This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I am a civil engineer, Zambian-born, trained at the University of Zambia and the University of Cape Town. I work on the preliminary design studies for the Zambia extension of the Lobito Corridor — the greenfield railway that will connect the Zambian Copperbelt to the existing corridor network.
This is the most exciting engineering project in Zambia in a generation. We are building a railway from scratch — route selection, geotechnical surveys, bridge design, station placement. The technical challenges are substantial: the terrain between Chingola and the DRC border includes river crossings, unstable soils, and elevation changes that require creative engineering solutions.
But the engineering is not what concerns me most. What concerns me is the local content question. How much of this railway will be built by Zambian engineers, Zambian construction workers, with Zambian materials? The Africa Finance Corporation, which is leading the development, talks about African ownership. But in practice, the specialised engineering is being done by international consultants. The heavy construction equipment will be imported. The senior project managers are expatriates.
I do not argue that we should refuse international expertise where we lack it. Railway engineering at this scale requires experience that Zambia does not yet have domestically. But the corridor should be structured to build that experience. Every international engineer should be paired with a Zambian counterpart. Every imported technology should come with a training programme. When the next railway is built in Africa, it should be designed and built by Africans trained on this one.
The corridor is infrastructure for the next century. If it is built by foreigners who leave when construction ends, its value is limited to the physical asset. If it builds African engineering capacity alongside the physical railway, its value extends far beyond the corridor itself. I hope the investors understand this difference.
Building Something New
I studied civil engineering at the University of Zambia, graduated top of my class, and spent five years building roads in Lusaka before I heard about the corridor extension. When I applied to join the engineering team, I thought I understood what I was getting into. I was wrong. Building a railway through the Zambian bush is nothing like building a road in the capital. The terrain fights you. The soil changes every kilometre. The rivers flood without warning. And the communities — the communities have questions that my engineering training never prepared me to answer.
The technical challenges are enormous but solvable. We survey the route, we test the soil, we design the structures, we build. What is not solvable by engineering alone is the human dimension. A grandmother in Kasempa asked me why the railway has to go through her village when there is empty land two kilometres to the east. I explained that the gradient profile requires this alignment. She looked at me and said: "Your gradient does not have to live somewhere else." She was right. Engineering optimises for cost and performance; it does not optimise for the people whose lives it disrupts.
I have learned to listen before I survey. Before we bring the theodolites and the GPS equipment, we sit with the community elders and we explain what we are planning and why. We show them the maps. We ask what we are missing — where the sacred sites are, where the best farming land is, where the children walk to school. Sometimes their information changes our design. Sometimes it cannot. But at least they know we tried, and we know what we are affecting.
What I want people to understand about the corridor is that it is built by Africans, for Africa, even when the money comes from America or Europe. I am Zambian. My construction workers are Zambian. The steel comes from South Africa. The concrete is mixed locally. This is not a foreign project imposed on us; it is our railway, and we will build it right. The corridor will be my generation's contribution to Zambia's future. I intend to make it one we can be proud of.
More Voices
A Life Along the Corridor
The corridor passes through my world but it does not stop to ask how I am. Every day I watch the changes — the surveyors with their equipment, the construction workers arriving in trucks, the officials in their vehicles with tinted windows who come and go without speaking to us. They are building something enormous, something that will change everything, and we are spectators at a transformation that will determine our future.
My community has seen change before. We have survived changes we did not choose — the colonial period, independence, the decline of the mines, the privatisation that emptied our hospitals and schools. Each change came with promises. Each change left us with less than we had before. So when the corridor people come with their presentations and their projections and their promises of jobs and development, we listen politely and believe cautiously.
What we want is simple. We want to be asked, not told. We want to be consulted before decisions are made, not informed after they are finalised. We want the wealth that flows through our community to leave some trace of its passage — a school that functions, a clinic with medicine, roads that don't become rivers when it rains. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for the minimum that justice requires when billions of dollars flow through the land where our grandparents are buried.
I tell my story not because it is unique but because it is common. Every community along the corridor has stories like mine — stories of hope and disappointment, of promises made and broken, of wealth extracted and poverty left behind. If the corridor is truly different from what came before, let it begin by listening to these stories. Not because listening is polite, but because listening is how you learn what communities actually need rather than what outsiders assume they want.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.