The multifaceted failures of logistics would cost, year after year, between $4 billion and $5 billion to Algeria, which has nevertheless invested heavily over the last twenty years, in the construction of road, port, and airport infrastructure, as well as in the acquisition of ships, cargo planes and merchant trains.
The financial effort of the State, which has already swallowed up no less than 60 billion dollars in the construction of basic infrastructure and the acquisition of equipment intended for current logistics (supplying the population and economic units), is obviously gigantic, but the local economic machine has unfortunately not followed suit. Due to a lack of local production, Algeria has indeed resolutely turned to imports that flow throughout its territory, using the infrastructure it had built to serve, first and foremost, its own machine. economic and commercial. The logistical means produced or acquired at great expense are in fact much more useful to foreign exporters than to Algerian producers who ultimately do not use, only a tiny part of the logistical potential available. A former senior official of the Ministry of Transport had rightly pointed out to us that “if the purpose of the roads, ports and airports and even the boats which have cost us a lot, was to be used only for imports, it would have been wiser to ask exporting countries (China, France, Turkey, Spain, USA, etc.) to finance them themselves, since they serve, first and foremost, their interests. »Our interlocutor was obviously not wrong, since it suffices to open his eyes to see that in the port enclosures and on the Algerian highways freshly put into service, circulate mainly semi-trailers loaded with containers, stuffed with a very wide range of imported products.
In the ports, the situation is even more deplorable. The thirty or so infrastructures in the country are all paid for imports, the transport of which is more than 90% reserved for foreign shipowners. It should indeed be known that the old national navigation company (CNAN) has only about twenty merchant ships of which, only ten, are authorized to navigate in international territorial waters, its “old boats” not being able to do, at best, the only cabotage. They are for the most part immobilized on the quays of our ports while waiting to be sold by weight in the form of scrap metal.
The maintenance of the CNAN as a state monopoly of maritime transport was certainly decided in high places to prevent the Algerian private sector from acquiring ships likely to strengthen the national fleet and to compete with the powerful foreign shipowners who took action. low on virtually all maritime logistics. The government had the audacity to promulgate a decree in 2015 authorizing the acquisition of merchant ships by Algerian private operators, but its application was never followed up. A dozen Algerian investors would have even taken steps with the Ministry of Transport at the time, to benefit from an authorization to acquire ships but, as usual, the administration was there to curb the enthusiasm. Six years after the promulgation of this decree, no Algerian investor has therefore been able to acquire, to date, a merchant’s vessel! Prime Minister Aymène Benabderahmane, recently returned to the subject by relaunching before the deputies of the AFN, this promise of openness to the private sector, but given the political and social situation which currently prevails in Algeria, he is to fear that this new promise of openness will not materialize, at least in the short term.
In addition, the weakness and the lack of diversity of the national production made that there is no logistics platform, nor free zone, worthy of their names in Algeria. These logistics spaces, which exist in all countries with a prosperous national economy, are made to serve as supply bases for factories that are fully operating in the industrial zones and poles of activity of the country. The products which circulate in Algeria being largely entirely manufactured abroad, the creation of this kind of platform, obviously did not prove to be essential. Hence their virtual absence in our country and the State’s reluctance to carry them out. They will not appear in the Algerian logistics system, only when our economy is able to increase and diversify its production, which unfortunately is not for tomorrow. An economy that is idling, by contenting itself with consuming foreigners, has no reason to acquire logistics platforms or free zones. There were, it is true, a few attempts at creation by means of administrative decisions (the case of the Bellara platform in 2015), but these have never been successful, as was to be expected. This type of platform requires a lot of time and a whole panoply of entrepreneurial initiatives taken according to daily activities and realities. A simple administrative decision is not enough to give them life, even if it comes from the top of the Algerian hierarchy.
