Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

Africa

Africa

US President Biden visits Angola to seal his legacy in Africa

US President Biden visits Angola to seal his legacy in Africa
Peter Fabricius
By Peter Fabricius
26 Nov 2024
Facebook
2
The Lobito Corridor will be the focus of outgoing President Joe Biden’s visit to Angola, his first to Africa during his presidency.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden will travel to Angola next week to keep his promise to visit Africa and also to underscore the ambitious Lobito Corridor project as his main legacy on the continent.

To mix the avian metaphors, Biden will conduct this swansong journey as a lame-duck president, with less than two months left of his presidency and soon to be succeeded by Donald Trump, who has shown very little interest in Africa, and that mostly contemptuous.

US officials say Biden will visit Angola from 2 to 4 December to meet Angolan President Joao Lourenço, underscore his commitment to Africa, strengthen ties with Angola and also to highlight and advance the Lobito Corridor, a rail link from the Angolan coast to Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia, where the US has invested heavily.

Biden will announce a set of deliverables on the Lobito Corridor, not only amplifying several areas of partnership with Angola, but also investments in projects in Zambia, Dr Frances Brown, the special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council, told African journalists in an online briefing on Tuesday, 26 November.

Helaina R Matza, acting special coordinator for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) in the State Department, said the Lobito Corridor project was moving ahead quickly.

Apart from the first phase of upgrading the existing 1,300km of railway line from the port of Lobito across Angola to the DRC border, the partners in the project had also completed feasibility studies for the 800km of greenfield railway to extend the line across Zambia, and had signed agreements to do the social and environment assessments. 

She noted that Biden had stated the ambition for the Lobito Corridor to reach right across to the Indian Ocean. She said it could connect with other corridors in Africa to create a broader transport network that could also include South Africa. The two rail lines would reduce the transit times between Zambia, DRC and Angola from 45 days to less than a week. “What that can do for agribusiness is absolutely astronomical”

The Lobito Corridor project was launched by Angola, DRC and Zambia, but is strongly supported by the US, European Union, African financial institutions and private investors. Though originally conceived mainly to accelerate the transit of minerals from DRC and Zambia to port, it is also envisaged that it will stimulate agriculture and other industries along its route, boosting general economic development in all three countries and beyond. 

Read more: Cementing US-Angola ties — Biden’s visit signifies an attempt to counter Chinese and Russian influence in southern Africa

US ‘overdelivering’ on African investment


Brown said Biden’s trip to Angola would illustrate the central point of the Biden administration’s US-Africa strategy that “it’s impossible to meet this era’s defining challenges without African contributions and leadership.”

She noted that at the US-Africa leaders’ summit that Biden hosted in December 2022, (and where, incidentally, he promised to visit Africa during his presidency) the US pledged to invest $55-billion in Africa over three years. 

“We are over-delivering on that thus far. Two years later, we’ve spent, we’ve invested, more than 80% of that commitment,” said Brown.

Read more: Joe Biden’s legacy – the good, the bad and the ugly

She said the Biden administration had also championed more African leadership in multilateral forums, including seats on the G20 and the UN Security Council and on the boards of international financial institutions.

She said Biden had chosen to visit Angola because the US saw it as a strategic partner and a regional leader. In 2023, US-Angola trade totalled about $1.77-billion, making it America’s fourth-largest trade partner in sub-Saharan Africa. The US and Angola were also working on a range of pressing issues, including bolstering peace and security in the eastern DRC. 

‘Checkmating’ China


In response to Amnesty International’s call on Biden to demand that Lourenço must stop his government’s crackdown on peaceful protests and free arbitrarily detained government critics, Brown said Biden “does not shy away from talking with counterparts about how democracy takes constant work and takes constant tending… and I don’t see a reason that he would stop now on that.”

Asked if the US was backing the Lobito Corridor to counter the influence of other powers such as China and Turkiye, Brown said the US approach “is not about forcing countries to choose, but rather giving them a choice and the ability to make their own sovereign decisions”.

Bob Wekesa, director of the African Centre for the Study of the United States, at Wits University, said he believed Biden’s visit was motivated by several factors, including fulfilling his promise to visit Africa, “thereby reaching out to the African-American community, to pro-Africanists in the US to indicate the Democratic Party has a soft spot for the continent.”

Biden’s trip and his support for the Lobito Corridor was also a way for the US to get ahead in the global race for Africa’s critical minerals, and “checkmating” China in particular. China had once been Angola’s top international partner, though that relationship seemed to have slowed. Wekesa said he believed that Biden was trying to use US economic levers to improve Angolan governance and democracy.

“Biden is seeking to put icing on the cake to say ‘this (the Lobito Corridor) is my legacy project on the continent’. Because if it succeeds, it will be one of the largest if not the largest undertaken.”

Wekesa said he thought the US commitment to the Lobito Corridor was now too deeply entrenched for Trump to reverse, even if he wanted to. DM

Categories:

Tags: