From the China Post. Story by Sophie Boiillon, AFP

Patrice Talon, Benin’s new businessman president, has promised to find a solution to the conflicting interests that have blocked the hopes of modern rail transport.

 

Only 20 good trains leave the small terminus each month in Benin’s economic capital of Cotonou. A new passenger train with blue seats and bright paintwork from France has never rolled out of Cotonou.

When French industrial giant Bollore took control of Benin’s rail network in April 2014, railway employees thought things were getting back on track, until a court stopped work the following year. It upheld a complaint from a Beninese businessman with his own agenda to get the railroad back into shape.

“We are going to get out of this hornet’s nest soon,” President Patrice Talon recently told journalists.

In November 2013, Benin and landlocked Niger to the north decided to establish Benirail, a multinational firm with France’s Bollore as a strategic partner.

Within three months, Bollore Africa Logistics renovated the station, paid wages in arrears and imported track to link Cotonou with Niger’s capital Niamey, with plans to extend the railway to Burkina Faso, Togo and Abidjan in Ivory Coast.

The aim was to kickstart growth in five of the world’s poorest countries in West Africa.

Railroads came to Benin, then called Dahomey, in 1936. But like other African nations the railway was internal. No significant international railway network exists except in South Africa.

Bollore’s start however was a bit too fast for Beninese millionaire businessman Samuel Dossou, CEO of Petrolin. Dossou had his own rail plans and sued Bollore.

Dossou paid for studies of the railway out of his own pocket, said Claudine Afiavi Prudencio, Dossou’s wife and Petrolin board member. The days when “people can trample on the rights of Beninese businessmen in their homeland are over,” she said.

Bollore had no legal authorization to begin work, the court ruled on Nov. 19, 2015. The Cotonou court of appeal upheld Dossou’s complaint and ordered “the end of all work undertaken” immediately.

Dossou has been trying to take charge of the rail network in the former French colony since 2004. Studies were carried out but came to nought, according to Gustave Sonon, a former minister of public works.

“Dossou didn’t have the resources,” Sonon said.

“When I went into government, I had a choice between allowing Bollore to continue or totally blocking the project,” the former minister told AFP. “Good progress had been made and for that reason I pushed things on a bit.”

Since the court brought work to a halt in 2015, a huge stock of new track intended to cover a distance of 310 miles has been lying in Cotonou, oxidizing in the sun.

Across the border in Niger the Bollore group has begun to lay 93 miles of track in the vast nation, which sorely needs access to the sea, and is threatening to bypass Benin.

“They are threatening to build a railway through Togo and abandon the port of Cotonou if Benin doesn’t choose Bollore,” said a source close to the case, who added that “in any event, everything will be negotiated in Paris.”

Both Petrolin and Bollore declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

But Talon, a cotton baron who was elected president with 65 percent of the vote and took office in April, declared that negotiations were under way when he gave a press conference after returning from Paris, where he had talks with industrial magnate Vincent Bollore.

“What has been done up until now has many flaws because it was done in haste,” Talon admitted, but insisted the impasse would end soon.

Read more at China Post.