|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
US-Africa relations recently received a great boost when President Joseph R. Biden visited Angola from Monday, 2 December to Wednesday, 4 December 2024 as part of his long-awaited first presidential trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Africans are known for their friendliness and warm hospitality and thousands of people lined the streets of Angola’s capital, Luanda, with Angolan President João Lourenço to welcome Biden to Africa. Before his arrival in Angola, Biden had a brief stopover in Cabo Verde, the Island nation off the coast of West Africa, where he met with Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva. The two leaders discussed their bilateral relationship on key areas covering democratic freedoms, human rights, climate change challenges, and global security issues.
While Biden’s arrival in Africa did not receive the global media attention one would have expected given the media focus on his controversial decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, a day before his departure, and the geopolitical situation in South Korea, Biden’s visit still raises what some experts at the Atlantic Council have described as “questions about the urgency and scope of US attention to the region [Africa]” and about how the incoming Trump administration should build on Biden’s outreach. The urgency argument is not only an important one to underscore, but it also brings into sharp focus the purpose of our opinion piece. The questions of interest are: Why is Biden in Angola? Is this too little, too late?
US-Africa relations and re-engagement debate
As experts have argued on the re-engagement focus of the US in Africa in terms of its reimagined transatlantic partnership, we also share the view that Biden’s visit to Angola is not only meant to re-engage with the continent within the broader framework of US-Africa relations and Biden’s all-in on Africa strategy with the promise of investing about US$15 billion in private trade and investment commitments and partnerships, and advance the argument further that Biden’s visit is part of the “game of catching up” to China’s growing influence on the continent.
In other words, the US is faced with a serious geopolitical challenge to countercheck and counterbalance China’s assertive influence in Africa, which explains the full support of the US for the multilateral Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor Summit and Biden’s last-minute visit. Details of the Lobito Corridor project will be discussed later in the paper, but for brevity, the project was launched in 2023 as a partnership between the US, the European Union (EU), Angola, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC-Congo), to build a railway corridor that will connect the critical mineral-rich countries of the region through the Angolan port of Lobito.
With respect to further debates on the re-engagement of the US in Africa, there is no question that the US is reconnecting too little and too late. We raised these issues in our previous article on Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to Africa in 2023 where we argued that the US has been preoccupied with other regions of the world while China was reading from a different playbook of strategic positioning in Africa with their long-term game plan, namely, the global strategic acquisition of vital resources such as critical minerals, metals, crude oil, and agricultural products.
Although belated, what Biden’s trip to Angola lacked in terms of urgency and scope was more than remedied by the thoughtful “goodies” in the basket of this visit. The headliner of this visit is the ambitious US$1 billion Lobito Corridor that will link Angola with Zambia, DRC-Congo, and Tanzania, all countries that are mineral-wealthy. Also crucial is the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) framework designed, according to the White House, “to enhance trans-continental connectivity from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean” for additional commercial investments.
Biden’s visit to Africa: too little, too late?
While foreign policy pundits criticise the Biden administration as not being “keen on prioritising” the continent “in the first place”, it is evident that US engagement with Africa in commercial, security, and strategic areas has been taking shape for the better part of the first two decades of this century. This Biden trip comes on the heels of US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s visit last November to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Angola’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce establishing the US-Angola Commercial and Investment Partnership, one that “will formalise regular collaboration between the two governments, and with U.S. and Angolan industry stakeholders to enhance commercial ties and increase the ease of doing business”. And since 2023, Angola has – in general and under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) that has been pivotal in enhancing trade and economic ties since Bill Clinton’s presidency in 2000 – benefitted from preferential trade to the tune of US$1.77 billion.
The US Department of Commerce is also apparently “developing a Sub-Saharan Africa Rail and Port Trade Mission to Angola and South Africa in 2025 to connect” American “companies with opportunities to meet demand for U.S. rail and port solutions in African markets”. Stretching for 1,344 km (835 miles), the Lobito railway line will connect various cobalt, lithium, and copper mines in the DRC-Congo and “the copper-belt region of Zambia, to the Angolan port city of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean”. However, this vital infrastructure plan pales in comparison to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Africa.
So far, China’s BRI has actualised the completion of over 12,000 km of roads and railway tracks across the African continent. There are also numerous BRI energy and power installations including 62 coal and 30 gas power projects which, according to Wood MacKenzie Consulting, represents 57 per cent of the total BRI project capacity. Indeed, this humongous Chinese investment in Africa isn’t to be sneered at or dismissed – Chinese companies have “completed over 300 overseas power projects, despite challenges causing over 20% of projects to be cancelled or shelved”. In just ten years, the China Belt & Road Initiative has brought in 128 GW installed power capacity.
When one assesses and takes into consideration the crosscutting work that China has accomplished regarding developing transportation networks, ports and shipping, laying down a comprehensive digital infrastructure and establishing regional hubs, one must wonder what the thinking is in Western capitals, which are all playing catch-up with China. They ought to collectively sit up and take notes! These Chinese economic and commercial gains didn’t take place overnight. They are all testament to China’s long-term scouring far and wide across the globe, and the ambitious game plan in Beijing to benefit from the world commodities, minerals, and other crucial natural resources market.
What is instructive in this skyrocketing Chinese ascendancy in the global economy is not only the obvious consistency and resilience, but also years, if not decades, of a top-notch global strategy that has literally left the West in the dust. And that’s just the one-word lesson that China’s past and rapidly increasing approach to, and engagement with, Africa teaches the West – that is, the urgent need for “concertation” in the West when dealing with Africa. The time for grand promises and aspirational goals when it comes to US-Africa relations is up. It’s about time that we saw an appreciable degree of seriousness and cooperation from one American president to the next when it comes to the creation of a unified strategy and concerted action in cutting long-term mutually beneficial deals with Africa. The gutting of former and now incoming president Donald Trump’s Free Trade Agreement with Kenya’s former president Uhuru Kenyatta – which Biden dumped – is a good case in point. This was done in favour of a so-called roadmap for ten engagement areas, among them agriculture, digital trade, climate change, trade facilitation, and customs procedures.
This left Kenyan diplomats with a rosy, good-old-Trump-days attitude even as they scampered and fought to preserve the free trade agreement of Trump’s first administration. Africa has benefitted from a strong and consistent relationship with the US but China is reshaping the reality on the ground. Granted, various American presidents – from Clinton to George W. Bush, from Barack Obama to Trump and now Biden and back to Trump again – have greatly benefitted the continent but it’s time for a proper, deep, well thought-out long-term economic, infrastructural, and commercial plan, partnership, and strategy for Africa.
The President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa (PAC-DBIA) created to advise the president on strengthening commercial engagement between the US and Africa is just fine, but such an outfit needs to be at the heart of the US Departments of State and Commerce, if Americans can so much as dream of keeping up with China and Russia in Africa. It is no secret that Americans have quietly crept away from, and even “disengaged with post-colonial Africa”, which has been their “lowest priority”. But the time for wildly exciting and “grandiose African strategies that are absolutely aspirational” is over. As Clinton’s former ambassador Tibor P. Nagy poses, Where’s the beef, America?
As the world keeps changing from a geopolitical perspective, with emerging regions of global political power and economic powerhouses, Africa’s close to 1.4 billion people – and the youngest population in the world with about 70 per cent of its population, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, under the age of 30 – should be taken seriously by the rest of the world, especially the great powers. As President Biden rightly noted, “Africa is the future.” Yes, America needs to, and will, indeed, continue to play a major global role in Africa. The continent is not only ready and “open for business” with the rest of the world, but it should be a business that is grounded in respect, fairness, mutual benefit for all, and especially for Africa’s socio-economic development.
Dr Felix Kumah-Abiwu is an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for African Studies at Kent State University in the United States. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow (Governance & Democracy) at Nkafu Policy Institute and co-editor of Jerry John Rawlings – Leadership and Legacy: A Pan-African Perspective (Springer, 2022).
Dr Kariũki wa Gĩthuku is an Associate Professor of African History at the City University of New York, York College, New York City, New York, and the author of Mau Mau Crucible of War: Statehood, National Identity, and the Politics of Postcolonial Kenya (2016).
