Tazara project showcases Beijing’s leaner approach to overseas development just as western aid appears to retreat
Mukololo Chanda still recalls the glory days of Africa’s “freedom railway”. Almost four decades ago, fresh from high school in Zambia, she began working as a switchboard operator on the railway built by Mao Zedong’s China that she believed would steer her newly independent country to prosperity.
“It was the only reliable way to travel to many places — everyone was using it,” said Chanda, a bubbly 55-year-old who is now the station master in Kapiri Mposhi, from where the Tazara railway links copper-rich, landlocked Zambia to Tanzania on Africa’s east coast.
But decades of underfunding and mismanagement have today left its decaying wagons and tracks operating at a fraction of capacity. “I was working alongside Chinese [colleagues], everything was running smoothly and we were always paid on time,” Chanda recalled. “I’d like the Chinese to come back.”
She is not the only one. Zambia — long a poster child for Beijing’s reach in Africa — and Tanzania are negotiating with a consortium led by the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation for a $1bn concession to rehabilitate and run the iconic railway, reviving the strategic export route to Beijing.
The railway is an exemplar of a revamped, leaner approach to Chinese overseas development that comes just as US President Donald Trump’s gutting of USAID and the UK’s slashing of its aid budget throws western approaches to foreign assistance into question.
China has long taken a different path from western nations, focusing less on humanitarian aid and more on financing grand infrastructure projects that many African leaders say are needed to lift their countries out of poverty.
Tazara showcases an attempt to use more equity investment by Chinese state companies after Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative was marred by defaults in borrower countries, including Zambia.
Fredrick Mutesa, the secretary-general of the Zambia-China Friendship Association, said that “there’s a feeling that there is no alternative to [the western] model of development, which is more aid than partnership”. Referring to China, he said: “To be able to see a country that has used a different path to development, it’s quite inspiring.”
Whether it succeeds could have far-reaching implications for the deepening competition for influence in a continent that is home to rich deposits of copper and other critical minerals vital to the global energy transition.
A rival US-backed project is under way to upgrade the colonial-era Lobito Corridor and ferry Zambia’s resources westward through Angola instead.
Agreed under former president Joe Biden through the US International Development Finance Corporation, Washington is lending $553mn to the railway in a model that brought in private investors such as Trafigura and Mota-Engil. The DFC, the US’s response to China’s state policy banks, was itself set up under Trump during his first term.
Although Trump’s gutting of US foreign assistance now spells uncertainty for Lobito too, experts say these sorts of commercial, strategic projects may also characterise Washington’s future engagement on the continent.
Trump’s presidency “signal[s] a complete change in the way in which the US perceives its interests in Africa”, said Peter Doyle, a former senior IMF official now with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
But “anyone who thinks that the US is going to disengage in terms of pursuing its own interests in Africa and give that to China just really hasn’t spent any time in Washington”, he said.
Started in 1970, the Tazara railway was designed to help copper-rich Zambia access overseas markets after white-controlled neighbouring Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, shut its borders in opposition to the country gaining independence from Britain.
Under Mao, Beijing forked out Rmb1bn in interest-free loans to build the Tazara, with thousands of Chinese labourers working alongside locals. At its peak, it ferried more than 1mn tonnes of copper, consumer goods and passengers annually.
“The Tazara to this day is still the biggest Chinese aid project implemented in Africa,” said Tim Zajontz, a lecturer at the University of Freiburg. “It continues to be a symbol of the Chinese-African all-weather friendship, as many officials on both sides often refer to it.”
China’s foreign assistance grew in ambition with BRI, which moved to interest-bearing loans, and has disbursed $1tn since 2013.
But Chinese lending to the continent peaked in 2016, with Beijing pivoting away from large sovereign-backed infrastructure projects to taking equity stakes in projects it then operates. Among recent examples are the state-owned China Harbor Engineering Company taking a minor share in Nigeria’s Lekki Port, and the China Road and Bridge Corporation’s three-decade concession of Kenya’s Nairobi Expressway.
“Small and beautiful” has become an official BRI phrase, with projects like the Tazara now typically financed with smaller public-private partnership loans, rather than through policy banks, and then run as concessions.
“China is ready to . . . implement 1,000 ‘small and beautiful’ livelihood projects,” President Xi Jinping said at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing in September, when he signed the memorandum of understanding with Zambia and Tanzania to upgrade the Tazara. Officials in Zambia and Washington told the Financial Times the deal could close as soon as this month. China’s foreign and commerce ministries did not comment.
Beijing’s influence is on display in Zambia’s Copperbelt province, the country’s mining heartland.
Chinese contractors are widening the highway, having already built local hydropower dams and a football stadium. Wedged between billboards of local Pentecostal churches and fast food outlets, signs in Chinese advertise supermarkets, car repair garages, hotels and heavy machinery shops.
At the Lying Dragon supermarket, where shelves were stocked entirely with Chinese imported goods, the Chinese store manager said business was booming.
While experts do not expect China to fill the void in humanitarian funding left by the US and others, it could expand its soft power in other ways, according to Cobus van Staden, managing editor at the China-Africa Project.
China may promote more projects like “model farms” in which Chinese and African universities collaborate on developing climate-resilient seeds. These are “not fully commercial, but are also not conventionally aid in the way that we understand it”, where aid is a type of charity, van Staden said.
Conversely, some experts suggest that US development assistance may start to look more like that of China.
Trump set up DFC during his first term to invest in emerging markets, competing against China’s construction sprees in the global South.
The DFC remains engaged in the Lobito project, according to people familiar with the financing, and is due to disburse part of its loan this month.
But even it is facing bigger questions from the new administration about its form and purpose, including whether it should focus on larger economies and take a harder line on countries that continue working with China.
Ben Black, Trump’s nominee to run the agency and son of private equity grandee Leon Black, wrote in a blog in January that the DFC should stop “pandering to the interest group-driven issue of the moment” and invest in Greenland, a territory Trump wants to annex from Denmark.
Questioning with a co-author, the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, why the US sent aid to Uganda while the east African nation attracted Chinese investment, Black asked: “Why are American taxpayers funding the groundwork for Chinese economic dominance?”
Zambia’s mines minister Paul Kabuswe was phlegmatic and said the country — which is aiming to hit 1mn metric tonnes of output annually and overtake the Democratic Republic of Congo as the continent’s top copper producer — did not feel the need to choose sides.
China is injecting up to $5bn into a new copper and cobalt fund that will help boost production, while the ministry is also shoring up investment in the “new Copperbelt” dominated by mostly western operators.
“What is happening in the geopolitical sphere will bring its own shocks, but that’s not something that’s going to affect what we’re [doing],” he said. “We will still stay the course.”
Life at the mines can be tough, however. Branham Chitalu, a worker at a Chinese-owned copper mine in the Copperbelt capital Kitwe, said Chinese mines in particular were unpopular. “Everybody is trying to leave,” he said. “The pay is peanuts compared to the other mines.”
However many Zambians care less about who is providing the money for projects than getting things done.
On a recent weekday, grandfather Wilson Mubanga sat in the Tazara’s faded Kapiri Mposhi station as his train, due to have set off an hour ago, waited to be fuelled. From past experience he expected the journey to Luchewe to see his family to take double its scheduled 12 hours.
“It’s very irritating,” he said. “Anyone who can fix this is welcome"
This story originally appeared on the Financial Times.
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