LUBUMBASHI, DR Congo: The 27 heaps of copper slabs are securely lashed down at the again of Omar Rachidi’s tractor-trailer. Now all he has to do is pressure the shipment to its vacation spot. However that’s more straightforward stated than executed. Two thousand kilometers (1,200 miles) of street lie between southeast DR Congo’s mineral belt and the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, from the place the copper can be shipped to Asia. And that freeway is difficult graft. “Infrequently it takes two weeks to do the commute,” says Rachidi, a 57-year-old Tanzanian, on the Chemaf steel processing plant at Lubumbashi in Haut-Katanga province.
“There are many queues, a lot of tolls, a lot of ready on the border.” The Democratic Republic of Congo is the sector’s largest manufacturer of cobalt-the key element in fashionable batteries-and Africa’s largest manufacturer of copper. And the freeway is the the most important however slim hyperlink in getting that wealth to marketplace. On Rachidi’s truck, the copper plates, referred to as cathodes, are loaded in bundles that weigh 2.3 tonnes a work. Every one is chained down “to forestall robbery”, says Chemaf’s copper supervisor Eric Tshinkobo.
With copper achieving round $10,000 (9,200 euros) a ton at the London Steel Alternate, the car is thus hauling a load price greater than 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 bucks. “Robbers assault us, particularly at the street that is going round Lubumbashi,” says Katema. Jacob Daoudi, 45, some other Tanzanian trucker who’s hauling 30 heaps of cobalt hydroxide, says the 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the Zambian border is fraught with chance. “Bandits assault us, they rip the tarps, they take hold of our cash,” he says.
Toll stations
Assaults have change into so unhealthy that increasingly more trucking firms use a machine of advance fee to hide street tolls at the DR Congo a part of the commute, reasonably than have truckers lift a big sum of money. Six toll stations dot the 400 kilometers on Nationwide Freeway 1 from Kolwezi in neighboring Lualaba province, to Kasumbalesa, at the border with Zambia. The queues there are infamous. The tolls “hinder visitors go with the flow and profitability,” stated Lambert Tshisueka Mutondo, president of the federation of global freight firms in Haut-Katanga.
He needs extra police patrols to dissuade robbers and for the collection of toll stations to be halved. Vehicles pay about $500 to hide the 400 kilometers, which makes the price of a go back commute to Dar es Salaam upward thrust to $1,000 in tolls on my own. The cash is going to a Chinese language company that below a freelance with the state builds and maintains roads-an association that mechanically attracts flak.
Congo ‘hassles’
Nationwide Freeway 1 is clean and tarmacked, which makes it a relative excitement to pressure on when put next with DR Congo’s generally pot-holed roads. Nevertheless it has handiest two lanes, every flowing within the reverse direction-the nation nonetheless has no highway. At Kanyaka, midway between Lubumbashi and the Zambian border, greater than 200 vans are ready to get via a toll sales space. Truckers say riding in Zambia and Tanzania is some distance from easiest, however the tolls there are some distance less than in DR Congo and queues and bureaucracy much less hard.
“There are hassles at all times in Congo,” says Maniasi Djuma Makweba, 50, heading for Dar with 35 heaps of cobalt he loaded at Tenke Fungurume Mining SA, situated within the center of the mineral belt. Like different drivers, he complains concerning the thieves, but in addition concerning the safety forces. “While you move to the police to claim a theft, they begin through short of to shake you down” for a bribe. – AFP