Hungarian experts will also take part in the construction of a new road that will connect the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) mining sites with a city in Zambia. The new road will reduce the transportation time of raw materials from 28 to 11 days from DRC to the port of the Tanzanian capital, Dar es-Salaam where half of the export of DRC goes through. This seems like a vitally important step for DRC’s economy, however, despite its significance, we know very few details about the road building project, that will most likely be implemented by consortium of international partners in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) construction.
The road construction, on which a Hungarian company called Duna Aszfalt will also work, is expected to start in 2020. Once it is realized, the project will have an impact not only on DRC’s but also on the world economy. Thanks to the new road, valuable minerals such as diamond or one of the most important ingredients of electric vehicle batteries, cobalt will reach the Tanzanian port in a much shorter time.
One of the key figures of the project, which according to estimations, will cost nearly 473 million dollars, is a certain René Hutton-Mills, a Hungarian businessman with Ghanaian origin. In 2010, Mr. Hutton-Mills started to work together as business partners with former Hungarian government spokesperson András Giró-Szász (who is also Mr. Hutton-Mills’s brother-in-law) on their first road building project in DRC, a country which is incredibly rich in valuable minerals, and is responsible for the third of the world’s diamond and 60 percent of the world’s cobalt production. Their first project was a smaller one, it only involved the construction of a 3 kilometers long city road, but it has served as a pilot project to the current, 182 kilometers long road project. It is also worth mentioning, that Moise Katumbi, one of the richest and most powerful people of DRC, the governor of the Katanga province, where all the above mentioned resources can be found also happens to be Mr. Hutton-Mills’s brother-in-law.
The latest available information suggests that the construction will be carried out in a PPP construction in collaboration with the Zambia’s and DRC’s governments, financed by the state owned Development Bank of Southern Africa.
(The content of this blog post was published by g7.hu. Photograph: A set of mountains in DR Congo. MONUSCO/Adeniyi Oluwo)