U.S. President Joe Biden speaks as he and Vice President Kamala deliver remarks at the White House in Washington on Sept. 26.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
U.S. President Joe Biden has chosen Angola as the destination for his much-delayed first visit in office to Africa, signalling that Washington sees the oil-rich country as crucial to its economic and political strategy on the continent.
Mr. Biden this week announced plans to be in Angola from Oct. 13 to 15, the first visit to Africa by a U.S. president in nearly a decade. After postponing earlier plans to visit the continent last year, he is now scheduled to arrive there just three months before the end of his term in office.
Washington has praised Angola as a diplomatic partner, especially for its role as a peace mediator in negotiations to resolve the long-running conflict in eastern Congo. But Angola, with its oil wealth and its strategic ports on the Atlantic coast, is also vital to U.S. plans to challenge Chinese and Russian influence in the region by expanding Western access to Africa’s natural resources.
At a summit with African leaders in 2022, Mr. Biden had proclaimed that the United States was “all in on Africa’s future.” Since then, however, he has been distracted by other global crises and domestic issues, repeatedly delaying his planned trip to the continent and now reducing it to a two-day visit to a single country.
For the past two decades, Angola has forged close relations with China, which has provided it with US$43-billion in loans, along with massive investments in its oil sector and infrastructure. Beijing has alarmed Washington by reportedly seeking a naval base on the Atlantic coast, with Angola as a possible option. The southern African country also has close links to Russia, traditionally its biggest arms supplier.
Now, however, Washington sees an opportunity to bring Angola closer to the Western orbit, after months of efforts by the Biden administration to woo the country.
Last November, Mr. Biden hosted Angolan President João Lourenço at the White House. Two months earlier, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin became the first-ever in his role to visit Angola, where he discussed military modernization and regional security. And in January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the latest U.S. official to travel to the country.
A key item on Mr. Biden’s agenda in Angola will be the Lobito Corridor, a multibillion-dollar railway project with significant U.S. funding that will allow the resource-rich countries of Congo and Zambia to gain faster access to the Angolan port of Lobito, from where their minerals can be easily shipped to North America. The project will boost the export of critical African minerals, including copper and cobalt, which are vital to Western economies.
Mr. Biden will be “celebrating” the railway project during his visit to Angola, according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement this week.
It is clear, however, that the United States is still playing catch-up to China in the region. China is now the biggest investor in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chinese companies were key players in financing and building the Lobito port. Earlier this month, Beijing signed a deal to revitalize the Tazara railway, which it had originally built in the early 1970s to connect Zambia and Tanzania. China has said it could pump US$1-billion into the rail project.
The geopolitical rivalry over minerals and oil seems to be outweighing any U.S. concern about Angola’s poor record on human rights and democracy. Allegations of election-rigging have been common in the country for many years, and its government has a long history of cracking down on dissent, including recent laws to restrict media freedoms.
Human Rights Watch says the Angolan state security forces have been implicated in more than a dozen unlawful killings, along with arbitrary detentions and the excessive use of force against peaceful protestors. Amnesty International noted this month that the country had jailed four activists for more than a year for planning a peaceful protest.
“A deeper, sustainable relationship with Angola will remain out of reach if the United States ignores these uncomfortable realities,” said Michelle Gavin, an Africa specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an analysis published last week.
“A visit from President Biden will be interpreted as an embrace of Angola’s unpopular government.”