ZIYANDA STUURMAN: Biden’s Angola visit aims to make the Lobito Corridor a policy showpiece

For much of US President Joe Biden’s term in office he has tried to make relations with African countries a centrepiece of his foreign policy platform — or at least make it seem that way. Before becoming former president Barack Obama’s vice-president, Biden had a well-respected record on foreign policy issues, and as president he has faced as many geopolitical challenges as he did local domestic and economic issues. 

Various representatives from the Biden administration have criss-crossed the continent in the past four years, strengthening partnerships in some quarters and forging new ones in others. Vice-president Kamala Harris in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. Secretary of state Antony Blinken in SA, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen in Senegal, SA and Zambia, and defence secretary Lloyd Austin in Angola, Djibouti and Kenya. Biden himself played host to 49 leaders from Africa in Washington DC in December 2022 and hosted several bilateral visits thereafter in 2023.

Despite this, for most of Biden’s term, his administration did not seem to have a clear plan or purpose guiding its Africa outreach, instead choosing to engage on individual issues in various countries. That changed with the announcement of the US’s backing of the Lobito Corridor project in September 2023.

The ambitious infrastructure initiative plans to rehabilitate parts of the old Benguela freight rail corridor — running east to west across Angola — and to link it to rail lines in mining regions from the DRC and Zambia. The project will probably extend to Tanzania in the long run and span the width of central Africa.

Initiated by an international consortium of logistics sector companies, the project has received large funding pledges from the US and the EU through the Partnership for Global Investment & Infrastructure Initiative (PGII), which was launched in May 2023 at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

If China has the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) then the G7 has the PGII, and with it Biden has a legacy Africa outreach showpiece with the Lobito Corridor.

Presidents before Biden have had their own showpieces too, each reflecting a different moment in the broader US-Africa relationship.

In 2000 Clinton’s administration created the African Growth & Opportunity Act, a preferential trade platform between the US and 32 African economies. George W Bush’s administration created the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) in 2003 to improve the capacity of recipient countries (initially focused on Africa) to control the spread of HIV/Aids.

Obama’s term brought the creation of the Power Africa initiative in 2013, which continues to push forward the goal of adding 300,000MW of electricity generation capacity on the continent by 2030. And finally, Donald Trump’s administration launched both the Development Finance Corporation and the Prosper Africa initiative to streamline and increase two-way trade and investment through private sector-led engagement.

Biden will want his upcoming visit to Luanda to be a sign of the times too. The US and EU are in a race with China to influence, direct or explicitly control the supply of critical minerals from several countries in Africa to their own industries. Washington has fallen far behind China, in no small part due to Beijing’s early and large investments through the BRI, making the Lobito Corridor project a test pilot for future investment partnership models.

Angola President Joao Lourenco will no doubt put in considerable effort to cast the US pledges to the project in concrete in these last few weeks of the Biden administration. Under Lourenco the Angolan government has been working to pivot away from the production and export of crude oil as its primary economic activity, and the opportunities for developing new industries in and around the rail corridor region and at the Lobito port are central to that work.

Lourenco will be encouraged that the PGII is as much a G7 project as it is a Biden legacy showpiece, making the prospects of continued international investment better than they would be without broader support. The project’s angle as a strategic, competitive initiative in the race against China for access to the supply of critical minerals such as copper and cobalt is a bonus.

For decades American presidents have left their mark on the trajectory of relations between their country and those on the African continent, for better or worse. Biden is likely to spend his time in Luanda trying to paint his administration’s engagement with Lourenco and other African leaders as forward-looking and mutually beneficial.

Whether that’s true or not will not be immediately obvious in the case of the Lobito Corridor, but it certainly has potential.

• Stuurman is senior analyst: Africa with Eurasia Group.