Four Decades of Road Transport in Africa Eddie Akinyemi

One of the dominant sectors in African transport over the past four decades has been road transport. Before and immediately after independence in many African countries, the focus was mainly on the rail sector. The European colonialists constructed over 10,000km of railway lines, mainly to facilitate the transport of goods between the interior, the main ports and neighbouring countries. However, since the 1960s, the road sector has dominated in terms of investments and demand. For example, roads are known to consume 5-10 per cent of recurrent budgets, 10-20 per cent of development budgets and 80-90 per cent of passenger and freight traffic (Heggie, 1995).