Zambia Railways concession to Railway Systems of Zambia, and its cancellation in 2012
Zambia concessioned its national railway, after a decade in which traffic halved from 1,072 million net ton kilometres in 1993 to 540 million in 1999, to the private operator Railway Systems of Zambia, which took over on 3 December 2003 and raised traffic by about 30 percent in net ton kilometres in 2004 against 2003; the World Bank later reported that the network and service kept deteriorating and that the concession was cancelled in September 2012.
30 %, increase in rail freight traffic (net ton kilometres) in the first year of the concession, 2004 against 2003, 2004. 3.7 million US dollars, concession fees paid to government by the concessionaire since takeover, per the concessionaire's auditors, 2005 (third quarter). World Bank, Implementation Completion Report, Zambia Railways Restructuring Project, Report No. 32520, December 2005, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
After two decades of falling traffic under the state railway, the government retrenched staff with World Bank money and let one private consortium run all freight and passenger services and the track under a vertically integrated concession; the operator lengthened hauls and paid fees for a few years, then a later government judged the network was still deteriorating and took the railway back.
Preconditions
- A concession agreement with enforceable investment and maintenance obligations and a monitoring body able to apply them
- Bulk mining freight that the railway can win back from road
- Political agreement across governments that private operation is the policy, which did not survive here
Limits: The cited completion report was written two years into the concession and supports the start and the early gains only; it says the 30 percent rise came with a fall in tonnage as the operator dropped short hauls, and that the borrower disputed the concessionaire's fee compliance and Parliament set up a review in December 2005. The cancellation rests on a second World Bank document, the Country Partnership Strategy for FY13 to FY16 (Report No. 75089-ZM, February 2013, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/182591468178437607/pdf/750890CORRIGEN0IC00IDA0R20130002703.pdf, PDF page 22, paragraph 49), which says the rail network condition and service continued to deteriorate and the concession was cancelled in September 2012 with a commitment to recapitalise the railway, and elsewhere (page 11) calls it a reversal of the railway concession that stakeholders saw as policy incoherence. Neither document gives traffic for the later concession years, so the record shows a delivered early gain and a cancellation, not a measured decline from a peak. Both documents come from the lender that financed the concession process and argued for privatisation. The figures are in PDFs (the 1993 and 1999 traffic on page 5, the fees on page 10, the 2004 traffic gain on page 19, the 20-year term on page 43). The concession was originally 20 years with possible extensions (Annex 10), so it ran about nine years of a 20-year term, a figure computed here.