The Vietnamese Parliament recently approved a $67 billion plan to build a high-speed standard gauge railway connecting Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. To put this in context, Vietnam’s economy stands at $570 billion as of 2024, meaning this infrastructure investment represents 14.3% of its GDP.
Similarly, in 2021, Austria, with a $500 billion economy, announced a $22 billion investment in expanding and improving its railway network, amounting to 4.4% of its GDP.
If we apply these investment benchmarks to Africa—whose economy is more than seven times the size of both Austria’s and Vietnam’s—the continent should be able to invest $154 billion over five years to develop a core railway network, following Austria’s model. Using Vietnam’s larger-scale investment as a benchmark, Africa should be looking at a $500 billion commitment within the same period.
Unlike the railway projects in Vietnam and Austria, which focus on upgrades and improvements, Africa’s proposed $150 billion African Railway Triangle Network Master Plan (ARTNMP) is not just a modernization effort. It is essential infrastructure for Africa’s industrialization, economic growth, and for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to be meaningful and successful. Without this crucial network, AfCFTA’s impact will be limited, and its success, uncertain.
While this project is a necessity, enormous challenges remain for Century Rail Ltd and the African Continental Unity Party (ACUP) in realizing this critical infrastructure. Principal among these challenges is what the African Development Bank (AfDB) has identified: a system not conducive to Africa’s needed rapid development. The AfDB has concluded that, at the current pace and under current conditions, it will take the African continent 108 years to achieve the status of a developed nation.
The enablers of this slow development are the African heads of state, who—lacking vision, urgency, and often acting in a cowardly manner on the world stage—have continued to justify the continent’s stagnation, offering only lip service to Africa’s challenges.
The ACUP has taken on this challenge, understanding that while the task is difficult, it is vital to bring a new system into being by any means necessary, including participation in elections where needed. This task and mission—to rebuild Africa from its fundamentals upwards—must be accomplished by this generation. Africa cannot afford to wait another century.
