This official visit by the outgoing president of the United States, between Monday and Wednesday, to Angola “represents a dramatic break with history,” says Alex Vines, director of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, a British think tank in London.
The US administration, under the leadership of Joe Biden, “has been trying to increase its involvement in Africa since 2021, through the recreation of assets, an increase in official visits” – even though Biden himself has not travelled to the continent since occupying the White House – “and some new initiatives, such as the Lobito Corridor in Angola, as part of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), designed to compete with China,” he added.
Also, in the context of this rapprochement, Angola is preparing to host the United States-Africa Business Summit in mid-2025. If the next US president, Donald Trump, maintains this agenda, which is not guaranteed, the summit is expected to bring together more than 1,500 delegates, heads of state and government, and other world leaders in Luanda.
Biden is coming to Angola with “two objectives”, according to Peter Fabricius, an analyst and researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria: “To fulfil his promise to Africa, even if in a somewhat diluted form,” in the last days of his presidency, but also “to confirm the Lobito Corridor, which took on an even more strategic significance at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) last September, with Beijing’s signing of the rehabilitation of the Tazara railway line with Tanzania and Zambia.”
The Lobito Corridor and the Tazara railway – an acronym for the Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority, whose line connects the town of Kapiri Mposhi, in the province of Central Zambia, to the port of Dar es Salaam, on the Indian Ocean – “are in a way, alternatives, because the critical minerals extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) and Zambia either go west or east,” he emphasises.
The Lobito Corridor, which will link the Angolan port to Zambia via the DRCongo, “is somewhat symbolic of the commitment of the United States and the European Union to infrastructure in Africa because that has been the great deficit in the relations of the two blocs with the continent compared to China,” says the ISS analyst.
On the question of whether Donald Trump will keep Washington’s commitments to the project, the ISS researcher predicts that although the next US head of state “doesn’t have the same interests as the Democrats in Africa”, the “practical benefits” of the project should prevail.
“Although Trump sympathises with Russia, he is quite hostile towards China. So, in that sense, I wonder if he will abandon the idea. Perhaps it’s a question of analysing the practical benefits. I don’t think we can assume that he will abandon the idea” of rehabilitating and extending the Lobito Corridor, he said.
China has decades of consistent investment behind it in Africa, and Angola is no exception. Over the last twenty years, Angola has benefited from investments in infrastructure totalling around 45 billion dollars. Angola owes $17 billion to Chinese creditors, around 40% of the country’s total debt.
“Nevertheless, Angola’s strategic importance to Washington has increased in the last five years due to two fundamental factors, starting with the rise of João Lourenço to the presidency of Angola after almost 40 years of rule by former President Eduardo dos Santos,” emphasises Vines.
“João Lourenço and his influential wife, Ana Dias, regularly visit the United States and own a property in Bethesda, Maryland [bought in 2013].” “Angolan foreign policy,” since Lourenço came to power in 2017, “has moved away from ideology and towards pragmatic multipolarity, becoming truly non-aligned,” according to the Chatham House analyst.
By way of illustration, Alex Vines refers to Luanda’s condemnation of Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories at the United Nations General Assembly in 2022 and emphasises Lourenço’s attempt to “reduce his proximity to Beijing and Moscow while deepening his relations with the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, as well as the United States”, as well as signing Angola’s accession to La Francophonie as an official observer.
The analyst pointed out that the second “fundamental factor” is the special relationship between Luanda and Kinshasa: “Angola’s transport links and diplomacy with the DRC are important to Washington. In recent years, Angola has played an important mediating role in ending the direct and indirect confrontation between the DRC and Rwanda.”
Bilateral US-Angolan relations, Angola’s diplomatic role in the southern African region and the Lobito Corridor as an iconic Western investment in Africa are expected to make headlines during Biden’s three-day visit to Angola. Still, the results of this summit are unlikely to go beyond “symbolic aspects”, said Fabricius.
“They’ll try to make it look like something more than a symbolic visit, but I’m not sure that we’ll see large sums of money being thrown on the table; there may be one or two commitments on the extension of Lobito to Zambia, that’s been aired, but it’s uncertain,” he added.
Borges Nhamirre, an ISS analyst, expects the US President to say “something about democracy and fundamental freedoms, rights and guarantees”.
But even if Biden doesn’t, adds the Mozambican ISS analyst, this is an “opportunity for the defenders of freedoms in Angola to show their struggle and vitality and tell the Americans that the country they are taking as a partner is passing laws that, from the point of view of fundamental rights, are inconceivable, as is the case with this recent law against public vandalism, which cannot be imagined anywhere in the world in the middle of the 21st century, perhaps only in North Korea”. By Lusa, Macau Business
