While the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is resource-rich, with huge deposits of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, and oil, it has, until recently, relied on its neighbours to access international markets and profit from its mineral wealth.
However, in March, the country moved a step further in increasing control of its seabound trade. It signed a USD350 million agreement with global developer and manager of marine and inland terminal operations DP World for the construction of the first phase of a deepwater greenfield port at the existing smaller Banana Port, which is currently being used to export some of the 260,000 barrels of crude oil the nation produces daily.
The new Banana Port will be the first deepwater port along the 37 km coastline of DRC, which currently has only one big river port in Matadi, 230 km inland from Banana, and will open access to the southern Atlantic Ocean. The port will be owned by DP World and the DRC government on a 70/30% share basis. DP World signed a 30-year concession for the development and management of the port, with an option for a 20-year extension.
“The port of Banana will offer the first deepwater port to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That will dramatically improve the cost and time of trade, as the majority of cargo is still handled by neighbouring countries,” said José Makila Sumanda, DRC deputy prime minister and minister of transport and communications.
“The project will provide us with a first-class marine facility comparable with [those of] other African countries in terms of capacity, draught, and ability to handle the latest generation of vessels.”
Four phases
DP World said the project was a four-phase USD1 billion undertaking to support DRC, the second-largest country in Africa, connect into global trade lanes, access a variety of global markets, and minimise dependency on ports in neighbouring countries such as Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania. It added that construction was scheduled to begin this year, although no specific date was confirmed, and that the first phase was expected to be completed within two years.
DRC’s exports are 90% made up of extracted commodities. It currently relies on the port of Mombasa in Kenya, especially for imports and exports destined to and from the Kisangani region in the northeast of the country. An estimated 4.9% of the 7.75 million tonnes of transit traffic through Mombasa in 2016/17 were destined for the northeast region of DRC, according to Kenya Ports Authority.
Extracted commodities in DRC’s southeast region, especially copper, are also exported through the port of Durban in South Africa. Other DRC exports and imports go through the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. These amounted to 391,457 tonnes of exports and 785,307 tonnes of imports in 2017, said Tanzania Ports Authority.
The mineral-rich DRC, which had an estimated GDP of USD37.24 billion in 2017, has two other ports: Matadi, on the left bank of the Congo, the world’s deepest river, with measured depths of more than 220 m, and Boma port, which has a limited draught of 7 m at the entrance because of regular sand build-up.
Matadi, which is used mainly for coffee and timber exports, has a maximum draught of 8.2 m, while the draught at the three-berth Boma port, also on the 4,700 km-long Congo River, is limited to 6.4 m. The shallow draughts at Matadi and Boma have limited the entry of large cargo liners. Some of these with cargoes for DRC dock at 16 m-deep Pointe-Noire in neighbouring Republic of the Congo, which also serves as a transhipment point for the Angolan ports of Cabinda, Luanda, and Soyo.
Furthermore, DRC is large – 2.3 million km² – and the US government’s Trade and Development Agency has said its “public ground transportation is generally crowded, unreliable, unsafe, and in many cases non-existent”.
These factors add to the high cost of moving goods into or out of the country.
Catalyst for growth
Construction of the new Banana port is expected to have “a major impact on the country’s trade, with significant cost and time savings, attracting more direct calls from larger vessels from Asia and Europe, and, ultimately, acting as a catalyst for the growth of the country and the region’s economy”, according to DP World Group chairman and chief executive officer Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem.
Although no details have been provided about the engineering, procurement, and construction contract and the structure of the financing of the project, DP World has indicated the project works will include a 600 m quay and 25 ha yard extension, with a container capacity of 350,000 teu and general cargo capacity of 1.5 million tonnes.
However, according to DP World, completing all four phases of the port will depend “on market demand for the port, industrial, and logistics zone infrastructure”.