Property – Infrastructure & Megaprojects · Editorial
By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026
Railways earn the ribbon-cuttings; roads do the work. China's foreign ministry claims that Chinese firms have helped build or upgrade nearly 100,000km of highways across Africa – a figure that dwarfs the marquee rail lines yet attracts a fraction of the coverage. The contradiction at the centre of China-in-Africa infrastructure is that its most consequential layer is also its least photographed: tarmac, not track, is where the scale lives.
The claim: nearly 100,000km, attributed not proven
The figure comes from Beijing's own ministry, and it should be read as an attributed claim rather than an audited total – the same official tally also asserts more than 10,000km of railways, nearly 1,000 bridges and 100 ports, and puts infrastructure cooperation at almost US$200bn across 2016 to 2020, with Chinese companies accounting for some 31% of the continent's infrastructure projects in 2020. Even discounted for promotional framing, the pattern is real: roads are the most numerous and dispersed form of Chinese construction on the continent, precisely because they are smaller, faster and politically easier to deliver than a national rail line.
That dispersal is the point. A single rail megaproject concentrates attention, debt and risk in one corridor; a hundred road projects spread across a dozen countries rarely make headlines but cumulatively redraw how an entire region moves. The roads-first pattern is what a connectivity strategy looks like when it is measured in everyday access rather than flagship prestige – and it is the part of the China-Africa story that the rail framing routinely undercounts. The numbers are large enough that even a heavy discount for official optimism leaves a transformation.
The biggest number in China-Africa infrastructure is the one nobody puts on a poster.
The proof: a 113km Senegalese expressway
Abstractions become legible in a single road. Senegal's Thies-Touba highway, a 113km fully enclosed expressway built by China Road and Bridge Corporation on a loan of about US$704.6 million, took 45 months and now links two of the country's major centres at motorway speed, designed for 130km/h with dual two-lane carriageways. Congo-Brazzaville's National Highway No. 1, roughly 400km cutting through dense terrain over eight years of construction, connected the political capital to the economic one as the country's only land link between the two. These are not symbols. They are the daily arteries the rail headlines overshadow.
Multiplied across the continent, roads of this kind do what trunk railways cannot: they reach the last mile. A standard-gauge line serves its stations; a road network feeds them, carrying produce from farm to market and goods from port to interior. The named projects are the visible tip of a far larger, quieter build-out that determines whether the headline corridors have anything to carry. A railway without feeder roads is a spine without limbs.
One enclosed expressway tells the continental story better than a round number ever could.
The catch: tarmac comes with a tab
Roads are cheaper than railways, but they are not free. The Senegalese expressway was loan-financed and runs as a toll road; some Chinese-built African highways carry tolls and decades of debt-service obligations, and at least one – the Congo route – has drawn scrutiny over the firms and political families that benefited from its concessions. The roads-first model delivers mobility quickly, but the financing question that shadows every China-Africa megaproject follows the tarmac just as it follows the rail.
The distinction worth holding is between the asset and the arrangement. A well-built expressway is a durable public good; a toll-and-loan structure that routes revenue through opaque concessions is a separate matter, and the two travel together more often than the official tally admits. Counting the kilometres without counting the terms tells only half the story – and the half it omits is the one that lands on national budgets long after the road opens.
A road built on a loan is mobility today against repayment for years.
The contrast with rail is instructive in both directions. A railway concentrates a country's borrowing and its risk in one corridor, where a single stalled megaproject – Nigeria's long-delayed coastal line is the obvious case – becomes a national headline. Roads spread that exposure thin: many smaller loans, many smaller assets, far less scrutiny per kilometre. The diffusion that makes the roads-first model politically easy is the same diffusion that lets its cumulative debt accrue quietly, project by project, until it is large in aggregate and visible nowhere in particular.
If the rail projects are the headlines of China-Africa infrastructure, the roads are the body text – longer, denser and more determinative of how goods and people actually move. Counted honestly, with the debt and the concessions attached, the tarmac is where the continent's connectivity was quietly rewritten, and where the next decade's repayment will quietly be felt.
Sources: China MFA – China-Africa cooperation, Thies-Touba Toll Highway Project – CRBC, Chinese-built toll road and DR Congo's Kabila family – Taipei Times
