Lobito Corridor, the multimodal transport link from Angola’s Atlantic port to Central Africa’s mineral belts, has been paraded at this week’s 7th African Union–European Union Summit in Luanda as a flagship sign of renewed partnership between Europe and Africa. Western capitals and sympathetic media have billed the corridor as a strategic answer to China’s expanding footprint on the continent. But in a stinging appraisal published in Maka Angola, journalist Rafael Marques de Morais urges a different reading: the corridor, he argues, is less a geopolitical triumph than a mirror of the familiar ills that have long shadowed African development.
The contrast between summit-stage promise and street-level reality is at the heart of Marques de Morais’s critique. The Lobito railway and associated transport infrastructure, presented in some Western capitals as evidence of an alternative to Chinese investment, instead — he writes — reproduces patterns Africa knows too well: external financing that deepens dependence; elite capture that concentrates benefits; extraction that draws blood in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and governance failures that leave ordinary people disconnected from apparent progress.
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That critique taps into two overlapping narratives shaping international debate. One is geopolitical: Western governments, alarmed by Beijing’s rapid wins in strategic contracts and hard infrastructure across Africa, are increasingly keen to offer competing sources of finance and partnership. The other is structural: corridors such as Lobito are meant to integrate landlocked producers into global markets, but they can also streamline the flow of raw materials out of the continent while inward flows — jobs, value-added industry, local taxes — are uncertain.
Marques de Morais’s shorthand — “Chinese debt, Western opportunism, Congolese blood, Angolan misrule” — frames the corridor as a project that amplifies external leverage while sidelining the long-term needs of communities along the line. That formulation is intentionally stark, and it resonates because it describes familiar dynamics: loans and contracts signed by national governments with limited transparency; infrastructure delivered in ways that prioritize export throughput over local connectivity; and regulatory gaps that allow environmental and labor harms where oversight is weak.
Those dynamics are not unique to one foreign partner. They are embedded in how major projects have been financed and governed across decades, whether under Western, Chinese, or other investors. The policy lesson is therefore not only about geopolitical alignment; it is about governance design. A corridor can facilitate economic transformation or it can entrench extractive patterns. Which outcome prevails will depend on the terms of investment, how revenues are shared, and who shapes the operations and oversight of the assets.
Marques de Morais’s intervention is timely because the AU-EU summit will shape choices about financing, procurement standards, and conditionalities that could determine whether the Lobito Corridor emerges as an instrument of inclusion or exclusion. He warns that if the project consolidates the interests of a narrow alliance of foreign companies, regional elites and resource buyers, it will perpetuate exactly the problems international partners claim to be solving.
Conversations at the summit have emphasized regional integration, job creation and sustainable development. Those are precisely the metrics that must define any credible defence of the corridor. Absent guarantees on local content, transparent contract disclosure, independent environmental and social assessments, and accountable revenue management, the rail and port investments risk becoming conduits for capital extraction rather than shared prosperity.
Practical measures could make the difference. They include public disclosure of contracts and loan terms; enforceable local content clauses that prioritize refineries and processing on the continent; robust labor protections and community consultation; independent monitoring of environmental impacts; and revenue-sharing mechanisms that direct a portion of export proceeds to regional development funds. Stronger regional institutions that can negotiate on behalf of several states, rather than bilateral bargains with single governments, would also rebalance bargaining power and reduce rent-seeking.
Beyond the policy toolbox, however, lies the political work of accountability. Angola’s governance record — raised by Marques de Morais — matters because how a state manages a strategic asset will determine whether a corridor benefits people or patronage networks. Donor governments and private investors can require safeguards, but ultimately citizens, civil society and independent judiciaries must be able to enforce them.
There is a risk that the rush to present the Lobito Corridor as a geopolitical counterweight to China obscures these fundamentals. Framing the project primarily in zero-sum terms — West versus China — can let all parties off the hook when it comes to domestic reform. It can also instrumentalize African infrastructure for external strategic goals without securing commensurate gains for African citizens.
The AU-EU summit gives partners an opening: to recognize that infrastructure diplomacy must be subordinate to development outcomes that are measurable, equitable and durable. If Lobito is to be more than a slogan on plenary slides, those outcomes must be front and center in any new financing or partnership agreements signed under the summit’s banner.
Rafael Marques de Morais’s warning is blunt, but it points to an essential truth: corridors that merely move raw materials faster leave the underlying political economy untouched. The promise of the Lobito Corridor will be realized only if investment is coupled with transparency, enforceable benefits for workers and communities, and governance reforms that limit capture. Otherwise, the railway will remain an efficient conduit for external interests and an inefficient engine for African development.
By News-room
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
