The President of the United States, Joe Biden, arrived in Angola this Monday to promote the development of a corridor that will connect the Angolan port of Lobito, in the Atlantic Ocean, with the cobalt mines in Zambia and the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (DRC), key to reduce China’s dependence on minerals.
The presidential plane, Air Force One, landed at the 4 de Febrero International Airport in the Angolan capital, Luanda, around 5:40 p.m. local time (4:40 p.m. GMT).
Biden, who was received at the foot of the steps by the Angolan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tete António, became the first American president to pay an official visit to the African country since its official independence from Portugal in 1975.
The Democratic president is also the first American president to travel to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015, when Barack Obama visited Kenya y Ethiopia.
At the same airport, Biden greeted the staff and families of the US embassy in Luanda.
This Tuesday, he will meet with his Angolan counterpart, João Lourençowith whom he already met in 2021 and 2023.
Both presidents are expected to address issues such as infrastructure, economy, climate change, regional security y strengthening democracythe president’s main advisor for the African continent, Frances Brown, announced last week.
With this meeting, the White House seeks to highlight the evolution of its relationship with Angola, leaving behind the tensions of the Cold War (1945-1991), when the US supported the rebel movement National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in its fight against the Government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), then backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba.
This conflict caused Angola to develop closer ties with Russia and China than with the United States.
However, in 2017, Lourenço, then Minister of Defense, visited Washington and signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States, opening the way to a strategic partnership that has made Angola – one of Africa’s main oil producers – one of the great allies of the US on the continent.
Also on Tuesday, Biden will give a speech at the National Slavery Museum in the Angolan capital.
This initiative has great strategic value for the US and Europe because it will allow them to access minerals essential for their technological development, such as cobalt, graphite and lithium, and reduce their dependence on China, which has monopolized these resources for decades.
According to Brown, Biden will promote the Lobito Corridor as a development model that can be applied in other regions of Africa to contribute to the progress of local communities.
The development of the work is promoted under the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), an initiative of the Group of Seven (G7) created in 2022 to counter the influence of China’s Silk Road, which has financed large infrastructure projects around the world, many of them in Africa.
The project was announced in September 2023, within the framework of the G20 summit in New Delhi, and since then almost $5 billion (about €4.76 billion) has been raised in a first phase of development.
Now, a second stage will begin that provides for 800 additional kilometers of railway between Angola, Zambia and the DRC, which will be added to the 1,300 kilometers already existing and in the process of modernization.
According to Helaina Matza, US coordinator for the PGII, the goal is to reduce the transit time of minerals from Zambia and the DRC to the port of Lobito from 45 days to less than a week, which will significantly impact global markets.
In Lobito, Biden will meet with regional leaders during the Lobito Corridor Trans-African Summit before leaving for the United States on Wednesday evening.
The US president arrived in Angola after making a brief stop in Cape Verde, where he met with the Prime Minister of that country, José Ulisses Correia e Silva, to whom he conveyed his support for the creation of two permanent seats for Africa in the Council of UN Security, among other issues.
Biden promised to visit Africa last year after reviving the US-Africa Summit for the first time in nearly a decade in December 2022.
However, the trip was postponed until 2024 and was delayed again in October due to the arrival of Hurricane Milton in Florida.
(With information from EFE)
