The Infrastructure
Revolution

Morocco understands something most African countries do not: infrastructure is not an expense. It is a revenue model. Tanger Med did not just build a port. It built a toll booth on the world’s busiest shipping lane. Eleven million containers pass through annually, connecting 180 ports in 70 countries. Every container pays. Morocco went from 78th in global maritime connectivity to 17th in twenty years. Not by accident. By architecture.

The Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline follows the same logic. It is not just a pipe. It is a corridor that connects 13 countries, 340 million people, and Nigeria’s gas reserves to Europe’s market — with Morocco as the gateway. The Dakhla Atlantic Port, the Nador West Med deepwater facility, and the Noor solar complex complete the picture. Morocco is building the infrastructure layer that everyone else will need.

China understands this too, which is why it has invested more in African infrastructure than any other external actor since 2013. But China’s model is different from Morocco’s. China builds the railway and China provides the loan. When Ethiopia could not repay its $4 billion railway debt, it renegotiated the terms. When Kenya’s SGR struggled to generate projected revenue, critics called it a white elephant. The academic consensus now rejects the “debt trap” narrative as simplistic — Chinese lending is not systematically worse than Western alternatives, and Beijing has forgiven dozens of loans. But the dependency question persists. When the Chinese-built railway needs Chinese parts and Chinese engineers, the toll booth has a different owner.

The US response arrived late but is now accelerating. The Lobito Corridor — 830km of greenfield railway connecting Angola’s Atlantic coast to Zambia and the DRC’s Copperbelt — is explicitly positioned as the democratic alternative to BRI. The EU’s Global Gateway programme announced $300 billion in 2021 to match China. Japan continues its TICAD framework. But all of these trail China’s spending by an order of magnitude. In 2025, China invested $61.2 billion in African infrastructure. The US counter-offer for the Lobito Corridor was $1 billion.

The most interesting story, though, is African self-financing. Ethiopia self-funded the GERD — $4.8 billion, the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, without external financing, because no external financier would touch the Nile politics. Dangote built Africa’s largest oil refinery with Nigerian capital. The Africa Finance Corporation found $1.1 trillion in untapped domestic capital sitting in African pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds.

The infrastructure revolution is real. The question is not whether the roads get built. It is whether they connect African economies to each other — as the AfCFTA envisions — or to extraction points that ship resources to Shanghai and Rotterdam. The colonial railways ran from mine to coast. The new railways could run from city to city. Whether they do depends on who writes the contract.