From railways and highways to ports and power dams, China has bankrolled most of Angola’s post-war reconstruction over the past two decades.
Chinese presence in the South African country became apparent in 2002, when former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos invited Beijing to invest following the end of the 27-year Angolan civil war that devastated the country’s infrastructure and economy.
Now, the United States is challenging the dominant Chinese foothold in the region, by betting on a trans-Africa railway that would run from the Atlantic coast of Angola through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia – a passage known as the Lobito Corridor – eastward to the Indian Ocean.
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At stake for both powers: supply chains for critical minerals that would be shipped out by rail and later by sea. Sub-Saharan Africa holds an estimated 30 per cent of the world’s proven critical mineral reserves by volume, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Washington has grown wary of China’s large market shares in commodities in developing countries such as the DRC, according to Austin Strange, an associate professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong.
“A revitalised Lobito Corridor could help improve American and European access to critical minerals,” Strange said.
Today, the US and the European Union are investing billions of dollars to revamp the Lobito Corridor. This work involves the refurbishment of an existing rail line on the 1,344km (835-mile) Benguela Railway into southern DRC across the border, and the building of a new 800km railway line through northwestern Zambia.
The US International Development Finance Corporation has advanced an initial US$250 million to finance upgrades on portions of the Benguela line in the DRC. The US is advancing a similar amount for construction of the railway extension from copper-rich Zambia to the Indian Ocean.
The investment in the corridor is part of the US$600 billion Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment by the US and Group of 7 (G7) countries to counter China’s multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative that aims to link economies into a trading network.
A US State Department spokesperson said last month that, in less than 18 months since US President Joe Biden committed US support, the partnership had announced more than US$3 billion worth of American funding for Angola, the DRC and Zambia.
The US and the EU aim to secure critical mineral supply chains in Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and the DRC, the world’s largest supplier of cobalt. Most cobalt is now exported to China, a leader in electric vehicles (EVs) and green energy.
Biden plans to visit Luanda in the first week of December. The trip would be Biden’s first to Africa since he took office in 2021.
Carlos Lopes, a professor with the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said that, with China having a significant head start in securing access to critical resources, “the US is keen to strengthen its foothold in this region”.
“The emphasis on the Lobito Corridor ... highlights an attempt to promote infrastructure and trade routes that could reduce Chinese logistical dominance,” Lopes said.
Ronak Gopaldas, director at Signal Risk, an African risk advisory firm, said Biden’s expected visit to Angola came amid intense geopolitical competition for influence in Africa, as Washington sought to counter China.
Tanzania recently signed a deal with the US to allow the corridor’s expansion to reach nickel deposits in the East African nation. This pact will help the US widen access to critical minerals and potentially create the first east-west railway connection in Africa – the Trans-Africa Corridor.
TechMet, a company in which the US International Development Finance Corporation is a major shareholder, has partnered with Lifezone Metals in Tanzania to build a new facility to process nickel, with the goal of delivering battery-grade nickel to the global market by 2026, according to the White House.
This comes as sparks have been flying between China and the West over risks associated with an overcapacity overflow in China’s EV industry, resulting in the US and EU imposing heavy tariffs on imported Chinese EVs.
W. Gyude Moore, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development and a former public works minister in Liberia, said the US and EU had staked much on the Lobito Corridor as an alternative to Chinese infrastructure financing.
“It is tied to connecting a mineral-rich region of the continent to global supply chains through rail and a port,” Moore said. “This is meant to be a demonstration that the West has not ceded infrastructure financing to China.”
But China is projected to stay in the picture. Chinese money was used to rehabilitate sections of the Portuguese-built Benguela Railway. Additionally, a Chinese firm has an interest in the consortium comprising Trafigura, Mota-Engil and Vecturis, which in 2022 won a 30-year concession for railway services and logistics.
China Communications Construction had a 32.4 per cent stake in Mota-Engil, said Dominik Kopinski, an associate professor with the Institute of Economics at the University of Wroclaw in Poland, earlier this year.
Meanwhile, China has an interest in the Tanzania–Zambia railway, commonly known as Tazara, which connects Zambia’s Copperbelt region to the Dar es Salaam port. In September, Beijing committed US$1 billion to refurbish the railway.
China Civil Engineering Construction will rehabilitate the railway, which was built in the 1970s and remains China’s largest-ever African foreign aid project. The state-owned firm will then operate the railway for 30 years to turn it profitable and recoup its investment before transferring it to authorities in Tanzania and Zambia.
Tazara could cross paths with the Lobito railway, creating a transcontinental corridor.
Sun Yun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, said the US had a vested interest in development projects in Africa, and that the timing was associated with a previous Chinese failure in railway development and management in Angola.
Sun added that, although China had funded mega infrastructure projects in Africa under the Belt and Road Initiative, loan repayment had become a key challenge.
“[China-US] competition is healthy,” Sun said. “It offers Africa options, and forces the great powers to be on their better behaviour.”
But analysts suggest that, instead of reinventing the wheel, it would make economic sense if the China-backed Tazara railway connects with the Lobito railway instead of building a new greenfield railway to Dar es Salaam port.
Over the past 120 years, companies from Western and non-Western countries, including China, made investments to maintain and improve the railways in the Lobito Corridor.
“There is simply no factual basis to claim the Lobito railway corridor as ‘Western’,” said Zha Daojiong, an international studies professor at Peking University.
If the Lobito Corridor and Tazara railways can be connected, there could be a truly transoceanic railway for that part of Africa. “Sensible and indeed sociopolitically sustainable approaches to foreign involvement in railway projects will have to be inside-out: serving interests of the African communities first. Therein lies the real competition,” Zha said.
According to Strange, from the University of Hong Kong, the element of great power competition distracts from the more urgent challenges of identifying, financing and implementing bankable infrastructure projects.
“There is ample space for China, the US, and other foreign public and private actors to invest, compete and learn from each other,” he said.
Between 2002 and 2023, Angola alone received US$46 billion, or a quarter of the US$182.3 billion that Chinese lenders advanced to all African countries, according to data at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Centre.
A single project “certainly can’t match China’s material presence in Angola or other countries along the corridor”, Strange said.
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