Back from Bandundu

Well, that was interesting.

Bandundu is a town of a couple of hundred thousand people about 400 km north and east of Kinshasa.  By road, this takes about seven hours.  Which is, by African standards, not bad!  The first couple of hundred km is paved, even.  (Recent development, last couple of years. It hadn't been paved for long time before that.)

Bandundu sits where two large rivers come together, just a few kilometers before flowing into an even bigger river (the Kasai), which in turn flows into the truly immense Congo River. 

Let me digress a moment and note that the Congo River is really frickin' huge.  Put it next to the Mississippi/Missouri: the Congo's capture area is comfortably larger, and its discharge volume is more than double.  On my last visit, I noted that nature had played a cruel joke on Congo by putting some of the world's largest, nastiest rapids near the mouth of the river, rendering it non-navigable from the sea.  It turns out that situation's even worse than I realized; not only are there rapids, but the mouth of the river is choked by sand bars.  But inland from Kinshasa, it's navigable for hundreds of miles inland, with tributaries going off in all directions.

So Bandundu -- sitting by the intersection of a bunch of large rivers, a few hundred km upstream from the capital -- hould be a pretty major river port.  Right?

Ah hah hah oh dear.  No.

The drive to Bandundu takes you across a couple of hundred kilometers of bush -- what the South Africans call MMBA, Miles and Miles of Bloody Africa.  That's harsh, but fair -- most of the drive you're just looking at rather scrubby grasslands, tropical prairie.  No large animals; this used to be prime elephant habitat, but they were wiped out almost a century ago.  Occasionally a dusty village of mud-brick houses, where you have to slow down to avoid hitting goats or chickens who've wandered into the road.  Off in the distance you sometimes see the towers of the Inga-Shaba line, the immense electrical transmission line that Mobutu built back in the 1980s; part of it is still working, and it still brings electricity to Bandundu.

Four hours of this, and then you come to the river.  Applause!  Bandundu at last!  You drive along the river for a few kilometers and then come to a dusty landing -- people waiting, a few stalls selling food, more goats and chickens.  A few hundred meters across the river is the town. 

And there you wait.

And wait.

Two hours and a bit.  You see, there's electricity in Bandundu, but none on the other side.  And there was a big soccer game on TV -- Kinshasa versus Lubumbashi, always exciting.  (At one point someone scored a goal.  Half a mile away across the river, we could hear the explosion of cheering.)  So we had to wait until the game was over before the ferry crew would load up the ferry and come fetch us.

Well... that gave us lots of time to watch the river.  And in two hours, we didn't see a single boat larger than a pirogue.

There were a lot of pirogues, mind.  Dugout canoes, typically paddled by two men.  They could take a dozen or more passengers, or a couple of tons of cargo.  Fast, flexible.  But still: nothing but pirogues?

-- No, actually that's not true.  We saw several large boats, of at least a few hundred tons each.  It's just that they were all wrecks: five or six of them, beached on the opposite shore, slowly disintegrating into rust.  Later we'd be told that they were casualties of the Second Congo War.  The fighting never got near Bandundu, but it did wipe out all access to spare parts for a few years.  As the river boats broke down, they were beached at Bandundu to wait for repairs.  Because of the war, the repairs never came, and so they never left.

We got that from a chat with the local director of ONATRA, the Congolese state-owned river transport company.  He wasn't a busy man.  Twenty years ago, there had been five or six boats a day stopping at Bandundu, both private vessels and ONATRA transport boats.  Today?  Two per week, private only.  He only bothered coming into the office because ONATRA still owned the docks and the single functioning crane, and there was a little bit of work collecting docking fees and -- very occasionally -- renting out the crane, mostly to Chinese moving tropical hardwoods down the river.  (He kept meticulous records, mind.  Wrote them out longhand, because the office typewriter had long since broken down.) 

The near-complete collapse of motorized river transport had been accompanied by an explosion of the dugout pirogues.  You could get from Bandundu to Kinshasa in a pirogue.  People did it, all the time.  Load up a few sacks of cassava or corn and head for the capital to sell it.  If you had an outboard motor, two days.  If not, five days.  To get back you waited for a boat going upstream, and paid them to hitch your pirogue on the back.

So motorized transport on the Congo river system got smashed flat by the wars.  Several years later, it's recovered to maybe 10% of its prewar level.  There's just not a lot of capital, either government or private, for investing in river shipping.  (Also, even if the capital were available -- which it really isn't -- there are a number of other barriers to investment in Congo.  Starting with the fact that the government is spectacularly corrupt, from top to bottom, so that you'd have to pay rather a lot of money in bribes before you could even think about running a boat, and even more to keep running it.)  And while good and reliable shipping would stimulate all kinds of economic activity along the river, the converse is also true: a lot of economic activity just won't happen until there is good and reliable shipping.

(There's a lot more to write about Bandundu, but let's save it for the next post.)

Comments

[The New York City Math Teacher]

A few minutes of googling turned up several interesting facts:

It is very hard to get reliable quotes for ship construction costs - so difficult that back in 1997 linear regression from a few known contracts was used to find ship building costs recently. (Lazy?)

UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific: a financing scheme for a mixed fleet of new-build small ocean going transports, ferries, landing craft, and tankers for service in the South Pacific. Simple linear regression on cost data for ships displacing more than 7500 tons, to find the costs of building ships displacing less than 1000 tons max.

Their conclusion?

86 ships - 9 45m vessels (three RORO passenger ferries, 3 tankers, two conventional passenger/cargo, and one landing craft), 15 35m vessels, 20 25m vessels, and 42 15m vessels would cost between 20 and 40 million dollars. This package, they said, could handle the transport of 9000 tons of cargo and 4700 people.

The report, titled "Study on Shipping and Port Capacities in the Island Developing Countries: Report of the Study on Policy Options for Replacing Ageing Ships in the Pacific Island Fleets" can be found at www.unescap.org/ttdw/Publications/TFS_pubs/Pub_1835/pub_1835_fulltext.pdf

How much of the pirogue traffic near Bandundu could this package replace?

[Doug M.]

Probably not much, because most of the ships would draw too deep a draft.

But that's niggling; for a similar price, you could surely buy a comparable fleet of shallow-draft river craft.

The $20 to $40 million figure: add 50% to that for inflation, then a bit more for the cost of bringing anything into the interior of the Congo. (Deserves a post of its own.) So, more like $40 to $70 million? And that doesn't include maintenance and spare parts, which are a big deal here. Or finding trained people to run it -- though I suspect that's doable; Congo does have mechanics.

In any event, Congo simply does not have $40 to $70 million to spare. A kindly donor... maybe. But a donor would want to contribute a few river craft, and wait to see how things worked out before ramping up.

Key point: who would you give the stuff to? The government? As noted, ONATRA was pretty bad -- corrupt, none too competent. But you can't just give stuff to the private sector. Sell it? The private sector here doesn't have a lot of cash on hand.

You could maybe put together something like a lease-to-own system for private operators. Or get a donor to guarantee bank loans for them... hm.

Doug M.