SADC’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

# **Box 2.1 The north-south corridor**

_Corridor anatomy._ The north-south corridor is the main artery supporting international and intraregional trade in southern Africa and extends from the southern Democratic Republic of Congo to the Cape. The corridor comprises both road and rail arteries, connecting with ports. The core road artery covers a distance of 7,500 km from Dar es Salaam to Durban, spanning Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are subarteries connecting the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. National rail systems form a railway network of approximately 6,000 km. Zambia (RSZ), Zimbabwe (NRZ), Tanzania (Tazara), and South Africa (Spoornet) compose the network. Railway volumes are generally low for all systems except Spoornet. At current traffic levels, all the rail operators along the corridor (with the exception of Spoornet) are running at barely 10 percent of the capacity of the infrastructure. The corridor connects landlocked countries with the port of Durban and Dar es Salam. Subarteries of the corridor link landlocked countries with smaller ports in Mozambique.

_Corridor and rail condition._ Only around 10 percent of the roads in the corridor are in poor condition. This is because of poor road maintenance in Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent in Tanzania and Zambia. Among the corridor’s sub-arteries, roads in Mozambique and to some extent in the Democratic Republic of Congo also need to be rehabilitated. Meanwhile, approximately 30 percent of the length of the rail corridor (outside South Africa), nearly 2,000 km in all, is currently in poor condition and requires rehabilitation. This condition is fairly evenly spread along the network, with most countries facing significant rehabilitation requirements. Existing traffic volumes are too low to cover the high costs associated with infrastructure rehabilitation and track maintenance. With the current traffic volumes, it is not possible for all of the examined railway systems to cover infrastructure rehabilitation needs as well as ongoing track and rolling-stock maintenance costs with their own revenues.

_Trade facilitation along the corridor._ Lengthy and inefficient administrative processes cause major problems for freight moving along the corridor. Some of the border crossings are notorious for delays to both road and rail freight. For road freight, the journey from Lusaka to Durban takes over eight days to complete, with as many as four days spent at border crossings. While trucks can operate at 50–60 kmph, the effective speed along the route averages a little over 12 kmph. The costs of delays for an eight-axle interlink truck has been estimated to be around $300 per day; given traffic volumes, this represents a loss of more than $50 million annually. For rail freight, a journey of 3,000 km from Kolowezi (along the Democratic Republic of Congo border) to Durban has taken up to 38 days to complete, 29 days of which are associated with customs processes and interchange. Even though trains run at 25–30 kmph, their effective speed along the route is 4 kmph—more or less the pace that a horse and buggy moves. Simulations suggest that these delays cost over $200 a day and represent a loss of $120 million per year, given traffic volumes.

The culprits are the border posts of Beit Bridge (Zimbabwe to South Africa) and Chirundu (Zambia into Zimbabwe). The delays at these borders are reputed to be among the longest in the continent. For railways, the major obstacles to trade facilitation have been a lack of reciprocal access rights among operators, inadequate operational planning, and an overall deficit in traction capacity. As it stands now, either access from one rail system to another is restricted for technical reasons (locomotives from one network are not allowed on another due to inability to provide technical assistance to broken locomotives belonging to another operator) or connecting rail operators simply do not have the necessary traction capacity to service existing traffic (mainly because of the low dispatch reliability of aging and badly maintained locomotives). In addition, poor traffic planning often causes undue delays, as operators have not signed binding contractual commitments that incentivize them to provide reliable interconnection services.

_Source:_ Curtis 2009; AICD various.

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