Biden’s long-awaited Africa trip to announce victory against China By Reuters

By Jessica Donati

(Reuters) – Joe Biden departs on Sunday for a trip to Angola that will fulfill his promise to visit Africa during his presidency and focus on a major U.S.-backed railway project aimed at extracting key minerals from China derive.

The project, financed in part by a US loan, connects the resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia with the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean, providing a fast and efficient route for exports to the West.

At stake are vast reserves of minerals such as cobalt, which are found in Congo and are a key ingredient in batteries and other electronics. China is the main player in Congo, which is increasingly worrying Washington.

China signed an agreement with Tanzania and Zambia in September to revive a rival railway line to Africa’s east coast.

While Biden’s trip comes in the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump is likely to support the railroad and remain a close partner of Angola when he returns to the White House in January, according to two officials who served under the previous Trump administration.

Tibor Nagy, a retired career ambassador and top Africa envoy under the last Trump administration, said Trump will likely have two overarching concerns about Africa. The first is competition with China and Russia, the second is access to critical minerals.

“This meets both criteria,” he said in an interview, referring to the Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR).

The project is supported by global commodities trader Trafigura, Portuguese construction group Mota-Engil and railway operator Vecturis. The US Development Finance Corporation has provided a $550 million loan to rehabilitate the 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) rail network from Lobito to Congo.

Biden was scheduled to land briefly in Cape Verde in West Africa on Monday morning and meet the president there before flying on to Angola. During the two-day trip, he will visit the country’s slavery museum in the capital Luanda and stop at the port of Lobito on Wednesday.

With his trip he is fulfilling one of his comprehensive promises to Africa. Others remain unrealized, such as support for two permanent seats for Africa on the UN Security Council.

Beyond the railway project, Washington has also done little to improve access to vast reserves of African minerals that it says are critical to national security, and has caused other diplomatic setbacks.

This summer it lost America’s largest spy base in Niger and has been unable to find an ally to house those assets. This leaves the US without a military foothold in the vast Sahel region, which has become a hotspot for Islamist militancy.

Angola has long had close ties with China and Russia but has recently moved closer to the West. Angolan officials say they are keen to work with any partner who can advance their economic growth agenda and hope the project will boost investment across a range of sectors.

“China has only become more important because Western countries probably haven’t paid much attention to Africa,” Angola’s Transport Minister Ricardo Viegas d’Abreu said in an interview.

GROWING CONNECTIONS WITH ANGOLA

Biden’s visit reflects a turnaround in U.S. relations with Angola after a complicated and bloody history. The United States and the Soviet Union supported rival sides in the country’s 27-year civil war. Washington established relations with Angola in 1993, nearly two decades after the country’s independence.

“It is probably poetic justice that the United States is funding the rehabilitation of this route that it helped destroy so many decades ago,” said Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika, a former Zambian government minister who also oversees part of the newly emerging route Railroad headed the Lobito Corridor.

Biden administration officials said the Lobito rail project is not an isolated case but a test run to prove that the public-private partnership works and that it will lead to other large infrastructure projects in Africa. They also hope that this will deepen US relations with Angola, including in the area of ​​security cooperation.

Critics doubt that the project, whose completion is not yet known, will achieve the promised goals. Of particular concern is a second phase that would connect the railway to the east coast of Africa as far as Tanzania and potentially provide a rival route to China.

Judd Devermont, until recently Biden’s top Africa adviser, said Congo wanted to diversify its mining partners and rejected the idea that linking the project to an eastern port in Tanzania would undermine efforts to expand Beijing’s influence over Congo’s minerals loosen.

“The Congolese have made it very clear that they do not want their entire mining sector to be dominated by China,” he said in an interview. “It benefits everyone when there is an easy way to move across the continent, whether for essential minerals or simply transporting goods from India to Brazil to New York.”