Railing behind the Lobito Corridor and why Tanzania shouldn’t be worried about losing Zambia copper cargo

The proposed Lobito railway corridor stretches from the Atlantic coast of Angola through to the Democratic Republic of Congo, then to the Copperbelt of Zambia.

Observers say the Lobito Corridor has the potential to become Africa’s first transcontinental transport link.

By reducing freight transit time from DR Congo and Zambia to the sea from over a month to just one week, the Lobito Corridor is transforming how goods move across central and southern Africa.

The corridor is opening markets for farmers, small businesses and industries while creating new jobs and lowering carbon emissions.

What This Means for Tanzania

The Tanzania-Zambia Railway backed by China already connects Lusaka’s Copperbelt to the Indian Ocean via the Port of Dar es Salaam, giving Tanzania an existing, operational route for the same minerals that the Lobito Corridor is now being rehabilitated to capture.

Tanzania also holds its own strategic deposits of graphite, nickel and rare earth elements, giving it a mineral-exporter interest in corridor economics that goes beyond transit fees alone.

Besides there have been even suggestions that in future the Lobito could be extended from Zambia to Tanzania, creating a railway line which connects the Atlantic and Indian oceans across Africa.

Or better still, find way of connecting to the already existing TAZARA infrastructure.

The emergence of a well-financed, Atlantic alternative supported by the United States, does not necessarily come at Tanzania’s expense.

Zambia and the DR Congo, as producers, gain negotiating leverage from having more than one viable export route and are unlikely to route all output through a single corridor regardless of which one receives the largest headline financing package.

For Tanzania as a transit economy, the more relevant question is whether TAZARA’s own condition, reliability and freight capacity can compete on cost and speed with a corridor that has just secured US$753 million in financing and set a public target of cutting transport costs by 30 percent.

Infrastructure competition of this kind tends to reward the route that is fastest and cheapest at the moment producers are deciding where to ship, not the route with the longer institutional history.

Mineral carriageway

Two announcements, nine days apart in July 2026, marked the clearest evidence yet that the contest over Africa’s critical minerals has moved from who controls the mines to who controls the routes those minerals travel.

For instance, on the 3^rd day of 3 July 2029, the Africa Finance Corporation announced financial close on a US$753 million package to modernize the Lobito Corridor Railway.

The line running 1,300 kilometres from Angola’s Port of Lobito to Luau on the DR Congo border.

The financing splits into a US$553 million, 15-year senior secured loan from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and US$200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

The concessionaire is Lobito Atlantic Railway, a joint venture between Portuguese construction group Mota-Engil and commodities trader Trafigura.

Nine days later, on 10 July, the DR Congo’s cabinet approved its own half of the same corridor.

Congo’s government endorsed a public-private partnership with Mota-Engil to undertake what cabinet minutes described as a complete rehabilitation of the railway running from the Angolan border through Kolwezi, Tenke and Lubumbashi, the mining heartland responsible for most of the country’s copper and cobalt output.

Mota-Engil and the DR Congo government are now negotiating a 30-year operating agreement.

Total U.S. financial commitment to the corridor, spanning a 2025 pledge and current International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) instruments, has reached approximately US$4 billion.

What the Financing Actually Buys

The numbers behind the Lobito deal explain why two governments and multiple financiers moved on it within the same two weeks.

The rehabilitation is projected to lift the corridor’s freight capacity roughly tenfold, from current levels to about 4.6 million tons a year, while cutting the cost of moving critical minerals by an estimated 30 percent.

Train frequency is set to rise from 12 to 20 departures a week by 2027.

For mining hubs like Kolwezi and Tenke, officials estimate cargo could reach the Atlantic coast at Lobito within five to eight days, against roughly 25 days for the same cargo routed south to the port of Durban.

The DRC has attached specific export targets to that improvement.

Over the next five years, the government wants 50 percent of state-linked copper exports, 30 percent of cobalt and 90 percent of zinc routed through the corridor.

Separately, Congo is preparing an international tender for the Tenke-Kolwezi-Dilolo section, a project estimated at US$400 to US$410 million, with major construction expected to begin in the final quarter of 2026.

The strategic logic is explicit on the American side of the financing too.

The DRC holds close to 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves and overtook Peru in 2023 to become the second-largest copper producer globally, yet Chinese-linked miners including CMOC Group and Zijin Mining Group still account for most of that production.

A December 2025 agreement between Washington and Kinshasa gives American investors preferential access to deposits of copper, cobalt, lithium and tantalum, explicitly citing the strategic nature of the Lobito Corridor.

The Trump administration has backed Mota-Engil’s push to win the DRC rehabilitation contract, and the DFC has issued a letter of interest for up to US$1 billion specifically tied to that portion of the work.

The Setback That Shows the Corridor Is More Than One Deal

Not every piece of infrastructure tied to this corridor is moving at the same pace.

On 15 July, Reuters reported that Trafigura had withdrawn from a separate, 2,000-megawatt power transmission project designed to carry surplus hydropower from Angola’s Lauca and Cambambe dams to mining operations in the DRC and Zambia.

The withdrawal ends a non-binding memorandum of understanding Trafigura signed with engineering firm ProMarks and the Angolan government in July 2024.

An Angolan government official confirmed the exit and said the project itself continues, with the composition of the consortium under revision rather than abandoned outright.

The gap is not going unfilled.

Meridia Energy, a joint venture between Dubai’s Averi Finance and Morocco’s Somagec, is advancing two competing transmission lines, one linking Malanje in Angola to the DRC’s Fungurume mining region, another connecting Soyo in northern Angola to the Inga dam site.

A separate, U.S.-based project from HYDRO-LINK, valued at US$1.5 billion, plans 1,200 kilometres of transmission infrastructure and five substations serving the Lualaba and Katanga mining provinces, with construction expected to take roughly two and a half years once financing closes.

Combined, more than US$3.2 billion in competing transmission projects remain in active development across the same corridor. Trafigura, notably, has not exited the corridor itself.

It remains a partner in the Lobito Atlantic Railway consortium even as it steps back from the separate power line, evidence that a single company’s withdrawal from one layer of a mineral corridor does not signal retreat from the corridor as a whole.

Freight Already Moving, Interrupted by Flooding

The Lobito railway is not a paper project waiting on financing to begin operating.

Freight traffic on the existing line resumed in mid-2026 following a roughly two-month closure caused by severe regional flooding in April, with emergency repair works restoring the link before the July financing announcements.

The Port of Lobito itself operates a dedicated minerals terminal with a 13.5-metre draft capable of handling Panamax-sized vessels, and current outbound shipments already include copper, cobalt, zinc and lithium, alongside inbound cargo of sulfur, ammonia, reagents and fuel destined for the mining operations upstream.

The Larger Pattern

Two deals closing nine days apart, on opposite sides of the same border, financed by different institutions but converging on the same 1,300 kilometres of track, is not a coincidence of timing.

It reflects a deliberate, coordinated push by Western development finance to build an alternative to China’s two-decade head start in African mineral logistics and refining capacity.

Whether that push succeeds will be measured less by financial close announcements than by whether freight volumes, currently transitioning from 12 to 20 trains a week, actually reach the tonnage the corridor was financed to carry, and whether the power, digital tracing, and cross-border customs systems the corridor also depends on keep pace with the railway itself.