Shortly after the municipal economic conference concluded, the Kitwe City government sent representatives to Lubumbashi for economic exchanges.
Lubumbashi.
The provincial capital of East Africa's Swabia Province, it had been one of the four major provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the previous life and the capital of Katanga Province. Later, after the Congo government split Katanga Province into four smaller provinces, Lubumbashi remained the capital of Upper Katanga Province.
The Congo government had obviously split Katanga Province into four provinces in order to guard against local separatism.
In the previous life, Congo's capital had been Kinshasa, but Kinshasa lay too far west relative to Congo's territory, leaving it with weak control over the eastern regions.
The eastern Congo region centered on Lubumbashi and other cities was not only vast, populous, and relatively economically developed, but also home to numerous ethnic groups. Combined with Congo's many neighboring countries, this often turned Congo into a land of war and chaos.
But Swabia Province under East African rule lay within the borders of Katanga Province from the previous life, and East Africa was clearly not worried about encountering the problems Congo had faced in the previous life.
Now, Lubumbashi had become one of the most important cities in central East Africa, with a thriving economy and a large population.
Having just finished the conference, Mayor Debern and his entourage immediately sensed the gap between the two places upon arriving in Lubumbashi.
Mayor Debern could not help sighing. "Lubumbashi has developed far too quickly in recent years. Back in the last century, Kitwe could at least wrestle with them, but now Lubumbashi alone is more than twice the size of our city."
As the two largest cities in the Copperbelt, Kitwe and Lubumbashi had both risen on local copper resources. But