Chapter 8 A Time for Realignment? Retrofit in the Golden Era of the Cameroonian Railways

Questions around the feasibility of the realignment of the Douala–Yaounde railway and its timing called for a kind of technical work whose duration and complexity confounded initial expectations. It was a long-drawn endeavour that took almost a decade to be settled. As we will see, the initial task of justifying a railway project largely in its own terms was reframed with the passage of time to foreground its intermodal implications. The exercise to establish a justification for a railway investment thus explicitly became a study of optimal formulas to coordinate rail and road investments. At this juncture, ‘corridor’ starts to pop up in the archival record as a shorthand for such a broadened approach.

Railroad competition was by no means a new problem in the region. In the 1950s, for example, the paving of the road between Douala, Cameroon’s main port, and Edea, an important town on the way to Yaounde, the capital city, had a noticeable impact on the railway company’s finances. The ‘brutal methods’ the railway company Regifercam subsequently adopted to fend off road competitors led in 1956 to a rail–road consultative conference at the Chamber of Commerce. As the doyen of transport history in Cameroon Albert Dikoumé showed, Regifercam’s methods included both officially sanctioned measures (such as a drastic drop of ton/km tariffs for cocoa and the enforcement of exacting weigh limits at the Edea rail–road bridge) and outright tracasseries (abuses, in this case in the form of deliberately long interruptions of road traffic at level crossings).3 Albert Dikoumé, ‘Les Transports au Cameroun de 1884 à 1975’, unpublished PhD thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1982, p. 148. A year later the government had to intervene to regulate what types of freight could be transported by road between Douala and Yaounde. Similarly, new railway construction in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by agreements on intermodal distribution between Regifercam and the national truckers’ association. For cargo in transit to and from northern Cameroon and Chad, truckers would thereby cease to operate in the sections covered by the railway network. More broadly, of course, the colonial and independent governments had incorporated intermodal considerations in their planning of transport infrastructures. As we will see, such considerations were integral to the northward expansion of the railway network, which was conceived in conjunction with an ambitious programme of road construction. With its methods of economic analysis and computational tools, the novelty of exercises like the ‘corridor study’ advocated by the World Bank in this case was seen to reside in the rigour and systematicity that they brought to the co-ordination of investments.

In trying to tell as richly as possible what is an intricate story, I take heed of recent calls for new research ‘to document the technical work of planning and to analyse its place within historical trajectories’.4 Boris Samuel, ‘Planifier en Afrique’, Politique Africaine, 145, 2017, pp. 5–26, at p. 26. The World Bank archives, where the core of my research materials come from, lend themselves particularly well to such a task. When approached with the tools of critical historiography, these materials provide rare insights into the dynamics that shape planning processes. The correspondence folders that I was able to consult shed precious yet partial light into some of the negotiations, conventions, compromises, misunderstandings and conflicts that policy visions and investment decisions are made of. Archival work took place during two visits to Washington D.C. in November 2017 and December 2018.

In the conversations that led to this first loan for railways, the rehabilitation of the Douala–Yaounde line was a focal point from the start (Map 8.1). Its 308 kilometres had been constructed in two stages: 1909–1914 under German domination and 1922–1927 during the period of French rule.2 Albert Dikoumé, ‘Les Transports au Cameroun de 1884 à 1975’. Accordingly, the railroad bore the technological marks of the time of its construction, out of which resulted its twisting alignment, severe gradients and sharp curves. By the late 1960s, the stability of a vital steel bridge (the Japoma Bridge over the River Dibamba) was imperilled by the sinking and tilting of its piers. Another source of concern were the rails, 30 per cent of which dated back to 1914 and 1926. Moreover, 143 kilometres of the line had been laid in very light rail (26–27.8 kg/m). The age and lightness of rails meant that the line had around 40 derailments in 1969, with the associated disruption and losses.3 Commissariat Général d’Information (CGI), Chemin de Fer Transcamerounais, Yaoundé, 1965; International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), Appraisal of a Railway Project – Federal Republic of Cameroon, Washington, D.C., 1970. These inadequacies had become glaring at a point in time when, as a result of the Biafran War (1967–1970) cutting access to the Port of Lagos for nearly two years, the lion share of Chad’s imports of consumer goods and exports of cotton had been diverted towards Douala via the Transcamerounais.4 Phillipe Decraene, ‘Le Chemin de Fer Transcamerounais Facteur de Développement et d’Unification’, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 1971, p. 7. Regifercam had struggled to cope with the ensuing increase in traffic, which had continued to follow this route even after the civil war in Nigeria came to an end.

The bank showed itself open to consider involvement in the funding of the line’s rehabilitation. The Cameroonian agency for implementation of railway projects was already undertaking a technical study of a potential realignment (as opposed to less fully-fledged upgrading possibilities), so it was agreed that the bank would provide funds for consultants to carry out a study of the project’s economic viability. This was, however, only a small item in the loan package. Other more substantial components were urgent investments such as the reconstruction of the Japoma Bridge, the relaying of 52.5 kilometres of track, and the purchase of rolling stock.

While the US$5.2 million of the bank’s first railway loan were a welcome injection of funds for the railway company, it paled in comparison with the type of investment Cameroon railways had attracted in the previous decade. Indeed, after independence (1960), the government had ‘moved heaven and earth to get providers of funds’ for the long-held aspiration of extending the railway network northwards.5 European Development Fund (EDF), Cameroon 1960–1975, Brussels, 1975, p. 13. These efforts crystalised in the construction of an additional 628 kilometres of railroad between Yaounde and Ngaoundere, which began in October 1964 and would cost some US$93.9 million. With the TAZARA project, this was one of the rare new investments in railways of the early postcolonial era.6 Richard Bullock, Off Track: Subsaharan African Railways, Washington, 2009, p. 5. Financed by China, the TAZARA (Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority) project involved the construction of linking the port of Dar es Salaam to the Zambian town of Kapiri Mposhi. See: Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway, Bloomington, 2011. The construction of Transgabonais began later and, unlike the Transcamerounais and the TAZARA, was more narrowly conceived as a mining railway. See: Roland Pourtier, ‘Les Chemins de Fer en Afrique Subsaharienne, entre Passé Révolu et Recompositions Incertaines’, Belgeo, 2, 2007, pp. 1–15. The Transcamerounais, as the line was baptised, was made possible by grants and concessional loans from the European Development Fund (EDF), which contributed more than half of the funds, as well as French and US sources. An autonomous railway agency, the Office du Chemin de Fer du Transcamerounais (OCFT), oversaw the work undertaken by the Italo-German consortium between the firms Cogefar and Hochtief that won the bid for the construction contract. The first phase finished in May 1969 with the opening of traffic from Yaounde to Belabo. The line from Belabo to the railhead Ngaoundere was completed in February 1974.

The new railway’s political significance was prominent from the start.7 Adrian Hewitt, ‘The European Development Fund as a Development Agent: Some Results of EDF Aid to Cameroon’, Overseas Development Institute Review, 2, 1979, pp. 41–56; Veronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire, New York, 2014, pp. 137–39. When construction began, President Ahidjo emphasised its potential to create ‘closer ties and unity between our inhabitants’. In this view, the Transcamerounais was ‘an essential foundation stone for the building of our nation’, an especially useful one for political leaders who not only lacked anticolonial credentials but had embraced nationalism only in recent years.8 CGI, Chemin de Fer, 3; Achille Mbembe, ‘Le Cameroun après la Mort d’Ahmadou Ahidjo’, Politique Africaine, 37, 1990, pp. 117–22. In spite of repeated claims to the contrary, the national framework overshadowed the project’s regional dimension, particularly the improved access to the sea for Chad and Central African Republic that derived from the project.9 Dimier, Invention, p. 128. More broadly, the project was celebrated as ‘le grand événement’ and a ‘a great adventure’.10 Pierre Billard, ‘On Construit des Chemins de Fer au Cameroun’, Revue de Géographie Alpine, 54:4, 1966, pp. 611–20, at p. 615, (EDF), Cameroon 1960–1975, p. 13. The European funders’ emotions were particularly charged, perhaps not surprisingly, given the gargantuan budget of the ‘Transcam’, as it became popularly known, in comparison to their other investments in African railways in the 1960s and 1970s.11 EDF aid allocation to Cameroon’s railways (EUA 64.5 million) dwarfed the sums invested in other countries’ railways networks (Congo–Brazzaville 19.6 million, Côte d’Ivoire–Burkina Faso 18.2 million and Togo 14.7 million) in the 1958–1978 period. See: Hewitt, ‘The European Development Fund as a Development Agent’, p. 49. Consider the EDF coordinator’s speech for the inauguration in Ngaoundéré, in which he harked back to his time as a colonial official and quoted his fellow Corsican Napoléon, and which the national press found ‘brilliant and spiritual’.12 ‘Deux Réalisations Grandioses Fêtées dans l’Enthousiasme’, Cameroon Tribune, 11 December 1974. As he put it, the new railway was “only prestigious because it was beautiful and full of hope”.13 Jacques Ferrandi, ‘Inauguration à Ngaoundéré’, Le Courrier, 30, 1975, pp. 16–17, at p. 17. Other international funders were equally delighted to be associated with the project (Photo 8.1). As of one of the USAID staffers, looking back on his involvement four decades later, reminded me, “it was a fairly sexy project in that it received a lot of attention … It was also fun.”14 Interview, Washington, D.C., 28 April 2017.

Such a large-scale investment, with the money, time and energy it required and the accompanying prestige at stake, was bound to generate the kind of hard-to-reverse commitments that Albert Hirschman had dissected so lucidly in his coetaneous Development Projects Observed.15 Albert O. Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, Washington, D.C., 1967. The paradox was that, while the new railway construction was being celebrated, the older existing line could not hide its fragility. As a USAID manager put it, ‘within the promise [of the Transcamerounais]’, there was ‘a weak spot’.16 John Swenson, ‘Le Transcamerounais Vu par un Américain’, Courrier de l’Association, 17, 1973, pp. 48–52, at p. 52. That the construction of the new railroad called for the realignment of the old one did not come as a surprise to those who had promoted the Transcamerounais. In fact, one of the conditions of the EDF’s financial commitment in 1964 had been that the Cameroon government should upgrade, with its own resources, the original Douala–Yaounde stretch of the railway. That this was a highly unrealistic condition in the national economy’s pre-oil era hardly seemed to matter. The words of Luc Towa-Fotso, the OCFT’s secretary general, capture well the ways in which both projects were intertwined: ‘Admittedly, Cameroon, like the neighbouring countries relying on the Transcamerounais railway, will only get the full benefits of the heavy investments made in the Yaounde–Ngaoundere railroad when the old section Douala–Yaoundé is entirely renovated.’17 Luc Towa-Fotso, ‘Apres le Deuxieme Troncon Entrée en Service en 1974 la Refection de la Portion Douala–Yaoundé’, Le Courrier, 28, 1974, pp. 47–49.

In the aftermath of the UK’s accession to the European Community, British critics of European aid would denounce the circularity of the argument justifying both these projects. While ‘the existence of the Yaoundé–Douala railway was itself a major reason for adopting the railway option [in the Yaounde–Ngaoundere section] in the first place’, it had been subsequently argued that the poor performance of the new line could only be remedied by addressing the ‘deterioration of the Yaounde–Douala railway to which it connects’.18 Hewitt, ‘The European Development Fund as a Development Agent’, pp. 51–52. But such Overseas Development Institute-sponsored assessments were made with the benefit of hindsight. The planning for the Transcamerounais had been carried out when the end of the ‘golden era’ of African railways was not quite within sight. By this ‘golden era’ shorthand, specialists designate the period that began after the end of the Second World War, when this mode of transport benefited from abundant and often highly skilled human resources, ease of access to finance and steady growth in traffic.19 François Dupré la Tour, ‘Cent-vingt Ans de Chemins de Fer en Afrique Noire Francophone: De la Construction aux Privatisations’, Revue Generale des Chemins de Fer, 7–8, 1998, pp. 135–51, at p. 143. It was only in the 1980s that the combined effects of economic crisis and road competition led to a reckoning that the times of plenty were over.20 Michel Baranger, ‘Afrique Intertropicale: L’Avenir du Rail’, Le Rail et le Monde, 46, 1987, pp. 28–29.

The vision behind the ‘Transcam’ and the financial calculus that informed the project were premised on the primacy of railways. The all-season road network inherited from the colonial era was extremely limited. Even Douala and Yaounde, the country’s two main cities, had an only partially paved road connection (Douala–Edea, 90 of the total 260 kilometres) on which circulation during the rainy season was highly disrupted. In the north of the country, where there was no prospect of railway coverage, the construction of new paved roads was explicitly co-ordinated with the railway project and these roads were seen as the railway’s ‘prolongements routiers (road extensions)’.21 Ferrandi, ‘Inauguration’, 17.

What Hirschman wrote about the construction of the Kuru–Maiduguri railway extension in Nigeria (1958–1964) applies well to the Transcamerounais project. By the time plans for the upgrading of the Douala–Yaounde old railway began to take shape, highway alternatives were becoming less and less nebulous.

Other actors were going to prove important in this and successive railway projects. Created in 1962 by presidential decree, the OCFT was conceived as an implementation agency for the Transcamerounais project. During the construction of the Yaounde–Ngaoundere line, it had distinguished itself for high professional and technical standards. Heavily staffed with expatriate personnel, it was an enclave of the French office for overseas railways within the Cameroon administration.4 With the independence of most French territories in Africa, the former Office Central des Chemins de Fer de la France d’Outremer (OFERFOM) changed its name to Office Central des Chemins de Fer d’Outremer (OFEROM). In 1975, it was revamped, and renamed once more, as Office de Coopération pour les Chemins de Fer et les Matériels d’Équipement (OFERMAT). Regifercam (the railway company) dated back to the post-war period, when the French colonial authorities decided to grant autonomy to the existing railway networks whose finances and management had up until then been controlled from the metropolitan centre.5 Dupré la Tour, ‘Cent-vingt Ans’, pp. 143–44; Edy-Claude Okalla Bana, ‘Les Entreprises Françaises de Travaux Publics Face au Développement Économique de l’Outre-Mer: La Mise en Place du Réseau Ferré au Cameroun’, Outre-Mers, 98, 2011, pp. 275–98, at pp. 278–79. Independence marked the beginning of the gradual ‘Africanisation’ of the company’s management, but this proved elusive. In 1969, Regifercam employed about 3,100 people, including 41 French technical assistants holding key posts.6 IBRD, Appraisal of a Railway Project, pp. 6–7. The first Cameroonian president-general manager was appointed only in 1975 and he continued to work closely with a French deputy. A programme training young Cameroonian engineers and administrators and placing them alongside expatriate managers as ‘national counterparts’ had mixed results and failed to achieve the levels of Africanisation expected. During the 1970s, the company kept finding it hard to attract and retain qualified, competent Cameroonian staff in positions of responsibility. By the end of the decade, the company still employed 37 French technical assistants.7 Operations Evaluation Department (OED), Cameroon Second and Third Railway Projects – Performance Audit Report, Washington, D.C., 1980, p. 12.

The renovation required in the Douala–Yaounde section of the Transcamerounais surfaced as a potential bone of contention from the early negotiations of the World Bank’s First Railway Project in 1969. The correspondence of the following years between the bank and various counterparts, including Regifercam, OCFT, the Cameroonian government and the consultants entrusted with the economic study of realignment options (led by Sofrerail, the French railways’ engineering outfit) allows us to reconstruct the contours of the discussion.8 Archival work took place during two visits to Washington, D.C. in November 2017 and December 2018. Unless otherwise specified, sources are from the First and Second Railway Projects correspondence: Railroads Project – Cameroon – Correspondence vols. 1–3, Folders 1607852–54, WBGA; and Railway Project II – Correspondence vols. 1–7, Folders 30222208–30222213, WBGA. There was a shared consensus on the deficiencies of the existing railroad. Even the most cautious participants in these discussions conceded that a realignment of the entire line to rectify its steep gradients and sharp curves would be necessary eventually. The issue, then, was when and how the realignment should be undertaken. In determining ‘the optimum timing’ (including a possible phasing) of realignment works, calculations of when the existing line would become saturated became crucial. The estimate of this point of in time, in turn, depended on traffic forecasts, which concerned not only tonnage to be carried in any given year but also the seasonality of traffic, i.e. its concentration in specific months. Early on, the bank’s caution contrasted with the keener approach of the railway company and the government. The archive contains subtle signs of the reticence underlying the bank’s stance. When reviewing the draft of instructions to staff traveling on an April 1972 mission to Cameroon, for example, their Transportation Department manager substituted ‘the study of the improvement to the central railway line’ for ‘the realignment study of the central railway line’ (Photo 8.2). At this early stage, thus, there was a clear willingness on the part of bank managers to give serious consideration to solutions that did not necessarily involve a realignment in the near future.

By June 1972, the consultants began to informally share preliminary conclusions with the bank and Regifercam.9 Letter from Brechot to Oursin, ‘Railway Project – Back-to-Office Report’, 29 June 1972, WBGA. It appeared to be a case of offering the bitter with the sweet. Their estimates initially pointed to 1980 as the year when existing line capacity would reach its limits. On the other hand, they hinted at a probable recommendation to go ahead without delay with the total realignment of the line, based on the substantial operating and maintenance savings this would produce. Predictably, Regifercam questioned the estimate of the saturation point, pushing for a considerably earlier date, whereas the World Bank argued against any recommendation to proceed with the realignment earlier than 1979.10 Letter from Brechot, De Gryse and du Parc to Oursin, ‘Discussion of Consultants’ Draft Final Report Concerning the Realignment of the Douala–Yaoundé Railway Line – Combined Back-to-Office and Full Report’, 1 December 1972, WBGA. These two contrasting positions hardened alongside the various iterations of the report: an interim report in July 1972, a draft final report in November 1972 plus an addendum in January 1973, and the final report in September 1973. All the actors involved met repeatedly in Cameroon over the course of Bank missions to the country, in Paris, where the consultants were based and both the bank and the OCFT had an office, and in Washington D.C., which the railway company’s assistant managing director visited in February 1974 and where bank staff and Cameroon government representatives met every year during bank’s annual meetings.

The bank took nine months to communicate to the Cameroonian government its official response to the consultants’ final report. It expressed several important reservations: they found the report’s traffic forecasts too high and they questioned the assumptions made in calculating the concentration of traffic on peak months; they found that the determination of the least costly option to meet the demand was premised on a flawed comparison of rail/road alternatives; and they pointed out a series of deficiencies in the assessment of the realignment’s economic and financial return as well as the analysis of the relevant costs of opportunity.

Significantly, the bank’s official response to the report was sent on 27 June 1974, only two weeks before a meeting called by the government to gauge the readiness of donors to fund the realignment, a meeting that had been scheduled months earlier and in which the bank itself was taking part. As early as November 1972, the Cameroonian government had intimated to the bank their intention to cast the net wide in their search for donors interested in financing the realignment works. Indeed, as the OCFT was quick to advertise through the European–African Association’s newsletter, the outcome of the July 1974 meeting with donors was a Western German and French commitment to fund a first phase of the realignment project (the Otele–Yaounde section).11 Towa-Fotso, ‘Apres le Deuxieme Troncon’, p. 49. While the concessional terms in which these funds were offered undermined the bank’s argument that the realignment project’s estimated economic rate of return (8 per cent) was not high enough, the decision to split the project into smaller components was a sign of the fundraising difficulties that lay ahead.

Part of the rationale behind the German and French support for the realignment was the possibility to redeploy the work teams and equipment that had been engaged in building the northernmost segment of the Transcamerounais (Goyoum [north of Belabo]–Ngaoundere), whose completion was imminent. This was a possibility of which the bank staff were fully aware, as it had been discussed internally by the engineers involved in preparations for the Second Railway Project. In proposing a negotiation strategy to their boss at the bank’s Division of Port’s and Railways in February 1973, they noted: ‘It has been argued that advantage should be taken of the availability of competent contracting and supervisory staff after completion of the Transcamerounais scheduled for 1974. This indeed may result in savings (mobilisation costs etc.) but these savings would probably be more than offset by the loss resulting from premature investment.’12 Letter from Brechot, De Gryse and Du Parc to Oursin, ‘A Proposed Strategy for a Second Railway Project’, 14 February 1973, WBGA.

The bank soon found itself under pressure. Formally, the government could not go ahead with the realignment of the Otele–Yaounde section, as the loan agreement for the First Railway Project included an explicit commitment not to undertake the realignment unless the government and the bank were satisfied that the investment was economically and financially sound. Other donors, who had repeatedly approached the bank in the preceding two years about co-financing arrangements for the realignment, probed the bank’s decision to disregard the consultants’ recommendation. In a letter to their colleague at the bank’s Paris office, who had informed them of the French government’s complaints about their position in this matter, the division chiefs for Western Africa took pains in setting the record straight: ‘The Bank, at no time has taken the position that it is unwilling to finance the realignment of the Douala–Yaounde leg of the Transcameroon Railway.’ They had simply stated that they could not commit to finance these works unless a complementary study on road/rail competition was completed.13 Letter from Steckhan and Brandreth to Carriere, ‘Transcameroon Railway (Douala–Yaoundé)’, 13 December 1974, WBGA.

The preparation and the undertaking of the new study run parallel to the planning and works of the Otele–Yaounde realignment, for which German, French and Canadian financial contributions had been confirmed. This commitment had obvious implications for the study, which could no longer treat the realignment of this section as an option to be assessed but as a given. Moreover, these three countries’ financial backing of works in that portion of the railway generated a momentum towards further commitments. Indeed, in early 1975, the Minister of Planning contacted the bank’s vice-president for Western Africa to appeal to the bank’s ‘willingness to associate themselves to the already formed group [of funders]’, so that the government could ‘forge ahead, as fast as possible, towards our final objective’, which was no other than the realignment of the entire line.3 Letter from Maikano Abdoulaye to Chaufournier, 7 February 1975, WBGA. As the bank’s lead in the railway projects noted in a memo to one of the Western Africa division chiefs: ‘The Minister’s letter…puts us in a difficult position. On the one hand, we and the Government should await the results of the rail/road study…before undertaking any works on the Douala–Yaoundé transport corridor. On the other hand, we more or less gave no objection in June 1974 to the Otélé–Yaoundé section being carried out.’4 Letter from Johnson to Steckhan, ‘Cameroon Railways’, 24 February 1975, WBGA.

The bank could do little but to urge that the corridor study should get under way and emphasise the importance of subordinating all investments to the study’s conclusions. To speed up the process, in April 1975 the bank agreed to retain the same consultants that had conducted the first economic study on the realignment.5 Letter from Bayon to Johnson, ‘Compte Rendu des Reunions du 19 Mars 1975 a Bruxelles a/s Rélignement Douala-Yaoundé’, 2 April 1975, WBGA.

The logic of postponing further investment decisions until the completion of the new study was anyhow hard to impose. The government, Regifercam and, less directly, the OCFT and the construction contractors kept pushing for potential lenders to agree to further phases of realignment and were successful, particularly in the case of a very receptive German government. After a visit to Frankfurt in July 1975, one of the Bank’s financial analysts reported that the German development bank, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), felt ‘committed to the realignment of the entire Douala–Yaounde section’ and that ‘the financial constraints of both KfW and Cameroon’ were the main reason for the slow pace of implementation.6 Letter from Apitz to Brandreth, ‘Second Douala Port Project and Proposed Douala-Yaoundé realignment’, 9 July 1975, WBGA. Bank managers, in turn, were not open-minded about what the implications of the corridor study could be. In a memo of November 1975, they stated clearly that ‘it is increasingly unlikely that we shall contribute to the realignment project’.7 Letter from Agueh de la Renaudiere to Chaufournier, ‘Cameroon – Status of Implementation and Preparation of our Railway Projects’, 3 November 1975, WBGA.

For close to a year after the choice of consultants was made, much energy was spent in reaching an agreement on the terms of their remit. Even the profile of the team of consultants was subject to considerable discussion, as the bank detected ‘a lack of balance in favour of railway [expertise]’.8 Letter from Brandreth to Regifercam, outgoing wire, 26 January 1976, WBGA. The impasse was reflected on a gap of 13 months (from November 1975 to December 1976) without a bank supervision mission. Once the consultants finally got to work, they were able to produce an interim report. Regifercam received it in July 1976 and sent copies of it to the bank in August. In the following months, bank staff, including railway and highway engineers and financial analysts, reviewed the report and travelled to Paris to discuss it with the consultants. However, to the Regifercam managers’ exasperation, they declared that the members of a mission to Cameroon in December 1976 were ‘still not in a position to discuss [the report]’. In a wire to Washington, the mission staff informed their bosses that the ‘railway is very embarrassed about delays purportedly caused by the Bank in finalising this study’. By that stage, the consultants had already produced a draft final report without allowing for the bank, the railway company, or the government’s comments to be incorporated. Eventually, it was agreed that the consultants would prepare an addendum to respond to the bank’s and Regifercam’s comments.

Once the bank had communicated their observations about the interim report to Regifercam, the company shared with the bank the draft final report and the two parties reviewed the consultants’ addendum. Only after the new year could they sit down to discuss their respective positions. When they did, predictably, their observations went in opposite directions: whereas the bank found the forecasts of timber traffic too optimistic, Regifercam thought the study had underestimated the beneficial impact realignment would have on accidents. They agreed on asking the consultants to rectify both aspects in the final report.9 Letter from Dick to Brandreth, ‘Second Railway Project – Douala–Yaoundé Corridor Study – Back to Office and Full Report’, 24 February 1977, WBGA.

Beyond such technical requests for rectification, whose implications were not likely to bring about any surprises, both parties seemed to have already drawn their own conclusions. The Western Africa Region economist in charge of railway projects informed the bank’s representative in Yaoundé in early January of how their ‘highly confidential’ review suggested that ‘realignment [is] not economically viable but minor improvements to railway probably are’.10 Letter from Dick to Palein, ‘Cameroon Corridor Study’, telex, 4 January 1977, WBGA. Sensing the bank’s continued reticence on this score and knowing that the government had by then received assurances of German support for realigning a new section (Douala–Edea), Regifercam reoriented their requests to the bank towards the purchase of new rolling stock. To complicate matters more, an announcement by the Cameroonian president seemed to undermine the relevance of the planning exercise itself. In a speech that had purportedly ‘caught even the relevant ministers by surprise’, President Ahidjo made public the government’s intention to construct a four-lane autoroute between Douala and Yaounde.11 Letter from Dick to Brandreth, op. cit., 24 February 1977, WBGA. Confirmation that Gauff, a German firm, had been hired to undertake engineering studies for this future highway and was considering constructing a stretch of it with its own funds caused alarm among bank staff.12 Letter from Palein to Steckhan, ‘Progress Report from Cameroon’, telex, 7 February 1977, WBGA.

The next step was a three-day ‘co-donors meeting’ held in Paris in March 1977.13 The Cameroon delegation was led by the Minister of Transport and included a Ministry of Economy and Planning director, Regifercam’s president and his French assistant director and the OCFT’s managing director, also French. Potential funders present at the table were Germany (four delegates), France (six), European Community (three), US (two), Canada (two), World Bank (two) and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (one). This larger meeting was preceded by further ‘technical discussions’ among the consultants Sofrerail, the Cameroon delegation and the bank. This restricted forum was the opportunity for Regifercam to confirm its intention to go ahead with the realignment of Douala–Edea, for which the consultants’ analysis showed acceptable rates of return. The bank explained that they would only be able to participate in the financing of this investment under certain conditions. Some of the conditions concerned the complementary future road investments, including the autoroute the president had recently ‘decreed’ be built. The Cameroon delegation stated that such conditions would be ‘difficult to meet’ and the discussions ended without reaching ‘a meeting of minds’.14 Letter from Dick to Brandreth, ‘Cameroon Second Railway Project: Co-donors’ Meeting – Back to Office and Full Report’, 11 April 1977, WBGA. Eventually, the meeting with the larger pool of potential funders led to ‘an overall accord in principle’ on future railway investments and on each of the parties’ respective financial contributions. The bank’s proposed participation was, in the view of its own staff, ‘marginal’ but deemed sufficient to give them ‘leverage’.15 Letter from Dick to Brandreth, ibid., 11 April 1977, WBGA. The bank staff were also satisfied to obtain a commitment to supplementary analysis by Sofrerail of the proposed infrastructure investment plan, in light of various new factors that had not been considered in the original study, including the autoroute project.

In spite of its unequivocal conclusions, Sofrerail’s supplementary study did not put an end to what bank staff now called ‘the road/rail controversy’.2 Letter from Eigen to Steckhan, ‘Discussions with BMZ/KfW in Bonn’, 28 July 1977, WBGA. Speculation and rumours kept feeding uncertainties surrounding the prospect of a new autoroute. While French opposition to the project seemed strong, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation remained rather supportive. In discussions with the bank, the Cameroon government showed itself ‘unwilling to modify [the engineering survey contractor Gauff’s] terms of reference to include a more modest concept’, such as the paved two-lane road on the existing alignment advocated by Sofrerail.3 Letter from Dick to files, ‘Douala-Yaoundé Road Construction’, 7 October 1977, WBGA. More alarmingly from the bank’s point of view, everything seemed to be up for grabs again on the railway side of things. During the 1977 bank annual meetings in D.C., the Cameroonian delegation was ‘non-committal’ about the investment package agreed in Paris a few months earlier and ‘adamant’ that the realignment of the Eseka–Maloume section be discussed.4 Letter from Calvo to Palein, ‘Annual Meeting’, telex, 14 October 1977, WBGA.

In November 1977, only a few weeks after the tense discussions of the annual meetings, the Minister of Economy and Planning sent a new letter ‘to clarify from now on the Cameroon government’s position’. The conciliatory tone seemed to be aimed at securing the bank’s green light for the realignment of the Douala–Edea section. With regards to the prospects of the realignment of remaining sections and the autoroute project, the minister reassured the bank that ‘our constant policy had never led us to envisage overinvesting but, on the contrary, to modulate such investments with regards to our needs and our possibilities’.5 Letter from Minister of Economy and Planning to Chef de Division, 4 November 1977, WBGA. The bank took this as outright acceptance of its own position.6 Letter from Apitz to Brandreth, ‘Second and Third Railway Projects Supervision – Preparation of the Fourth Railway Project – Back-to-Office report’, 8 December 1977, WBGA.

When commitments for the Douala–Edea realignment were firmed up, the bank was no longer among the funders.7 Nor did the bank finance the rolling stock about which Regifercam had approached them back in early 1977, as the Canadians showed themselves more willing to cover that particular investment: see letter from Apitz to Brandreth, op. cit., 8 December 1977, WBGA. The bank’s Fourth Railway Project focused instead on the construction of new railway facilities in both Douala and Yaounde and on technical assistance to improve Regifercam’s management and operational performance. Yet, one of the covenants contained in this loan agreement referred to the railway realignment. The government thereby agreed to pursue a closer study of all possible improvement alternatives to completely realigning the Edea–Maloume section and committed itself not to make any capital investments in this section unless their ‘economic justification’ had been established.8 Fourth Railway Project, Staff Appraisal, p. 52, WBGA. By the time the new railway loan was approved in June 1979, the bank had also prevailed upon the government to drop the idea of a Douala–Yaounde autoroute and to redefine the terms of reference of the project’s contractors, so that the economic feasibility and detailed engineering of a two-lane paved road would be studied instead.9 Fourth Highway Project, Staff Appraisal Report, p. 5, WBGA.

Thus, as in the previous phase, when construction works for the realignment of the Douala–Edea portion began in December 1978, uncertainty surrounded the fate of the remaining sections. In spite of the bank’s continued objections to the project, the government continued to seek out potential funders. Consider the presidential speech for the opening in June 1979 of the new Japoma railway bridge, a project whose completion arrived almost a decade after the bank had first agreed to partially fund it. While the occasion was framed as a celebration of international co-operation, the president did not miss the opportunity to remind Cameroon’s partners of the priority projects still in need of support:

In the end, the realignment of the remaining section of old railway was carried out in two stages. The first one, from Edea to Eseka, began in 1981 and opened for traffic ‘sans tambours ni trompettes [without fanfare]’ in December 1982.11 Michel Baranger, ‘Transcam: Plus que 25km’, Le Rail et le Monde, 24, 1983, pp. 48–50. The most technically challenging and expensive part (Eseka–Maloume), which included an ‘infernal’ elevation gain of 350 metres within 19 kilometres as the crow flies, was left for last. It comprised building four spectacular viaducts and excavating three long tunnels. The much-awaited completion took place in 1987, by which time the country’s economic prospects had taken a drastic turn for the worse.12 ‘Infernal’ is the adjective chosen by Daniel Vincent, who was then the European Commission’s division chief for general infrastructure and industry. It is interesting that even within the European Economic Community, which remained a constant funder throughout the whole realignment process, there was already in 1974 a clear sense that the more technically and financially demanding sections to be rebuilt ‘weighed’ heavily on those involved in the project. See Daniel Vincent, ‘La politique du F.E.D. en matière de cooperation ferroviaire’, Le Courrier, 28, 1974, pp. 43–46. The sense of exhaustion when the final works approached completion is apparent in the title that the editors of Le Rail et le Monde, the French periodical devoted to international railway co-operation, chose for the issue they devoted to the project: ‘Transcamerounais: the end of the tunnel’. See: Michel Baranger, ‘Transcamerounais: Le Bout du Tunnel en 1986’, Le Rail et le Monde, 33, 1985, pp. 6–11. Years of annual deficits and underinvestment followed for Regifercam, whose privatisation was agreed by the government and its financiers in 1994. It finally materialised in 1999 through a 30-year concession agreement with a consortium led by the French multinational Bollore.

In sum, the complete realignment ended up being a much longer, tortuous and expensive affair than could have been anticipated in the early 1970s, when planning for it had begun. Carrying it out took roughly as long as the construction of the original Douala–Yaounde line – and it cost almost twice as much as the construction of the new Yaounde–Belabo–Ngaoundere railroad.13 Dupré la Tour, ‘Cent-vingt Ans’, p. 140. Throughout this period, the World Bank stood firm in their stance of not supporting the project, while taking active part in various other transport investments in the country. These included one of nine lots in which the construction of a paved Douala–Yaounde road was divided, a project that took place from 1980 to 1983.

For the bank, the delay seems to have been welcome. Their ‘petit projet ferroviaire’, as the OCFT dismissively referred to the First Railway Project, had given the bank a say in the government’s investment policy.1 Office du Chemin de Fer Transcamerounais (OCFT); ‘La Revision de la Voie Ferrée Douala-Yaoundé’, 25 September 1972, Revision de la Ligne Doula/Yaoundé – Dossiers, Fol. 581571, WBGA. Its small size notwithstanding, the terms of that first loan explicitly subjected future decisions on realignment to the bank being satisfied that they constituted sound investments. From the preliminary discussions of the consultants’ findings, well before the final report, they knew that the cost–benefit analysis was going to generate what were by their standards low economic rates of return. As far as they were concerned, it was an investment that could wait. From the point of view of the Cameroonian parties, the old line was a major hindrance to the railway company’s operations and the investment was justified and urgent. They had been led to assume that if the consultants’ recommendations were favourable, the bank would follow through with a financial contribution towards realignment. As we saw, they were up for a disappointment. Although the report recommended to proceed with the investment, it also placed the point of saturation of existing line in 1980. The bank could latch on to this to argue that any earlier investment would be premature.

There was an acute awareness of the potential dilatory effects of technical studies when the bank and the government negotiated the Second Railway Project (Photo 8.3). Firstly, the difficulties involved in securing the bank’s board of executive directors’ approval of a loan were not to be underestimated. Going through the motions of the bank’s bureaucratic procedures to reach the stage of the presentation to the board, from the ‘issues paper’ and the ‘yellow cover’ president’s report to the ‘green cover’ documents for the loan committee and the negotiations with the government, could take up to ten months when things went as planned.2 Sympathetic bank staff could make efforts to ‘compress’ the typical schedule to seven months, as they offered doing for Cameroon’s Third Railway Project. See: Memo from Agueh to Files, ‘Cameroon – Third Railway Project – Decision Memorandum’, 18 December 1975. Secondly, it was fresh in everyone’s minds that, for the preceding study on the economic viability of the realignment, the bank had taken nine months to respond to the consultants’ final report. The government therefore voiced its reservations about the new ‘corridor’ study proposed by the bank, ‘fearing that [on the basis of this further study] the Bank might not finance the realignment’. The bank offered assurances that ‘the study can be completed within a year of commencement and this … would still leave time to complete the realignment before traffic constraints on the existing line reach an unacceptable level’.3 Letter from Steckhan and Brandreth to Carriere, ‘Transcameroon Railway (Douala–Yaoundé)’, 13 December 1974, WBGA; See also: IBRD, Appraisal of a Railway Project – Federal Republic of Cameroon, pp. 6–7; Similarly, the project appraisal document stated that that, even ‘allowing for construction lead time’, a decision on ‘either railway realignment or road improvement’ would be ‘unnecessary before 1976’, see: IBRD, Appraisal of a Second Railway Project – Cameroon, p. 6. At the bank’s insistence, the study thus became one of the items in the new railway project.

Loan budgeting shortages resulting from currency exchange dynamics slowed down the launch of the corridor study. Although a decision was taken to entrust it to the previous consultants to expedite the process, it was only in July 1976, more than two years after the agreement, that the consultants produced an interim report. It is not hard to understand the railway company’s frustration when, five months later, a bank mission to Douala informed them that they were not in a position to discuss the report. When those discussions finally took place in February 1977, the transport economist leading the banks’s team showed full awareness of the effects that all that waiting was having on their relations with the borrowers. When discussing the options that the bank faced in an upcoming donors meeting, he wrote: ‘[Our] non-involvement [in the financing of realignment] could have a serious adverse effect on the Bank’s influence on the Cameroon transport sector. The Bank initiated the consultants’ study, this study has been patiently awaited for two years, and complete dissociation of the Bank from railway investment associated with its conclusions would be incomprehensible to the Cameroon government.’4 Letter from Dick to Brandreth, ‘Second Railway Project – Douala–Yaoundé Corridor Study – Back-to-Office and Full Report’, 24 February 1977, WBGA.

Yet that was exactly what ended up happening. As we have seen, an initial agreement in principle to contribute alongside other donors to the realignment of the Douala–Edea section, then under discussion, soon came to nothing.

As much as the rhythms of work within various bureaucracies ranging from the railway company to the relevant ministries and funding agencies were oriented towards short- and long-term planning, the converse relationship also obtained. ‘Planning itself takes time’, Simone Abram has recently reminded us.5 Simone Abram, ‘The Time it Takes: Temporalities of Planning’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, special issue, 2014, pp. 12947 at p. 145. In Cameroon, throughout the 1970s, this obvious but often neglected fact served well the bank in its efforts to either prevent or slow down investments that they deemed premature. There were certainly clear limits to this strategy. When the bank distanced itself from the consultants’ recommendations in both the economic study of realignment and in the corridor study, there was an inevitable fallout. At those points, the clauses contained in the loans that required bank approval did not count for much and the government was able to forge ahead and secure commitments from other donors to realign first Yaounde–Otele–Maloume and later Douala–Edea. The bank’s overestimation of its ability to exert control over events was costly in particular instances. For example, track of the old line renewed as late as November 1976 was taken out of use in April 1978, when the realigned Yaounde–Otele section was completed (Map 8.1). Although the track from the renewed sections was salvaged and repurposed by the railway company for other projects, the expense of the ballast and the labour required for the relaying of the track looked wasteful. The bank’s financial analyst, who, as Figure 8.1 shows, devoted considerable attention to this matter, concluded that ‘with the benefit of hindsight, it might have been anticipated that … the extent of benefits from track relaying were very uncertain’.6 World Bank, Cameroon Second and Third Railway Projects – Project Completion Report, Washington, D.C., 1979, p. 45. As the bank’s staff acknowledged, such a blatant case of mistiming was ‘partly due to weaknesses in the Bank’s relationship with the borrower’.7 World Bank, Cameroon Second and Third Railway Projects, p. 44. Such glitches aside, in a matter of months after each of the fallouts resulting from the bank’s response to the two studies, both parties made a point of patching their differences up and, as the rhetoric of international finance diplomacy would have it, find ways of ‘concentrat[ing] on areas where government and Bank can develop enlarged co-operation and avoid confrontation’.8 Letter from Calvo to Palein, ‘Annual Meeting’, telex, 14 October 1977, WBGA.

Ultimately, the factor that seems to have influenced most the timing and the pace of realignment was the presence in Cameroon of Cogefar-Hochtief, the tried and tested contractor that had built the Yaounde–Ngaoundere line. As it turned out, the various phases of the realignment ended up being scheduled so as to ensure the Italo-German consortium kept getting steady contracts without significant periods of idleness. Resorting to these contractors mitigated the uncertainties surrounding the engineering challenges of the realignment works themselves. This was presented as both a matter of lower cost, given the installation savings, and of quality. But, equally decisively if not more, retaining the same contractor – while complying with the motions of international bidding procedures – was for the Cameroon government also key in addressing the uncertainties surrounding the supply of finance. The choice of contractor was indeed far from immaterial to the co-funders involved in both the construction of the new line to Ngaoundere and the realignment of the old line.9 According to Hewitt, the Transcamerounais project benefited from ‘the surplus capacity civil engineering sector of the Italian economy’. Cogefar was ‘prepared to offer relatively cheap but highly skilled labour and expertise and to bid aggressively for the works contracts’, see: Hewitt, ‘The European Development Fund as a development agent’, p. 52. Most grants and loans for Cameroonian railways were tied aid. Referring specifically to the realignment, a USAID officer recalled “difficult issues surrounding the transparency and fairness of the procurement arrangements for the various aspects of the project …The European donors were inclined to be cavalier about these issues”: Frederick Gilbert, Deputy Regional Development Officer, USAID Cameroon (1976–1980), Foreign Affairs Oral History, 1997, p. 135 <https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Gilbert-Frederick-E.pdf> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. The tying of aid to contracts for companies from the European Economic Community member countries was at the time a requirement for the EDF and, in fact, the Transcamerounais was a pioneering project in relaxing these restrictions to make US firms eligible bidders.10 Dimier, Invention, 64. A similar logic applied to the position of the OCFT as the supervisor of railway projects. Large projects such as the successive phases of realignment were what justified the OCFT’s continuous existence; it was also a crucial consideration behind France’s financial support at various points.

The design of these transport infrastructure projects in Cameroon had been done along modal lines, with separate loans for ports, highways and railways. In fact, it was only much later, in the 1990s, that the bank’s loans to Cameroon adopted the more encompassing ‘transport sector’ denomination. Furthermore, in these projects of the 1970s, the arena for co-ordination of intermodal investments that the bank itself had agreed to was one dominated by railway professionals. Indeed, the commissioner of the corridor study was the railway company – and, according to such far from neutral legal arrangements, it was the company that would have to return the money they had borrowed from the bank.2 Laura Bear, ‘Speculations on Infrastructure: From Colonial Public Works to a Post-Colonial Global Asset Class on the Indian Railways 1840–2017’, Economy & Society, 49:1, 2020, pp. 45–70. It was also small wonder that railway expertise would be overrepresented in consultant teams led by a railway engineering contractor; or that the consultants’ recommendations for the corridor ended up being sympathetic to the investment packages favoured by the railway company.

That corridor irrupted as the watchword for a technical problematisation of rail–road competition in Cameroon at this particular time also reflected a global swing of the pendulum in favour of roads. Indeed, the 1970s was the decade when road transport became ‘the right mode’.3 International Road Union (IRU), ‘Seven Decades: Driving Road Transport’, IRU Factsheet, 2018, p. 2 <www.iru.org/system/files/factsheet-tir-seven-decades-driving-road-transport.pdf> [Accessed 27 April 2021]. This gradual dominance was long in the making and was decisively strengthened by the standardisation of shipping containers. The process certainly had many specific histories. In Nigeria, a case that became paradigmatic because it caught Albert Hirschman’s imagination and was the spark that inspired some of his most celebrated work, the triumph of road transport was already palpable by the mid-1960s.4 Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty. In Cameroon, because of the limitations of the road network and the foreign and national backing of railways, the pendulum swung later but the swing was equally pronounced. As in numerous other contexts, road transport eventually developed a powerful political platform that found its reflection in government policies premised on the road’s superior competitiveness. As if to atone for the sense of repeated deferral that surrounded the entire realignment project, a 1980 evaluation of the bank’s railway lending to the country ended on a positive note: ‘Regifercam is at least fortunate in having time to prepare for the increased competitive situation [that would derive from the completion of the Douala–Yaounde paved road in 1983].’5 World Bank, Cameroon Second and Third Railway Projects, p. 13. Yet, what unfolded in later years seems instead to instantiate Hirschman’s point about the Nigerian railways. In both cases, road competition seems to have provided ‘the railways not so much with a spur for good performance as with a special kind of latitude for poor performance’.6 Hirschman, Development Projects Observed, pp. 147–48.

The present offers a suggestive vantage point from which to look back on the 1970s. While the twenty-first century opened with announcements of an imminent ‘rail renaissance’7 Neil Ford, ‘Africa’s Rail Renaissance’, African Business, June 2004, pp. 22–23. in the African continent, its substance, momentum and durability have been variously assessed. Certainly, the enthusiastic tone of the early 2010s has given way to more circumspect views.8 ‘Puffed Out; Railways in Africa’, The Economist, 42, 2016, p. 419; Vincent Defait, ‘En Afrique, le Train Revient au Cœur des Grands Projets du Continent’, Le Monde, 5 October 2016. Yet, a number of new railroads have been completed in recent years and construction of others is ongoing. In Cameroon, the government published an ambitious Railway Master Plan (RMP) in 2012. The investments designated as short- and mid-term are gargantuan. It is the new construction projects to be undertaken that have captured most of the media attention, even though they remain to this day distant possibilities.9 Rousseau-Joël Foute, ‘Transport Ferroviaire: L’Incontournable Modernisation’, Cameroon Tribune, 19 June 2013; Paul Eboa, ‘Projets à Réaliser à Moyen Terme: Une Dizaine de Tronçons dans le Pipe’, Cameroon Tribune, 28 April 2016. The RMP also comprises a substantial but less conspicuous package for rehabilitation of the existing network, within which the renovation of the northernmost section of the existing line (Pangar–Ngaoundéré) is the largest project.

In the aftermath of the country’s most lethal railway accident on 21 October 2016 (82 deaths and nearly 600 injured) and faced with a pronounced decline in freight volume, the concessionary company Camrail (Regifercam’s successor) has been questioned in recent years. While the concession does not expire until 2034, the government itself commissioned an audit of the company’s performance in 2017. However, the auditors’ recommendations have neither been made public nor acted upon. In ways that both resemble and differ from the situation in the 1970s, many railway professionals in Cameroon today see the present as a period of uncertainty and confusion. Some of this uncertainty and confusion refers specifically to what the best ways of ensuring the long-term durability of railway infrastructure might be, a question that occupied all those who took an active interest in the Douala–Yaounde realignment. A greater policy focus on intermodal co-ordination and competition might be in the cards. In this, the coming decade may echo the 1970s.