Should Donald Trump fail to back the Lobito Corridor project, João Lourenço’s government has other partnership options in Europe and the Middle East.
President Joe Biden’s trip to Angola next week is his first to Africa as president, and the first visit to Angola by an American leader since independence from Portugal in 1975.
It comes as the governing People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party prepares to celebrate 50 years of rule, and Angola gets ready to host the US-Africa Business Summit in mid-2025
US-Angola relations are at their strongest since 1993.
The Biden administration has tried to increase its Africa engagement since 2021, through sharpened focus within its Africa network, increased official visits and important new initiatives such as the Lobito Corridor.
The Corridor is planned as part of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), a G7 initiative designed to compete with Chinese influence head on, in Africa and beyond. In these respects, US-Angola relations are at their strongest since 1993.
A break with the past
This is a dramatic change. During the Cold War, Angola was a one-party Marxist-Leninist state, allied to the Soviet Union and Cuba. The country fought a long civil war with UNITA, a rebel group supported by apartheid South Africa and the US. (UNITA was the second largest recipient of US covert aid after the Afghan Mujahadin until 1992, poisoning relations between Washington and Luanda).
The tide began to turn in May 1993, when President Bill Clinton formally recognized the government elected in Angola’s first ever multiparty elections.
Related content China-Africa relations US oil companies, Chevron and Exxon, have prospered in the country, and Angola was an important source of US oil imports. That continued until 2006, when this trade plateaued and then sharply declined following the US shale boom.
Luanda’s subsequent relationship with Washington has been patchy. At the end of the civil war in 2003, the Angolans complained to a senior US official that Washington supported an international donors conference for Afghanistan, but not for Angola. The reply, reportedly, was blunt.
Bilateral relations with the US subsequently cooled, and Angola sought diplomatic and economic relations with China – resulting in $45 billion of infrastructure investment over the last twenty years. Angola still owes Chinese lenders $17 billion, constituting about 40 per cent of its total debt.
Growing strategic importance
However, Angola’s strategic importance to Washington has increased in the last five years. There have been two key drivers for this. The first is João Lourenço’s ascendency to the Angolan presidency in 2017, after almost 40 years of rule by former President Dos Santos.
Angola has deepened relations with the US – but also the UAE, Turkey and France.
Lourenço’s administration has seen Angolan foreign policy move away from ideology towards pragmatic multipolarity, becoming truly non-aligned. Luanda has sought to reduce its closeness to Beijing and Moscow, voting in favour of the 2022 UN General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian annexation referendums in Ukraine.
Meanwhile Angola has deepened relations with the US – but also the UAE, Turkey and France. In early October the country joined Le Francophonie as an official observer, and Lourenço is due to visit Paris in early 2025, following the visit of Emmanuel Macron to Angola in 2023. Angola has also indicated it would like to join the Commonwealth.
Second, Angola’s strategic location is important for Washington. Angola has played a valuable mediation role to end confrontation between the DRC and Rwanda in recent years – it shares a long northern border with the DRC. Biden will be keen to ensure Angola’s continuing support for those efforts. US officials were deeply involved in meetings on the fringes of this year’s UN General Assembly, working to get a DRC- Rwanda ceasefire (signed in Luanda this July) to stick.
President Lourenço is also seeking election to chairperson of the African Union in 2025 – an appointment that Washington would welcome.
The Lobito Corridor
Biden will also focus on the Lobito Corridor. This project, to rehabilitate a 1,300-kilometre railway linking Angola’s coast to the mineral fields of the DRC and Zambia, is the first strategic economic corridor launched under the PGII.
The Lobito Corridor… is intended to transport resources including copper and cobalt, critical for a new generation of batteries.
The Corridor runs from the port of Lobito, on the Atlantic Ocean, to the town of Luau on Angola’s north-eastern border with the DRC and a further 400 kilometres into the DRC mining town of Kolwezi. A branch line to Zambia is also envisaged. The project is intended to transport resources including copper and cobalt, critical for a new generation of batteries that will power the energy transition.
The resilience of the strategic mineral supply chain is important for US and European technology industries. The Corridor is also intended as a crucial demonstration that the West can deliver on infrastructure projects in Africa.
It may also help to engage the US private sector in broader investments on the continent, which have to date remained tepid (beyond hydrocarbons and critical minerals).
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But funding for the Corridor looks more uncertain following the election of Donald Trump.
A multipolar future
The Lobito project is aimed to compete with China. But both Western and Chinese firms will be able to use the infrastructure it delivers. In fact, a joint venture between Chinese Zijin Mining and Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines was the Lobito Atlantic Railway’s first customer.
Should Trump fail to back the Lobito project, EU and African Development Bank investment is likely to continue.
That may make its value questionable to Trump, a US president who will likely define his administration in large measure by competition with Beijing.
Regardless, Biden’s trip to Angola is a reminder to future White House incumbents that, unlike during the Cold War, the world is no longer defined by superpower competition.
African leaders living in a multipolar world will not tolerate being caught up in a competition between Washington and Beijing. Should Trump fail to back Lobito, EU and African Development Bank investment is likely to continue.
Donald Trump and his successors should take note: Angola, and countries like it, have many partners to choose from in a world of increasing competition for access to Africa’s vital resources.
Dr Alex Vines OBE, Research Director; Director, Africa Programme
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Source link : https://allafrica.com/stories/202411300162.html
Author : contact@chathamhouse.org.uk (Chatham House)
Publish date : 2024-11-30 16:25:36
