By visiting the Angolan port of Lobito on Wednesday, Joe Biden will try, just before leaving power, to explain how the United States must do “better” but not necessarily “more” than China to regain influence on the African continent.
“For the investments of the United States compared to the investments of others, it is not a question of doing more or less, it is a question of doing things differently. We see others arriving with very large checks, building a lot of things, but it comes with high interest rates, with really difficult conditions and without commitments for the civil society of African countries, assured a senior White House official during an exchange with the press.
The American president had promised to make an official visit to Africa.
He is running at the very end of his mandate, when he no longer has much political weight, which raises questions about the real scope of his trip to Angola, a former Portuguese colony, long an ally of the Soviet Union.
He began his trip on Tuesday with a meeting with President Joao Lourenço, considered a strong ally by the United States, and with a speech evoking slavery in particular.
On Wednesday, Joe Biden has an entire program devoted to the economy.
He will visit the port of Lobito, about 500 kilometers south of the capital Luanda, then an agri-food company, before meetings with the Angolan president, those of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, and the vice-president from Tanzania, as well as business leaders.
Joe Biden is expected to announce new investments of $600 million in the “Lobito Corridor”, a vast infrastructure and trade project.
This “Corridor”, if the project is completed, must connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, and thus facilitate exports of very strategic raw materials such as copper and cobalt, while developing, according to Washington, agricultural exchanges and commerce in general.
– From 45 days to 45 hours –
Initially, the “Lobito Corridor”, a project also supported by the Europeans, should make it possible to dramatically reduce the time it takes to transport minerals between the DRC or Zambia and the coast: from 45 days today by the road 40 to 50 hours by train.
The senior American official already cited said he was convinced that Donald Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20, would support this project, designed as a showcase of American strategy in the face of gigantic infrastructure projects financed by Beijing in Africa.
“You can’t pretend to be in competition with China and not support what’s happening here,” he said.
The Republican president-elect promises firmness against China, and in particular intends to trigger a commercial standoff.
During his first term, Donald Trump did not show much interest in Africa, and was openly contemptuous of certain states on the continent, which he described as “shithole countries”.
Still, to make the “Lobito Corridor” a real success, the United States will have to cooperate with China. The latter “dominates the mining sector in the DRC and Zambia,” recalls Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute based in Washington.
For its detractors, this “Lobito Corridor” is a project of “exploitation and monopolization” of African mineral wealth in reality “comparable to the Silk Roads”, the gigantic Chinese global infrastructure plan, underlines -he.
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