Biden, in Africa, pushes to cement ties before leaving office

BENGUELA, Angola - President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that the United States would spend more than $560 million on projects connected to the Lobito Corridor, a trans-African railway that will help get vital minerals and other goods to a port where they can be shipped to the United States and other destinations.

The announcement, which brings the U.S. investment in the Lobito Corridor project to $4 billion, was an 11th-hour capstone to Biden’s effort to increase American engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has become a focus of the struggle between the United States and China for economic and political influence across the globe.

“I think we’re at one of the transition points in world history where what we do is going to affect what the next six, seven, eight decades look like,” Biden said at a celebratory event with African heads of state. “I think this is one of those milestones.”

The project’s goal is to ease the transport of minerals such as cobalt and copper, which are crucial to the worldwide tech industry, from the African interior to this Atlantic port, where they can be easily shipped to Western countries. Currently, the trip to the coast is made by large, smoke-belching trucks, which are often delayed by long traffic jams.

Biden noted that the Democratic Republic of Congo recently sent the first copper shipment on the railway for transit to the United States, adding that the railway project would reduce the travel time for many shipments from 45 days to 45 hours. “It’s a game changer,” he said.

The president on Wednesday stopped first at the Lobito port terminal, where officials in Angola, Congo and Zambia hope tons of minerals will eventually arrive from the continent’s interior. There, Biden viewed a shiny new red-and-black train engine attached to a string of containers marked “Lobito Atlantic Railway.” The engine did not rest on railroad tracks, however, underscoring a point made by African leaders - that the project still has a long and complex path to completion.

Biden’s motorcade then traveled south along the coast, passing clusters of homes rimmed by uncollected trash and open ravines of green sewage, to reach the city of Benguela.

Along the route, men, women and children poured out of the alleys between their cinder-block homes to stand on the edges of hilltops or on concrete walls to get a look at the passing motorcade. No sitting American president had visited Angola before, and now Biden was traveling through the countryside joined by Angolan President João Lourenço.

The Lobito Corridor would connect the southern mining areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast, through the refurbishment of old rail line and the construction of new. The broader “trans-Africa” vision for the project involves a further expansion to existing rail in Tanzania, facilitating shipment to China.

American participation, focused on the Angolan stretch of the project, represents a new kind of foreign assistance, U.S. officials say - one that invests in infrastructure and business, viewing Africans as partners rather than passive recipients of dollars.

“Nothing in what is happening in the Lobito Corridor is aid,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief journalists. “It is all about making things commercial, financeable and for-profit so that they’re actually sustainable for a long period of time.”

The official added, “The Lobito Corridor was the test case for this approach, not just for Africa but globally.”

Still, in speeches delivered after Biden’s, the leaders of Zambia, Tanzania and Congo acknowledged the distance from concept to actuality and hinted at their own unresolved visions for the project.

“I am aware that at this stage not many will see what we are discussing today and how valuable it will be 10 years down the road,” said Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, acknowledging his country’s still-nonexistent stretch of rail.

Félix Tshisekedi, president of Congo, spoke of needing to “add value” to his nation’s vast mineral wealth - a seeming reference to mineral processing, which now mostly takes place in China - before export abroad.

And no one mentioned the land mines left from Angola’s war-torn past, which HALO Trust, a British demining organization that is active in Angola, says will need to be cleared to make way for agricultural and other development along the corridor, and in some places for the railway itself.

But Biden’s trip comes at the end of his presidency, at a time when he is a lame duck. Hovering over his trip are questions about whether President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will continue the push in Africa, given Trump’s seeming indifference toward the continent during his first term.

The senior administration official said the Lobito Corridor project has strong bipartisan support and is a critical piece of America’s efforts to counter Chinese influence.

The official added, “Look, at the end of the day, if you want to talk about living in an era of global competition, specifically with China, this Lobito Corridor is the heart of that.”