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The Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a 30-year concession on 26 August 2026, in the presence of Presidents Félix Tshisekedi and João Lourenço, over the 1,004.5-kilometre Kolwezi–Tenke–Lubumbashi railway—the Congolese leg of the route joining the Angolan network to the Atlantic port of Lobito. Mota-Engil Africa is the concessionaire. The indicative investment announced for rehabilitation, modernisation, extension, operation and maintenance is approximately US$1.258 billion.

The terms Kinshasa took are unusual in both directions. The state holds at least a 10% stake in the project company and receives a royalty equivalent to 7.5% of annual gross revenue. Against that, it granted the concession without a sovereign guarantee, without an operating subsidy, and without a minimum-revenue guarantee. Financing risk and traffic risk both sit with the concessionaire.

Those three absences are the most informative part of the document. Each is a standard instrument by which a state makes a corridor bankable, and each is a contingent liability on the sovereign balance sheet. Declining all three is not obviously generous to Kinshasa—it is what a government does when its own credit is the expensive input. A guarantee from a sovereign that markets price harshly does not cheapen the debt very much, and it does encumber the state. Selling access on hard terms and keeping the balance sheet clean is the rational trade for a borrower in that position.

The royalty is the other half of the design, and its base matters more than its rate. A claim of 7.5% on gross revenue is senior to profit: it is paid on turnover whether or not the railway clears its costs, and it does not wait for the concessionaire to earn a return. Paired with a minority equity holding, Kinshasa has taken one instrument that pays regardless and one that pays only if the venture works. The state's cash flow does not depend on the traffic forecast being right, which is precisely the forecast it has just declined to underwrite.

Cobalt and copper leave this region on somebody's rails. What the Congolese state has done is separate the question of who carries the corridor's risk from the question of who is paid for it—keeping the second and transferring the first to a contractor prepared to hold both financing and volume exposure for three decades.

Corridors are usually read as contests between the powers financing them. This one was settled by a government with no guarantee to give, converting the only asset it controlled—permission—into a senior claim on revenue. Sovereignty exercised through the terms sheet rather than the treasury.

— Capital Statecraft Intelligence · Resources & Statecraft Desk

Primary source(s): Shanghai Metals Market reporting the DRC Presidency, 27 August 2026