Paper short abstract:

A critical examination of reconstruction in the Lobito Corridor demands a political economy approach which addresses the role of and impact on different social groups, the nature of winners and losers, and areas of territory in terms of their relationship to transport technology and how it is utilised.

Paper long abstract:

Notwithstanding the great importance of an efficient transport system for a country like Angola where poor and scattered communities extend over great distances, its reconstruction has an ambivalent character in Benguela. On the one hand, it is an indispensable part of the process of economic reconstruction and development where it is possible to identify complementary linkages influencing the dynamics of road and railway reconstruction that can reduce poverty. On the other hand, the post-war transport economy, like the war transport economy, is a site of private accumulation and change where social stratification goes in parallel with increased socio-economic inequality and unfavourable conditions in the labour transport market. The infrastructural reconstruction process is not fulfilling its potential for generating domestic linkages or multiplier effects through wage employment of Angolans. Despite the creation of employment and other income earning opportunities they have been limited meaning that communities might lack the financial capacity to make use of the transport network. The ambivalent character of the modernisation of the transport system was already a featured in the first half of the 20th century as the transport network´s creation of regional and national spaces with new centres and peripheries established a new hierarchy of social groups and gave rise to significant cultural changes. The effects of roads, railways, and other new means of transport were experienced in very different ways by different actors (means of wealth as well as poverty; inroads of repression as well as paths to personal liberation and as tools of fragmentation as well as of unification).