This official visit by the outgoing President of the United States, between Monday and Wednesday, to Angola "represents a dramatic break with history", highlights Alex Vines, director of the Africa Program at Chatham House, a British analysis institute in London.
The US administration, under the leadership of Joe Biden, "has been trying to increase its engagement in Africa since 2021, through a re-creation of assets, increased official visits" – even though Biden himself has not been to the continent since who occupied the White House – "and some new initiatives, such as the Lobito Corridor, in Angola, within the scope of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), designed to compete with China", he added.
Still in the context of this rapprochement, Angola is preparing to host the United States-Africa Business Summit, in mid-2025, which should bring together more than 1,500 delegates, heads of State and Government and other world leaders in Luanda, if the next President -American, Donald Trump, maintain this agenda, which is not guaranteed.
Biden comes to Angola with "two objectives", in the opinion of Peter Fabricius, analyst and researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), in Pretoria: "Fulfill the promise to Africa, even if in a slightly diluted form", in recent days of his presidency, but also "confirm the Lobito Corridor, which acquired an even more strategic significance at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), last September, with Beijing's signature on the rehabilitation of the Tazara railway line, with the Tanzania and Zambia".
The Lobito Corridor and the Tazara railway – an acronym for Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority, whose railway line connects the city of Kapiri Mposhi, in the province of Central Zambia, to the port of Dar es Salaam, in the Indian Ocean – "are, in a way, , alternative, because the critical minerals extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) and Zambia either go to the west or to the east", he emphasizes.
The Lobito Corridor, which will connect the Angolan port to Zambia via DRCongo, "is somewhat symbolic of the commitment of the United States and the European Union to infrastructure in Africa, because this has been the great deficit in the two blocs' relations with the continent compared to China", says the ISS analyst.
Regarding the question of whether Donald Trump will maintain Washington's commitments regarding the project, the ISS researcher predicts that, despite the next American head of state "not having the same interests as the Democrats in Africa", the "practical benefits" of the project shall prevail.
"Although Trump is sympathetic to Russia, he is quite hostile towards China. So in that sense, I wonder if he will abandon the idea. Maybe this is an analysis of the practical benefits. I don't think we can assume that he will abandon the idea" of rehabilitating and extending the Corridor do Lobinho, he stated.
China has decades of consistent investment in Africa behind it and Angola is no exception, having benefited from infrastructure investments of around $45 billion over the last 20 years. Angola owes $17 billion to Chinese creditors, which constitutes about 40 percent of the country's total debt.
"Nevertheless, the strategic importance of Angola for Washington has increased in the last five years, due to two fundamental factors, starting with the rise of João Lourenço to the Presidency of Angola, after almost 40 years of government by former president Eduardo dos Santos", accentuates Vines.
"João Lourenço and his influential wife, Ana Dias, regularly visit the United States and own property in Bethesda, Maryland [purchased in 2013]." "Angolan foreign policy", since Lourenço's arrival in power in 2017, "has moved away from ideology and towards pragmatic multipolarity, becoming truly non-aligned", according to the Chatham House analyst.
By way of illustration, Alex Vines refers to Luanda's condemnation of Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territories at the United Nations General Assembly in 2022 and highlights Lourenço's attempt to "reduce its proximity to Beijing and Moscow, at the same time deepening its relations with the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, as well as with the United States", in addition to signing Angola's accession to the Francophonie as an official observer.
The second "fundamental factor", points out the analyst, is the special relationship between Luanda and Kinshasa: "Angola's transport links and diplomacy with DRCongo are important for Washington. In recent years, Angola has played an important mediation role to end the direct and indirect confrontation between DRCongo and Rwanda".
US-Angola bilateral relations, Angola's diplomatic role in the Southern African region and the Lobito Corridor as an iconic Western investment in Africa are expected to fill the headlines during Biden's three-day visit to Angola, but the results of this summit are unlikely to go any further of "symbolic aspects", says Fabricius.
"They will try to make it look like something more than a symbolic visit, but I'm not sure we will see large amounts of money being thrown on the table; there may be one or another compromise on extending Lobito to Zambia, that has been aired, but it is uncertain", he added.
Borges Nhamirre, also an ISS analyst, expects the President of the United States to say "something about democracy and fundamental freedoms, rights and guarantees."
But, even if Biden doesn't do it, adds the Mozambican analyst at ISS, this is an “opportunity for defenders of freedoms in Angola to show their struggle and vitality and tell the Americans that the country they are taking as a partner is approving laws that, from the point of view of fundamental rights, are inconceivable, as is the case with this recent law against public vandalism, which cannot be imagined anywhere in the world in the 21st century, perhaps only in North Korea”.
