thirds of global cobalt comes from the DRC, and 75% of processing of the mineral takes place in China. China has invested extensively in East African infrastructure to ship raw materials from the continent, as well as in parts of the Lobito Corridor railway. It has now committed to upgrade the historic TAZARA (Tanzania-Zambia) railway it helped build in the 1970s (ironically, after the Western countries as well as the Soviet Union rejected to fund the railway), a move seen as a response to the Lobito Corridor initiative.

The Corridor project exemplifies the growing reliance on mobilising private finance with the help of public funds to finance ‘development’, embedded in strategies like the Global Gateway or PGII. To this end, the Commission's "Team Europe" approach has intended to strengthen cooperation among EU institutions, financing bodies like the EIB and EBRD, Member States, and private investors, using EU’s aid budget to derisk European companies' investments in the Global South – that is, to attract private capital investments in global South projects by making returns for companies more appealing thanks to allocation of public development funds.

No data is publicly available on the sum of European public funds allocated, but according to the Commission, €605 million has been ‘mobilised’ across five sectors: €77 million for trade and transit facilitation, €261,5 million for energy and climate, €71,7 million for critical raw materials-related value chains, €98 million for education, skill development and job creation, and €96,7 million for agricultural value-chains. It is not clear what are the investments envisioned under these sectors, who implements them, and from what sources is the money mobilised. The US, reports that it has mobilized over $4 billion in less than a year and a half on the Corridor (that would mean well above the estimated total cost of up to $2,3 billion for the Corridor), making it one of the highest-profile infrastructure projects sponsored by the Global Gateway.

Questionable partners

Amidst these large-scale efforts, a joint venture has been awarded by the Angolan state a 30-year concession for operational management of the railway: the Lobito Atlantic Railway, a consortium comprising Trafigura (49.5%) – a Swiss commodity company and the world’s second largest oil trader, MotaEngil (49.5%) – a Portuguese construction and engineering company, and Vecturis (1%) – a Belgian private railway operator. LAR started to operate in July 2024, transporting raw materials from mines owned by companies such as Canadian Ivanhoe Mining.

Two of these companies have been implicated in several scandals, some of them occurring in the very same Lobito Corridor area.

Trafigura has major interests in the Corridor. It runs the Mutoshi copper and cobalt mine together with Chemaf, a Dubai-based mining group, in the Congolese Lualaba province. In 2022, Trafigura signed a $600 million deal with Chemaf to finance the mechanisation of the mine and to market the production of cobalt hydroxide The acquisition of the mine by Chemaf led to forced evictions around the site that included the burning of settlements and sexual abuse, as Amnesty reported.

A recent investigation of Public Eye revealed that Trafigura has been investing in the area already since early 2010s through a shady subsidiary, which is linked to a senior Angolan executive under sanctions by the US Treasury Department. It was managed by a businessman who is in Brazil’s prison for corruption, and who is allegedly responsible for Trafigura’s current court process in Switzerland, having been charged with having bribed Angolan officials to secure profitable oil deals with Sonagol, the state-owned oil company. Most recently, Trafigura was found guilty in May 2024 for bribing officials in Brazil’s Petrobras oil company to secure favourable contracts.

Moreover, Trafigura has been found guilty in the 2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump crisis, when the firm offloaded some 500 tons of toxic waste which led to the poisoning of tens of thousand Ivorians.

Mota-Engil has faced corruption scandals in recent years while trying to secure railway contracts outside its Portuguese borders, in tax fraud and in participating in a bid-rigging cartel for Portuguese rail maintenance that resulted in inflated payments from public authorities. Sonagold was one of Mota-Engil’s shareholders, but it sold its shares shortly after the concession was awarded to LAR. Its other shareholders are tied to corrupt dealings in Angola.

Vecturis, the 1% owner of LAR, was charged with operating the trains on the Lobito Corridor. According to Public Eye, it had an Angolan subsidiary Vecturis Logística, Portos e Caminhos de Ferro – registered by Trafigura – already in 2012, but it seems to not exist as a registered entity in Angola anymore. At the same time Public Eye notes that Vecturis in Belgium has only four employees and a turnover closer to that of a small NGO, making the company’s credibility of “providing transport services worldwide for passengers, mining products and commercial cargo” questionable. According to Vecturis’ co-founder, its turnover was made up of invoices for services or consultancy.

Which priorities?

Like any other Global Gateway and PGII project, the development of the Lobito Corridor is in theory expected to meet high standards of human rights, sustainability and transparency and to foster local value with clear development additionality. At the same time, the Corridor is supposed to offer the three countries enhanced export opportunities for the three targeted countries and fuel economic growth by facilitating the transit of materials, intra-African trade, agribusiness, and local jobs.

However, it is questionable whether these standards are and will be met, as it is too early to measure the real impact of the Lobito Corridor on local communities and economy.  Most of the land crossed by the railway is sparsely populated. The promise to create local quality jobs and secure productive sector development through private funding in these isolated areas seems hard to believe, especially given the non-existence of a clear long-term strategy which would include local mineral processing, for example. The nearly straight route from the mines to the ocean demonstrates a focus on quick extraction and export, rather than on local communities.

Indeed, in a foreign press briefing, the American Acting Special Coordinator for the PGII mentioned cutting down the transit time from 45 days to 48 hours – while stressing that the intent is not an “extractive play”, and emphasising on the ground for investment and economic growth the project aims to create. According to Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin, such a model of cheap and fast resource extraction of the Lobito Corridor ‘closely resembles the colonial resource extraction model of the 19th century, both in intention and outcome’ and ‘has created vast amounts of visible poverty on the continent.’

 The extractive supplier

With a history of environmental harm and human rights violations, participation in the global race for raw minerals  as things are implies a very high risk of supporting and exacerbating current harmful mining sector patterns.

European and US communication has not addressed the well-documented dreadful mining conditions nor the impact of mineral extraction in the areas key to the Lobito Corridor. The artisanal and industrial mines in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba provinces continue to be plagued by appalling labour practices and disastrous environmental impacts. Exposure to cobalt and cobalt compounds is highly toxic, leading to birth defects in mining communities and threatening women’s reproductive health. Waste dumping contaminates waterways, kills crops and poisons fish. In artisanal mines, miners lack protection and risk death in hand-dug tunnels where accidents are frequent. Tens of thousands of them are children. Miners work in poor conditions for extremely low wages, sometimes face physical abuse by employers. Therefore, supporting the mining sector in this form inherently entails high risk of human rights violations.

Mining can also contribute to deforestation, and critical materials like copper and cobalt are often found in critical forest landscapes. Haut-Katanga and Lualaba provinces had the highest deforestation rates in the past years, with mining activities likely as one of the key influences. At the same time, weak legal protections and gaps in the existing legal framework in the DRC – including no recognition of customary tenure rights, no consultation and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and inadequate due diligence standards in law – expose local communities to risk of negative impacts from the mining activities.

It's hard to imagine how increasing exports won't drive up extraction, resulting in greater environmental and human rights abuses from projects paid for by European public funds under the Global Gateway. Such a strategy perpetuates an extraction model where Africa ends up developing Europe and the people in the global South suffer far more harm than they gain from their own resources.

It remains unclear how this mine-to-ocean rail line can improve local living conditions and support sustainable development. As a flagship Global Gateway initiative, the Lobito Corridor illustrates there is a long way to go for the  Commission to propose a credible development finance strategy. The disproportionate power given to European companies, lack of transparency,  legally shady business, resource extraction, disregard for human rights and the environment, sidelining of local communities and civil society both in Europe and in the global South, and the priority given to commercial and geopolitical stakes all highlight European neocolonialism under the guise of development.