Foreword
Everyone agrees that Africa has a serious infrastructure deficit, estimated at about US$48 billion a year, and that this deficit is impeding the continent’s competitiveness and hence its economic growth, to the tune of 1 or 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) per year. There is less agreement on how to solve the problem. Some advocate building more infrastructure while others suggest privatizing, or contracting out to the private sector, the management of infrastructure so that the discipline of the market will lead to more and better quality services. This book graphically illustrates the problem in the case of Africa’s ports. With the exception of Durban, cargo dwell times—the amount of time cargo spends in the port—average about 20 days in African ports, compared with 3 to 4 days in most other international ports. Yet neither of the solutions seems to be working. Adding additional berths has not brought down the dwell times. And with the exception of Durban and Mombasa, all major ports are already run by private container terminal operators. The reason the solutions are not working—and this is the major contribution of this book—is that the long dwell times are in the interest of certain public and private actors in the system. Specifically, importers use the ports to store their goods; in Douala, for instance, storage in the xi