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 have traded goods between Lubumbashi and Ndola for fifteen years. I buy manufactured goods — cooking oil, soap, flour, building materials — in Zambia where they are cheaper, and sell them in DRC where supply is limited and prices higher. The Kasumbalesa border crossing is my office. I know every customs officer, every clearing agent, every truck driver by name.
Transport costs are the invisible tax that eats into everything I earn. A 20-tonne truck from Ndola to Lubumbashi costs $1,500-2,500 depending on the season, the road conditions, and how many unofficial payments are required along the way. The official customs duties are published. The unofficial costs — the payments at roadblocks, the "processing fees" at the border, the charges for priority handling — are not published but are entirely predictable. I budget for them.
The corridor promises to reduce transport costs by shifting freight from road to rail. If the Zambia extension connects to the network, and if rail freight is genuinely cheaper than trucking, it could transform the economics of cross-border trade. But I have two concerns.
First, will the railway serve small traders like me, or only the big mining companies? The LAR concession and the mining companies are the corridor's commercial anchor tenants. If container freight for traders is an afterthought, the cost savings will flow to companies that are already profitable while traders like me continue paying truck rates.
Second, what happens to the communities along the truck routes? Thousands of families in Kasumbalesa depend on the cross-border trucking economy — restaurants, rest houses, mechanics, currency changers. If freight shifts to rail, these livelihoods disappear. Progress for some becomes loss for others. I do not hear the corridor planners talking about this transition.
The Mathematics of Survival
I am a trader. I buy dried fish in Kasumbalesa and sell it in Kolwezi. I buy second-hand clothing in Lubumbashi and sell it in Likasi. I buy cooking oil in bulk and distribute it to small shops in mining communities. Every transaction involves transport, and every transport involves a cost that determines whether I make money or lose money, whether my children eat or don't.
The road from Kasumbalesa to Kolwezi should take six hours. It takes twelve because the road is destroyed. My truck — a 1990s Mitsubishi with three hundred thousand kilometres — breaks down on every trip. Spare parts cost more than the truck is worth. Fuel costs more here than in Lusaka because it has to be transported on the same bad roads that destroy my truck. The circle is vicious: bad roads increase transport costs, increased costs reduce trade volume, reduced trade means less pressure to fix the roads.
When they tell me the railway will reduce transport costs, I want to believe them. If I could load my goods onto a train in Kasumbalesa and collect them in Kolwezi the same day, my business would transform. I could trade more goods, more frequently, at lower cost. My prices would drop. My customers — mining families who spend most of their income on food and basic goods — would benefit. The corridor is not an abstraction for me; it is the difference between a business that survives and a business that thrives.
But I have learned to be careful about promises. Will the railway accept small traders' cargo, or will it serve only the mining companies? Will the tariffs be affordable for someone shipping fifty bags of fish, or only for someone shipping ten thousand tonnes of copper? Will there be stations and loading facilities accessible to local traders, or only at the mines and the port? The corridor's design determines its beneficiaries. If it is designed for minerals, minerals will benefit. If it is designed for communities, communities will benefit. I am watching to see which design prevails.
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.