JOHANNESBURG—Joe Biden was in Angola, an oil-rich former Portuguese colony in southern Africa, this week, for his first and last visit to Africa as President of the United States.
He walked red carpets and gave salutes. At a museum, he delivered a 30-minute speech about the horrors of slavery. He ate seafood from the nearby Atlantic Ocean at a plush hotel built with petrodollars in the capital, Luanda.
The U.S. president promised to build solar infrastructure to give Angolans electricity; he spoke about working with President Joao Lourenco on peace and security in the neighboring, war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and expanding technological and scientific cooperation.
He called Angola a strategic partner and regional leader, saying Washington’s relationship with Africa’s eighth-largest economy had “totally transformed” in recent years—an oblique reference to the 1970s and 1980s, the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. supported guerrillas fighting Lourenco’s Soviet-backed People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the country’s ruling party.
Jamil Jaffer, director of the National Security Initiative (NSI) in Washington, told a webinar ahead of Biden’s visit it makes sense for the United States to partner with Angola, despite the accusations of political repression against Lourenco’s administration.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got to deal with who’s in power. The reality is that Angola is an opportunity for the United States to break China’s stranglehold on the acquisition of minerals,” Jaffer said.
“We’ve paid too little attention to Africa for far too long. It’s a critical continent, not just for American and national security purposes but for the global economy.”
Eduard Jordaan, Associate Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa, characterized the Biden administration’s approach in Angola as “pretty mercenary; almost the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect from a Democratic administration.”
“Biden keyed in on Angola very early in his presidency. We saw that when, seemingly out of the blue, [national security adviser] Jake Sullivan met Lourenco in Washington,” he told The Epoch Times.
Martin van Staden, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, which observes political and economic developments impacting southern Africa, told The Epoch Times Biden’s visit to Angola was “really about three things: Money, minerals, and mining.”
Van Staden said Biden left it late visiting Africa, “but he signed off with what I think is the United States’ greatest geopolitical victory yet over the Chinese and Russians on the continent.”
He was referring to the Lobito Corridor Project, a U.S.-backed plan to connect three of Africa’s mineral-producing powerhouses—Angola, DRC, and Zambia—to an American-built harbor on the Atlantic.
The United States is the main financer of an 800-mile line that’ll transport critical minerals to the Angolan port of Lobito, on the Atlantic Ocean, to be shipped to the United States and Europe, and away from China’s refineries.
“This is the kind of transactional approach to doing business in Africa that I think we’re going to see a lot more of when Donald Trump’s back in the White House in 2025,” Van Staden said.
The minerals, including cobalt, lithium, and copper, are used in cell phones, laptops, and clean energy technology, especially electric vehicle batteries.
Under Biden, the United States initially provided a $550 million loan to support the venture, which involves rebuilding a dilapidated railway through Angola and Zambia and extending it into the DRC’s mining heartland.
On Dec. 4, Biden announced an additional $600 million in financing for projects, including solar and telecommunications, along the corridor.
Chris Hattingh, trade expert at the Center for Risk Analysis in Johannesburg, described the Lobito Project as “a touch of genius.”
“There’s all this talk about Trump being transactional and all about what the U.S. gains from putting its dollars anywhere,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Well, Lobito is transactional in the extreme, in the sense that the United States will gain an awful lot from it at a spend of a couple of billion dollars.
“The entire region of southern Africa wins too, because the railway will ramp up trade in a region where rail transport is in a pathetic state. Plus there are spinoffs regarding job creation and socioeconomic development. It’s a win-win. Everyone looks good, except the Chinese.”
Hattingh also said the Lobito Project can serve the United States’ “mass drive of electrification,” which requires a substantial amount of copper for expansion, upgrade, and diversification of its electricity grid, the largest in the world.
“Copper is the critical mineral that’s common to all forms of electricity generation, and the DRC and Zambia are two of the world’s biggest copper producers,” he said.
Hattingh said the U.S.-built railway would also eventually “take a lot of cobalt away” from China.
“Cobalt is the most versatile critical mineral. Almost 80 percent of known cobalt reserves are in DRC, and many of those reserves are in the mines of one city: Kolwezi. And guess where the American railway begins and ends? Kolwezi.”
Cobalt is a key component of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in televisions, smartphones, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems. It’s also essential to making alloys to strengthen aircraft engines and gas turbines and as a catalyst in the chemical and petroleum industries.
Jerome Smith, an independent minerals broker in the Zambian capital Lusaka, said China dominates the processing of cobalt and thus controls global supply at the moment, and the United States must buy processed cobalt from China. He said the Lobito project could change the status quo.
“If the United States can make progress in terms of setting up its own processing infrastructure, and it stockpiles cobalt for well into the future, then this will really hurt China,” he told The Epoch Times.
“I suspect that’s what the Lobito Corridor Project is all about, and the other stuff about solar projects and the rest is just public relations by-products.”
Smith’s opinions are bolstered by a Reuters report on March 18, 2024, which quoted a letter to Congress written by several senior government sources.
They wrote that the United States “lacks sufficient cobalt reserves, endangering America’s critical mineral supply chain.”
Reuters quoted Congressman Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a retired U.S. Air Force general who specialized in electronic warfare and intelligence, as saying the United States “should move aggressively to secure domestic sources of critical minerals including cobalt.”
The letter said the U.S. cobalt stockpile was down from approximately 13,000 tons during the Cold War to 333 tons.
Cobalt contains two rare earth elements (REEs), niobium and tantalum, which are also on the U.S. government’s essential critical minerals list and used in a wide variety of applications in the defense and weapons industries.
Zenge Simakoloyi, researcher at the Africa Peace and Security Governance initiative, said the U.S.–Angola relationship represented a “geopolitical slap in the face” for Moscow and Beijing.
“It was China that actually started rebuilding the same railway the United States is now working on, between 2006 and 2014,” he said. “But then the Chinese turned their attention to expanding the railway eastwards, which has now opened the door for the Americans to go westwards.”
The United States has also undercut the MPLA’s previously ironclad and historical ties to Moscow, said Simakoloyi.
“As recently as 2019, Lourenco was talking to the Russians about them building arms factories in Angola. In 2023, Russia lost its place as Angola’s biggest supplier of weapons and ammunition to America. It’s American and South African firms now making military equipment for the Angolan market,” he said.
Osvaldo Mboco, an Angolan international relations analyst, said Lourenco’s “fundamental realignment” with the West came in October 2022, when his administration voted in favor of the United Nations resolution censuring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Angolan president appealed to Moscow to declare “a definitive and unconditional ceasefire” and declared he wanted Angola to align with NATO.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov subsequently visited Lourenco in January 2023, accusing the United States and its allies of pressuring developing countries to side with Ukraine.
“Lourenco was unmoved and continued making moves that were welcome in Washington but not welcome in Moscow and Beijing,” Mboco told The Epoch Times.
Borges Nhamirre, southern Africa program consultant at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria, said Lourenco’s apparent indifference to Russia’s requests were “the clearest signs yet that Angola is potentially aligned with U.S. efforts to counter Russian influence in Africa.”
It came as no surprise, he told The Epoch Times, when in January Angola was not invited to join the expanded version of China and Russia-led BRICS bloc of key emerging economies.
“Now that Angola is moving closer to the West, its relations with China are also faltering,” said Simakoloyi. “Chinese fishing vessels were previously allowed carte blanche in Angolan waters. Now there are U.S. maritime forces patrolling the area.”
An American-owned mobile company, Africell, has established itself in the Angolan market as a rival to Unitel, which is partnered with Chinese cellular phone giant Huawei.
In 2022, when Africell entered the arena, then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said: “It’s not about throwing shade on Huawei. We’ve been very direct. We believe that when countries choose Huawei, they are potentially giving up their sovereignty. They are turning over their data to another country.”
Simakoloyi and other African observers are convinced that the second Trump administration will look favorably on Angola come 2025.
“I can’t see Trump abandoning the Angola project simply because it was Biden that sowed the seeds,” said the researcher.
“There’s too much for the United States to gain from this relationship, and history could judge Biden’s strategy in Angola as the point at which America truly started transforming its relations with Africa to the benefit of both.”
