US Counters China in Africa With Huge Rail Project

Trucks loaded with copper prepare to leave Tenke Fungurume Mine, one of the largest copper and cobalt mines in the world, in southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, on June 17, 2023. Emmet Livingstone/AFP via Getty Images

In 2024, the U.S. government will fire the first salvo in its efforts to counter China’s influence in Africa when construction begins on the Lobito Corridor project, which is expected to loosen Beijing’s hold on some of the continent’s most important minerals.

The eventual 1,000-mile railway will span Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and northwestern Zambia.

“It’s clear that the U.S. has decided to build the railway to Angola’s biggest port on the Atlantic because it’s locked in competition with China for Africa’s rare-earth minerals,” said Candice Moore, a specialist in U.S.–Africa relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

“Of course, the U.S. is also trying to win hearts and minds in Africa, and the project helps on that front, too, because it’ll boost growth, trade, and investment in a strategically very significant part of Africa, not to mention create thousands of jobs for locals,” she told The Epoch Times.

Scientific analysis has established that the conflict-wracked DRC is the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources, with untapped deposits of raw minerals estimated to be worth more than $24 trillion.

The DRC is rich in gold, diamonds, and extremely high-grade copper. But China and the United States are mostly “fighting over” the Central African country’s cobalt, Ms. Moore said.

This metal is essential to the production of electric vehicles and batteries, gas turbines, and modern weapons systems.

The DRC is the world’s largest miner of cobalt. Its year-on-year turnout of 100,000 tons represents more than 40 percent of annual global production.

Coltan, derived from cobalt, has become indispensable to modern life. It’s used in most everyday tech products, from smartphones to laptops to advanced medical equipment.

Other Resources

Angola is Africa’s second-largest diamond producer.

According to Africa Mining IQ, the continent’s mining intelligence portal, Angola has only explored about 40 percent of the country’s estimated diamond resources.

The country is also a major producer of copper and oil.

The International Trade Administration has said Angola “holds abundant untapped oil and gas resources estimated at 9 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and 11 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.”

Zambia is also one of the world’s biggest producers of copper and cobalt.

“There’s no doubt that the railway to Lobito will eventually take minerals and other natural resources out of Chinese hands,” Ms. Moore said. “It’ll take them to Africa’s west coast and from there to Western markets, instead of to East African ports from where they’ve traditionally been shipped East.”

South Africa-based mining expert Ruben Els said China presently controls 70 percent of the world’s production of rare-earth metals and minerals.

“In recent years, the U.S. has cultivated its own mines around the world for some critical minerals, and it’s now the world’s second-largest producer. But it doesn’t currently have enough smelting capacity. This is forcing it to export raw minerals to China for processing. It then has to reimport them, at significant cost,” he told The Epoch Times.

Ms. Moore called this situation a “humiliating slap in the face for the U.S.”

“The U.S. is tired of being slapped in the face by its biggest geopolitical foe and it’s taking action to stop this,” she said.

African Consortium

In early July 2023, the presidents of Angola, the DRC, and Zambia met in Lobito to celebrate the establishment of the Lobito Atlantic Railway, a consortium led by multinational trader Trafigura.

It has been awarded a 30-year concession to operate the line that will run from Lobito through Zambia to Kolwezi in the DRC’s copper belt.

The consortium plans to invest $550 million in the line, which it hopes will be fully operational by 2029.

The U.S. government and European Union, along with the African Development Bank and the Africa Finance Corporation, have pledged to contribute the rest of the funding, expected to be an additional $500 million.

The railway is historically a key part of the region’s economic infrastructure. It stretches more than 800 miles from Lobito to the DRC border, and then for another 250 miles to Kolwezi.

The railway was built in the early 20th century but degraded significantly during Angola’s long civil war, from 1975 to 2002.

David Taylor, an expert in African rail infrastructure, told The Epoch Times that the Lobito project is “revolutionary” in its attempt to “recreate a route to Western markets for goods and materials.”

“The Lobito rail corridor will be a ‘pit-to-port’ line, and will make it much easier for African mining companies to export material to markets in America and Europe,” he said.

Jake Levine, a senior official at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, through which the United States is providing funding to the project, recently visited Angola, the DRC, and Zambia.

“If you speak to a business in Zambia that’s doing exports out of DRC, and you ask, ‘What’s it like to operate in this region?’ They’ll tell you, ‘It’s a nightmare. We have to transport goods from DRC container by container using single trucks and then from Zambia to Mombasa or Dar es Salaam or Durban using the same process,’” he told The Epoch Times, referring to major cities in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa, respectively.

“The truckers are stuck in 80-kilometer-long queues for weeks at border crossings, plus they have to travel thousands of kilometers out of their way to reach functional ports on the opposite side of Africa on roads that are falling apart because of all the heavy traffic.”

Mr. Levine said the Development Finance Corporation is also interested in exploring opportunities to expand the container port in Lobito.

“That will be critical to getting exports out to the West,” he said. “It’s no good we build a great railway to a port that doesn’t have the necessary capacity to handle large-volume inflows and outflows of export products.”

Mr. Levine described the benefits of the reconstruction of the railway line as “a win for African business, and a win for U.S. interests.”

Catching Up to Belt and Road

The Lobito Corridor will be the biggest infrastructure build ever undertaken in Africa by Washington and follows a decade of Chinese projects in Africa under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Through the BRI, China has financed the construction of roads, reservoirs, railways, tech centers, and other infrastructure in Africa worth hundreds of billions of dollars since 2013.

Critics say the BRI has forced Africa into a “debt trap,” with the continent owing China a combined $73 billion.

Nevertheless, 52 of Africa’s 54 countries have BRI agreements with China.

In July 2023, the Green Finance and Development Centre at Shanghai’s Fudan University reported that Beijing had invested more than $1 trillion in 148 BRI partner countries since 2013, with the dominant region for investment being sub-Saharan Africa.

“The BRI has undoubtedly established China as Africa’s biggest trade partner, but the Biden administration has dedicated itself to ending Beijing’s hegemony in Africa, and the Lobito Corridor should be seen as Washington’s most blatant response to the BRI. ... It’s a belated response, and the U.S. is very far behind China in terms of African engagement and access to African minerals, but at least the U.S. has woken up with regard to how important Africa has become,” Ms. Moore said.

“Even long before the BRI was formalized, China was busy upgrading African infrastructure, like ports, so that it could win access to Africa’s immense mineral wealth. The U.S. had eyes elsewhere.”

Mr. Els said China has spent more than a trillion dollars on projects “directly or indirectly intended to safeguard its supply of resources” vital to the energy transition.

“If the U.S. is able to move those valuable resources from Africa’s copper belt to Western markets, and cut out China, it’ll be a major boon for [the] U.S. and Europe, especially as the energy transition happens.”

Corridor Project a ‘Good Start’

Cobus van Staden, director of the China-Africa Project at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, described the construction of the railway to the Atlantic as “very timely.”

He told The Epoch Times that BRI-related investment reached a peak of $125 billion in 2015 but that it fell to $70 billion in 2022 because of “economic slowdown” and the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Since 2013, Beijing has flexed its financial muscle by loaning immense amounts of cash to African countries. But China’s communist party has become more concerned about debt distress in Africa and recently decided to stop funding energy projects in Africa. In 2022, for the first time in 20 years, Chinese lending to the continent dropped to below $1 billion,” Mr. van Staden said.

“So in many ways, this is a great time for the U.S. to step in and show Africa it’s serious about building a partnership with the continent and of helping to develop the continent in a way that’s much more sustainable than the path so far offered by China.”

He said it’s unlikely that the United States and Europe will ever catch up to China in terms of the “megaprojects” that Beijing has built in Africa over the past few decades.

But, Mr. van Staden said, if the Lobito Corridor project is “somewhat of a blueprint” for how the United States and its partners are going to cooperate with Africans in the future, it’s a good start.

“On the surface, it seems to me as if the Lobito railway construction is far more of a mutually beneficial project than most that China has presented over the years. When this railway is built, it’s likely to positively transform the economies of the countries involved, and beyond,” he said.

African countries know that both the United States and China are playing tug of war with them because of their mineral wealth, Mr. van Staden said.

“This suits the Africans just fine. They can stand back and watch these great powers fight, and then afterward, they can choose the one that offers the most benefits and allows [African] countries to create and retain value on the continent. The Lobito railway allows exactly that,” he said.