Angola: Lobito Corridor Motivates Creation of Lagos-Dakar Link

27 July 2026
Angola Press Agency (Luanda)

Luanda — Nigeria's minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, has proposed the creation of a transport corridor between Lagos (Nigeria) and Dakar (Senegal), inspired by Angola's Lobito Corridor.

The Nigerian newspaper The Nation, in its Sunday edition, reported that the proposal includes the creation of a mineral processing center in West Africa to address the infrastructure and capital deficits that hinder mineral processing on the continent.

The suggestion was made during the recent Ministerial Forum on "Critical Minerals, Value Chain and Beneficiation: Pathways to African Transformation," held in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) last week.

The Lobito Corridor is a strategic multimodal infrastructure that extends from the Port of Lobito in Angola, crossing the country and connecting to the transport networks of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia.

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Its development is seen as fundamental to unlock the economic potential of the interior of Central and Southern Africa, facilitating access to international markets and promoting intra-regional trade. The Lagos-Dakar route would allow neighboring nations to pool resources, divide processing specializations based on comparative advantages, and share infrastructure risks, the Nigerian official considered.

Dele Alake noted that the fragmentation of regional trade continues to harm the continent, as intra-African trade represents only 16%, compared to 60% in Asia and 70% in Europe.

The minister emphasized that Africa's vast mineral wealth can only generate true economic freedom through unified regional strategies and "not through isolated national efforts."

For his part, the president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Sidi Ould Tah, noted that despite possessing vast reserves of critical minerals vital to the global transition to green energy, Africa has still "failed to convert these resources into growth proportional to Gross Domestic Product". This is due to low Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and dependence on the export of raw materials, he added.

The high-level meeting concluded with the adoption of the Abidjan Declaration, which establishes a roadmap for mineral financing and governance across the continent.

Under the declaration, the AfDB committed to using its financial instruments, capital structuring capabilities and technical expertise to reduce the risks of critical mining projects, build infrastructure and catalyze private sector investment in regional value chains.

The forum brought together more than 20 African ministers responsible for the mining, energy, and industrial sectors, along with representatives from Afreximbank, the US Export-Import Bank, and global mining conglomerates from Germany, Canada, and the United States. According to The Nation, in an attempt to reshape the architecture of the continent's mining sector, Nigeria and the African Development Bank (AfDB) called for direct control of Africa's mineral resources, urging nations to prioritize local valorization, data sovereignty, and regional processing corridors. ADR/QCB/TED/jmc

Read the original article on ANGOP.

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