At an invitation-only gathering held at the sidelines of Mining Indaba 2026 in Cape Town, senior voices from mining, rail, government and finance came together to take stock of Southern Africa’s logistics reform agenda — and to confront the hard work that still lies ahead.
The Bay Hotel in Camps Bay provided a fitting backdrop for Mining X Logistics 2026, the annual invitation-only forum convened by infrastructure advisory firm Anura Partners. Now in its third year, the event has established itself as a rare space where the mining sector, rail operators, government officials and development financiers speak candidly about the systemic issues holding Southern Africa’s logistics infrastructure back — and what it will take to move forward.
Anura Partners, whose work spans governments, investors, and industry players across the region, used the occasion to reflect on progress since it published its Tracks to Prosperity report a year earlier, and to probe what has — and has not — changed. Four keynote speakers brought perspectives from across the rail value chain: the executive director of Southern Africa’s foremost rail body, a senior government policymaker, the technical architect of South Africa’s private sector participation programme, and an industry entrepreneur preparing to put trains on the network. What emerged was a picture of genuine momentum, tempered by an equally genuine recognition of how much remains to be done.
The room itself was telling. Around the tables sat a genuine cross-section of the sector’s decision-makers: government representatives from across Africa and beyond, senior mining executives, Transnet leadership, private rail operators and concession holders active across the continent, South African rolling stock manufacturers and rail industry suppliers, and development finance institutions and commercial investors from Africa, Europe and Asia. It is a gathering Anura Partners has made something of a trademark — convening, in one room, precisely the stakeholders whose collective action will determine whether Southern Africa’s logistics transformation actually happens.
The Regional Picture: Connectivity as a Competitive Imperative
Raymond Shoniwa, Executive Director of the Southern African Railways Association (SARA), set the scene with a frank account of the region’s rail dysfunction. Drawing on his earlier role running private rail operations in Zimbabwe, Shoniwa described a corridor from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls — 840 kilometres — that routinely took 30 hours to traverse, while the onward leg from Livingstone to Dar es Salaam, a comparable distance, consumed 76 hours. The economics were unsustainable.
“If it takes 76 hours from Victoria Falls to Livingstone, you could do with half the rolling stock that we were using. Half the human capital. That distance was taking far much less by road.” — Raymond Shoniwa, Executive Director, SARA
The point was not simply about slow trains. It was about the compounding cost of poor infrastructure on every input in the system — and the fact that roads, by default, absorb freight that rail should be carrying. Shoniwa was careful to welcome the wave of private sector interest entering the space, but equally clear that rolling stock alone would not fix the problem. Infrastructure rehabilitation, he argued, is the precondition for everything else.
SARA is working with development finance institutions, including the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the European Union, to address capacity gaps across the region, and has begun engaging with the supply chain — a constituency Shoniwa noted had been largely overlooked. For South African suppliers accustomed to treating Transnet as their sole customer, he offered a blunt reframe: the region is the market.
The Mmamabula–Lephalale Corridor: A Priority Cross-border Connector
Perhaps the most tangible near-term opportunity discussed at the event is the proposed rail corridor linking Botswana’s coal and mineral-rich northwest to South Africa’s rail network at Lephalale in Limpopo. At approximately 110 kilometres, it is short by regional standards, relatively straightforward in engineering terms, and sits at the intersection of significant mineral demand on both sides of the border.
Johannes Tsimako, Deputy Permanent Secretary at Botswana’s Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, described a country whose dependence on diamond revenues has left it urgently seeking logistics solutions to unlock other resources — coal, copper, soda ash — that are stranded in the northwest for want of export infrastructure. New mining entrants, including MMG at the Khoemacau copper operation, are expanding their footprints and need export routes. Without rail, trucks fill the void.
“There are currently about 120 trucks leaving the mine every day,” Tsimako noted. “That is not sustainable.” The corridor, he said, is the priority — shorter, quicker to deliver, and capable of unlocking resources that could anchor the concession economics for investors.
“Of all the corridors, this is the most prime one. It is shorter, it is relatively easy to finish quickly, and it can unlock a whole lot of resources that can be easily sent out to markets. That is why it is our priority.”
— Johannes Tsimako, Deputy Permanent Secretary, Botswana Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure
Political momentum is building, and feasibility work on the corridor is well advanced. The main remaining obstacle, Tsimako acknowledged with some candour, is a bilateral legal text being argued over by lawyers on both sides. On the Botswana legislative side, a Rail Authority Bill and related infrastructure legislation are moving through parliament, with private sector participation explicitly enshrined in the new framework.
South Africa’s Psp Programme: Structure, Scale and Urgency
Jaap van der Merwe, a technical expert within DBSA’s Rail Private Sector Participation unit, delivered the most detailed account of where South Africa’s PSP programme stands — and the scale of the prize it is chasing. His framing was anchored around what he called the fundamental economics of mineral logistics: from drilling to the freight-on-board certificate, a cost of approximately $50 per tonne is the threshold that determines whether export supply chains work. Everything the sector does must be evaluated against that number.
The PSP process has been painstaking but deliberate. A formal request for information drew 142 responses from 96 companies across 15 countries, generating a 1,400-page analysis that shaped the programme’s design. Three problems emerged with unusual clarity: the system needs to recover to its previous capacity of 280 million tonnes; Transnet cannot remain a single point of failure; and private capital — measured in hundreds of billions of rand — is available under the right conditions.
“The private sector will invest substantially, unconditionally, to unlock the full potential of our national logistics system. But that will take time to mature — and the urgent rehabilitation programme must start now.”
— Jaap van der Merwe, Technical Expert, DBSA Rail PSP Unit
The programme is structured around four pillars: a rehabilitation and recovery programme across the network; a dedicated minerals rail strand; an intermodal supply chain programme; and a passenger and urban rail component. Van der Merwe described a portfolio of projects, some capable of running discretely, others interdependent. The first standalone PSP announcement — the redevelopment of the Richards Bay terminal, targeting a 24-million tonne chrome corridor — was expected by end of February.
His closing challenge was directed not at policy, but at readiness: if South Africa is about to commit hundreds of billions of rand across five or six corridors, where are the engineers, the construction companies, the compliant contractors? Without deliberate preparation, the work will flow to international firms. “Bring the African people in,” he urged. “Let’s make real what the African continent agreed to, ten years ago.”
Private Operators Mobilise: From Policy to Trains on the Track
Anand Moodliar, Chairperson of the African Rail Industry Association (ARIA) and CEO of Barberry, offered the industry’s perspective on what it looks like to actually put private trains on South Africa’s network. Barberry is among the 11 Train Operating Companies awarded slots under the current framework — and Moodliar described the work of converting that award into operational reality with the energy of someone who has already started.
Among the announcements at the event: Barberry is working with partners to procure the Alstom 23E electric locomotive — a proven platform already in service with Transnet — as the basis for its initial fleet. Moodliar positioned this as a deliberate choice: interoperability on shared infrastructure, where trains follow each other down the same lines, demands equipment compatibility. The same logic underpins his support for the competition commission’s block exemption, which allows TOCs to cooperate on operational matters without falling foul of competition law.
On the commercial opportunity, Moodliar pointed to numbers that frame the stakes: 20 million tonnes of freight currently moving by road on the Majuba corridor alone; 6 billion tonnes of nameplate IPCD capacity ready to be activated; a global coal market of 1.1 billion tonnes shipped annually, of which South Africa should — he argued forcefully — reclaim its historical share. “Why are we leaving our market share off the table?” he asked, in remarks directed as much at the mining companies in the room as at fellow operators.
“For every million tonnes moved back to rail on a journey over 500 kilometres, 49,000 tonnes of CO2 is avoided. We are not just talking about survival. We are talking about the future of logistics in this country.”
— Anand Moodliar, Chairperson, ARIA / CEO, Barberry
The Overlooked Enablers: Skills, Supply Chain and Readiness
Across all four speakers, a consistent thread emerged that rarely commands the same attention as locomotives and concession structures: the readiness of the human and industrial ecosystem to support a rail revival. Shoniwa described an ageing regional technician workforce with an average age approaching 55, trained by national railways in the 1990s and not yet replaced. Without deliberate intervention, the private players entering the market will simply compete for the same shrinking pool of skilled workers — or, as he observed wryly, recruit directly from the state enterprises.
Van der Merwe made a related point about the construction and engineering sector, warning that without preparation, the beneficiaries of South Africa’s rail investment programme would be international contractors, not local firms. Moodliar pointed to a different dimension of readiness — his 200 front-end loader operators, all holding aspirations to become train drivers, represent a pipeline that should be a planning input, not an afterthought.
It was a theme that resonated with Dr. Maximilian Matschke, Managing Partner of Anura Partners, who had opened the evening by framing logistics not as a cost centre but as the single largest value lever available to the mining sector. “Some mines could triple, quadruple, or even quintuple their export volumes if they had sufficient logistics access,” he noted. “The biggest commercial risk for mines in this environment is not putting their weight behind logistics.”
The observation set the tone for an evening that was less a celebration of progress than a serious accounting of what must now be done — corridor by corridor, legislation by legislation, locomotive by locomotive. Mining X Logistics 2026 offered no shortage of complexity. What it did offer, in the view of those present, was a rare convergence of the actors needed to begin resolving it.
Mining X Logistics 2026 was hosted by Anura Partners at The Bay Hotel, Camps Bay, Cape Town, on 9 February 2026, at the sidelines of Mining Indaba.
