Neglect, War Take Toll on Congo Transport

The first-class rail car sits abandoned in a derelict train yard ruled by goats and grasshoppers. It last served as a barracks whose dwellers built fires on the floor, ripped the cushions off the seats and broke the windows.

It is a metaphor for a Congo blasted apart by four decades of neglect and a five-year civil war that killed 3 million people, most from hunger and disease. After so much devastation and tragedy, simply stitching together a country bigger than the U.S. Southwest is one of the great challenges facing Africa, foreign aid givers and the fragile postwar Congolese government.

The roads are mostly impassable, cratered and infested with bandits. Passenger planes have not landed in Kalemie for years; the bombed-out airport is controlled by hot-tempered teenagers with guns.

Decades of corruption, mismanagement and neglect under former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko left the road and rail network in ruins. The war that followed finished off what little had survived. As a result, Congo’s eastern half is severed from the west, and the gaping, forested middle country is a no-man’s land.

“Getting around in Congo is like trying to travel from California to Illinois, but finding out that someone has built a giant fence around the central states,” said Michael Satin, an American aid worker for Food for the Hungry International. “It’s the third-largest country in Africa, but it’s like a black hole in the center of the continent.”

Four flights a week link Congo’s two largest cities -- the capital, Kinshasa, in the west and Lubumbashi in the southeast. The only other way is by road -- or what’s left of it. The 960-mile journey, at a spine-rattling pace of 8 miles a day, can take four months. In this desperately poor nation of 53 million, few can afford airline fare.

No road links Kinshasa to Kisangani, a major commercial hub on the Congo River 900 miles to the east. A few tenuous transport links have begun to revive -- commercial barges resumed service in August, and a passenger airline flies between the two cities once a week.

Congo, or Zaire as it was named under Mobutu, slowly decayed during his 32-year reign. Then, on Aug. 2, 1998, Rwanda and Uganda, two of Congo’s nine neighbor states, sent troops into the country to back rebels seeking to oust Mobutu’s successor, President Laurent Kabila. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia rushed in troops to support him. It was the beginning of what would come to be called Africa’s world war. All foreign armies have at last withdrawn, but not before causing heavy damage. Although the war is officially over, Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels still control Kalemie.

A government headed by Kabila’s son, Joseph, shares power with the rebels, and elections are supposed to come next year. But there are doubts that the government is strong enough to pull the country together and ensure everyone gets to vote.

In some towns in the volatile, rugged northeast, even the mail sometimes takes weeks; the government may face serious hurdles distributing ballot boxes and counting votes.

Most of Congo’s crumbling infrastructure is left over from Belgian rule, when vast road, rail and river barge networks were built to move rubber, copper and gold from the forested interior.

Kalemie, then named Albertville, had a major railhead and port on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, making it “one of the turntables of Central Africa,” according to a 1956 travel guide. Passengers would show up at the station dressed in their finest clothes, said Am’Drolainy Dema, a railroad official.

A first-class ticket to Lubumbashi, 410 miles south, cost $35. Passengers could dine while taking in the scenery, have a drink at the bar, then enjoy a hot shower before bed.

Dema’s title is director of eastern Congo’s office of the Societe National des Chemins de Fer du Congo, the national rail and port authority. But he comes across more as the sheriff of a ghost town.

Dema said the last passenger train left the station on Aug. 25, 1998. The next day, Rwandan soldiers swept into Kalemie and camped in the coaches.

“We need things here to return to normal,” he said. “Before the war, life was good.”

In the dust-blown train yard, the good life seems far away. The bar car’s mirrors lie in sparkling shards. The shower is overrun with spiders, and the toilets are filled with dirt.

Dema said that before the war, Kalemie had 40 locomotives constantly running. Now a train may leave once a week, if it carries enough goods to make the trip worthwhile.

Still, the people of Kalemie make do. Each morning, dozens of travelers and traders arrive, pushing bicycles laden with coal, cotton and palm oil, balancing their wheels on the train rails.

The war and neglect damaged two key railroad bridges connecting Kalemie to former markets. Today, aid agencies have to spend millions to fly food to displaced and hungry people.

As part of initial efforts to mend Congo’s transportation infrastructure, the U.S. Agency for International Development is paying for the repair of 310 miles of railroad.

Other projects aim to repair the bridges, which would reduce the cost of relief operations.