Completion of the Dar es Salaam railway to Kigoma, near Ujiji, in German East Africa in 1914, coupled with a lake steamer service to Mpulungu near Abercorn, made it even more viable.

There was migration from Luapula Province to Katanga, and some of Mwata Kazembe's people looked to Élisabethville for employment and advancement rather than Mufulira, Kitwe and Ndola.

Eventually, in the late 1940s, the Government of Northern Rhodesia realised the need for a larger, direct road from the Copperbelt to Fort Rosebery with a higher-capacity ferry over the Luapula.

By the 1950s the Chembe Ferry had two motorised pontoons able to take the largest trucks, the border posts worked smoothly and the 174 km (108 mi) drive from Mufulira to Mansa could be completed in four or five hours.

By comparison the same journey keeping to roads within the country was 1,166 km (725 mi) and took at least two days, going via Kapiri Mposhi, Mpika, Kasama and Luwingu.

The colonial experience had broken down those connections which might have smoothed travel by Zambians through Zaire and replaced them with a bureaucracy and leadership whose allegiances had greatly changed and who saw how to exploit regulations and authority for their own gains.

[3] Under Mobutu, governance deteriorated and corruption flourished in Zaire, and he saw Katanga only as a cash cow and punished it for its separatist tendencies by neglecting its development.

The situation became more severe when any of Mobutu's security forces were in the Pedicle,[1] with robberies, violence and occasionally the complete disappearance of travellers and their vehicles.