By Jeffery Kazembe Batts
On December 2nd, President Biden met with Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva as Air Force One refueled in Cape Verde before taking him to the Angolan capital, Luanda. Although a lame-duck president, advisors encouraged him to make the trip to show his interest and as part of his legacy. Announcing his son’s pardon as he was about to depart drew news focus away from the trip.
The trip was Biden’s first time to sub-Saharan Africa as president after being delayed twice. He is the first American president to visit Africa since Barack Obama visited his father’s homeland of Kenya and Ethiopia in 2015.
After arriving in the capital, Luanda, Biden spoke at the National Slavery Museum, where he acknowledged that the first two enslaved Africans are believed to have come from this region of Angola one hundred and fifty years before the founding of the USA. $240,000 was pledged to help renovate the museum.
While meeting with Angolan President Joan Lourenco, who was hosted inside the Oval Office a year ago, deliverables such as agribusiness, health initiatives, and security were discussed by a senior American official who declared “at the 2022 Africa Leaders Summit, the U.S. pledged to invest $55 billion in Africa over the subsequent three years. Two years on from that, I’m proud to say that we’ve already met 80 percent of that commitment, and we really view these as investments, not donations.”
Without mentioning China by name, the underlying theme, or the elephant in the room, was that China has invested and surpassed the U.S. in helping Africa in general and Angola, Zambia, and southern Congo develop and that reality must be countered. Angola has $42 billion dollars of debt to China, the most significant debt on the continent, and America’s investment is primarily private/public partnerships should avoid creating massive debt.
After leaving Luanda, President Biden traveled down to the coastal city of Lobito, the terminus for the 800-mile Lobito Corridor development project. The railway corridor goes to the Democratic Republic of Congo border and then into Zambia.
This south-central African location is where vast amounts of vital minerals are mined, often stolen, and industrialized countries are supplied with the resources needed for modern technology, whether cell phones, computers, electric cars, nuclear power, etc. Rival militias, especially in Congo, battle for control of the rich territory while the masses of people live in dirt-poor conditions.
The stated aim of the Lobito Corridor is to modernize a railway so that minerals can efficiently be removed from Africa and funneled into the West for production in their economies. The potential construction of factories along the Lobito Corridor is mentioned almost as an afterthought.
The possibility of African nations adding value to the resources coming out of their land and thereby creating local industrialization, business, and jobs – a proper self-determining development plan is not overtly on the table.