President Joe Biden arrived in Angola on Monday for his long-awaited first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa . Thousands of people lined the streets as Biden entered Angola’s capital, Luanda.
Biden first stopped in the Atlantic Ocean island nation of Cape Verde for a brief, closed-door meeting with Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva. In Angola, Biden plans to meet with Angolan President João Lourenço, visit the National Slavery Museum and travel to the port city of Lobito for a look at the rail project.
His visit comes with weeks left in his presidency, as Republican Donald Trump prepares to take office on Jan. 20.
Biden promised to visit Africa last year after reviving the U.S.-Africa Summit in December 2022. The trip was pushed back to 2024 and delayed again this October because of Hurricane Milton, reinforcing a sentiment among Africans that their continent is still low priority for Washington.
The last U.S. president to visit sub-Saharan Africa was Barack Obama in 2015. Biden did attend a United Nations climate summit in Egypt in North Africa in 2022.
“I just kind of push back on the premise that this is some Johnny-come-lately trip at the very end,” national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on board Air Force One on the way to Angola, noting that top administration officials had visited Africa, including Vice President Kamala Harris. “This is something he (Biden) has been focused on since he became president of the United States.”
A new strategy
Critical minerals are a key field for U.S.-China competition and China has a stranglehold on Africa’s critical minerals.
The U.S. has for years built relations in Africa through trade, security and humanitarian aid. The 800-mile (1,300-kilometer) railway upgrade is a different move and has shades of China’s Belt and Road foreign infrastructure strategy that has surged ahead.
The Biden administration has called the corridor one of the president’s signature initiatives, yet Lobito’s future and any change in the way the United States engages with a continent of 1.4 billion that’s leaning heavily toward China depends on the incoming administration of President-elect Trump.
“President Biden is no longer the story,” said Mvemba Dizolele, the director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “Even African leaders are focused on Donald Trump.”
A fit for Trump’s vision?
The U.S. has committed $3 billion to the Lobito Corridor and related projects, administration officials said, alongside financing from the European Union, the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, a Western-led private consortium and African banks.
“A lot is riding on this in terms of its success and its replicability,” said Tom Sheehy, a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan federal research institution.
He called it one of the flagships for the G7’s new Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which was driven by Biden and aims to reach other developing nations as a response to China’s Belt and Road.
Many are optimistic that the Lobito project, which isn’t due for completion until well after Biden has left office, will survive a change of administration and be given a chance. It goes some way to blunting China, which has bipartisan backing and is high on Trump’s to-do list.
“As long as they keep labeling Lobito one of the main anti-China tools in Africa, there is a certain likelihood that it’s going to keep being funded,” said Christian-Géraud Neema, who analyzes China-Africa relations.
Kirby said the Biden administration hoped Trump and his team saw the value in Lobito but “we are still in office. We still have 50 days. This is a key major development not just for the United States and our foreign policy goals in Africa, but for Africans.”
The Lobito Corridor will be an upgrade and extension of a railway line from the copper and cobalt mines of northern Zambia and southern Congo to Angola’s Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito, a route west for Africa’s critical minerals. It also ultimately aims to extend from Zambia and Congo to Africa’s east coast through Tanzania and be a coast-to-coast rail link.
While Biden’s administration called it a “game-changer” for U.S. investment in Africa, it’s little more than a starting point for the U.S. and its partners with China dominant in the mining in Zambia and Congo. Congo has more than 70% of the world’s cobalt, most of which is heading to China to reinforce its critical mineral supply chain that the U.S. and Europe have to rely on.
Some success in Africa
Lobito was made possible by some American diplomatic success in Angola that led to a Western consortium winning the bid for the project in 2022 ahead of Chinese competition, a surprise given Angola’s long and strong ties with Beijing. China financed a previous redevelopment of the railway.
The Biden administration accelerated American outreach to Angola, turning around what was an antagonistic relationship three decades ago when the U.S. armed anti-government rebels in Angola’s civil war. U.S.-Angola trade was $1.77 billion last year, while the U.S. has a stronger stake in regional security through a strategic presence on the Atlantic Ocean, and Lourenço’s role mediating in a conflict in eastern Congo.
In Angola, Biden will announce new developments on health, agribusiness, security cooperation as well as the Lobito Corridor, White House officials said.
The visit, the first by a sitting U.S. president to Angola, will “highlight that remarkable evolution of the U.S.-Angola relationship,” said Frances Brown, a special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council.
It will also draw attention to a perennial challenge for America’s value-based diplomacy in Africa. International rights groups have used Biden’s trip to criticize the Lourenço government’s authoritarian shift. Political opponents have been imprisoned and allegedly tortured, while security and other laws have been passed in Angola that severely restrict freedoms, throwing some scrutiny on Washington’s new African partnership.
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