The truth about the Lobito Corridor
Authors
The Lobito Corridor has been sold as the flagship of Western efforts to compete with China in Africa: a multi-billion-dollar railway carrying critical minerals from the heart of the continent to the Atlantic. The reality is smaller, stranger and far more revealing: a limited rehabilitation of a colonial-era, Chinese-refurbished line whose copper still flows mostly to China. The story is as much about propaganda as it is about rail and minerals.
In this episode of Europolis: the global Europe podcast, host Poorva Karkare sits down with Lee Jones (Professor of Political Economy and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London) and Shahar Hameiri (Professor of International Politics, University of Queensland) to separate what the Lobito Corridor actually is from the story that has been told about it, and to ask how African governments are exercising their own agency in the process.
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Whatever your listeners might have heard about the Lobito Corridor, it's almost certainly wrong.
Key discussion highlights
A flagship built on hype. The corridor is the self-declared flagship of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. But the headline figures, around $4 billion on the US side and €2 billion on the EU side, are reached only by collating years of pre-existing and often unrelated spending. Jones and Hameiri argue this is a deliberate exercise in perception management, one that think tanks and much of the media have repeated uncritically.
The EU is doing little, though more than the US. Actual EU support across all three corridor countries adds up to under €112 million, spread thinly across agriculture, trade facilitation and training. On the US side, the headline $550 million loan to the railway consortium had still not been disbursed at the time of recording. Both are spending far less than the announcements imply.
The minerals don't flow west. Most Congolese copper is trucked, not railed, and roughly 60% goes to China. Even of the copper now moving along the Lobito line, an estimated 80% to 95% is bound for China, and the operating consortium is itself partly Chinese-owned. The premise that the railway redirects critical minerals toward the West does not hold.
Agency and "poly-alignment". The corridor states, Angola, the DRC and Zambia, are heavily incentivised not to choose sides between Washington and Beijing. Angola is the most committed of the three, but its motives are domestic. It is trying to diversify an economy hit hard by the collapse in oil prices, and it retains a nostalgia for the railway's colonial-era heyday, rather than any alignment with the West.
Three myths about the Lobito Corridor
Jones and Hameiri's fieldwork, carried out at both ends of the railway and in Washington, leads them to three claims about the corridor that, they argue, do not survive contact with the evidence.
| The myth | The reality |
| A new trans-African railway, built by the US, running from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. | The US role is a limited contribution to rehabilitating a colonial-era line in Angola that China had already refurbished. The project was Angolan in origin. The Zambian spur is now costed at $4 to $5 billion rather than the $1 billion first assumed, and almost certainly will not be built. The onward link to Dar es Salaam is purely notional. |
| By backing the railway, the West is funnelling the DRC's critical minerals away from China. | Most Congolese copper is trucked, not railed, and around 60% goes to China. Of the copper transiting Lobito, an estimated 80% to 95% is bound for China. The consortium's only major offtake deal is with a mine 45%-owned by a Chinese state enterprise, and the consortium itself is around 11% Chinese-owned. |
| The Western offer is cleaner, less corrupt and less extractive than China's, with wider development spillovers. | Consortium members have faced serious corruption allegations tied to Angola's former dos Santos government, and the US had itself pursued one of them over similar conduct elsewhere. The promised development spillovers have largely failed to materialise. |
What it means for Europe
If the corridor's geopolitical story is largely myth, the more useful question is what Europe can realistically offer. Many EU officials are privately sceptical of the Washington narrative. Their instinct is to focus on wider economic benefits, diversification and trade facilitation for the partner countries rather than on securing a mineral route, and it is the sounder one. The catch, as Jones and Hameiri put it, is that Europe is still not putting its money where its mouth is. The useful work is unglamorous, needs patient public funding and looks nothing like the flagship it has been dressed up as.
About the speakers
Host: Poorva Karkare
Poorva is a Senior Policy Analyst at ECDPM, analysing the intersection of international trade, geopolitics and macroeconomic shifts.
Guest: Lee Jones
Lee Jones is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Guest: Shahar Hameiri
Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics at the University of Queensland.
About the podcast series
Faced with geopolitical and economic turbulence, Europe needs new and better partners to secure its prosperity. Europolis: the global Europe podcast looks at how new dynamics are reshaping relations between the EU and the wider world and how Europe might navigate this new terrain.
Join us as we break down EU policy through insightful conversations with leading policymakers, industry leaders and experts. Discover how the EU could drive innovation, competitiveness and progress in the global arena, and understand how policymakers are thinking about shaping our sovereign future.
