In 1902, a Scotsman named Robert Williams He began building a railway line to transport minerals from Central Africa to Europe and the Americas. They would call the project the Lobito Corridor, after the coastal town in Angola where it ends and lasts. In the 1970s, the railway was dormant after the Angolan Civil War, but today the United States is waging the biggest offensive in years to try to counter China’s power in Africa.
In May 2023, in Hiroshima, the G7 announced an agreement to revitalize and extend the Lobito Corridor to Zambia. The aim is to modernize the railway line to avoid bottlenecks in the transport of critical minerals for the energy and technology transition. Two-thirds of the world’s coltan and half of its cobalt are found in the DRC, vital for mobile batteries.In addition, there are minerals such as manganese, copper, zinc or lithium and other precious minerals such as gold and diamonds.
Currently, transport is by road and takes an average of thirty days, but the goal is to reduce it to eight days by train and thus have priority access to critical minerals. The project is led by the United States, which has already promised an investment of 250 million dollars. But it is not the only one.
If the Lobito corridor goes west, the Tazara railway goes east. In 1975, by order of Mao Zedongwas built as an alternative to exporting Zambian copper to the Indian Ocean via the port of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Like the Lobito, it has lost value over the years, becoming virtually unusable. Last Friday, at the ninth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Xi Jinping announced a $2 billion project to revitalize the Tazara line.
In Africa, minerals are the most valuable raw material. The value of everything the Democratic Republic of Congo owns is estimated at US$24 trillion, almost equivalent to the entire US economy. Their possession is vital in the geopolitical conflict between the two powers, but to access them, one must have the favor of African leaders. In this race, China is winning, but it already feels tired.
China, the giant that conquered Africa
In 2000, China decided to organize the first FOCAC. After the initial success of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) hosted by Japan, its neighbor decided to counterattack to take advantage of the potential of the African market and the raw materials it needed to take a step forward in its own economic development.
At its first edition in Beijing, it signed “strategic agreements” with 44 African countries. Three years later, it eliminated import duties on hundreds of African products from 30 countries considered low-income by the UN.
China thus gained access to vital goods such as crude oil, minerals and metalsbut also food products such as meat, coffee or vegetables, among others. Currently, more than 8,000 African products are exempt from taxes in China, but those produced in the Asian country itself, such as corn, rice, cereals or sugar, are not found there.
In 2009, China became the largest trading partner of the African continent, surpassing the United States, and since then the gap has continued to widen. By 2023, the value of Sino-African trade will reach $262 billion, four times that of the United States.
However, if China has consolidated its influence and interests in Africa, it is thanks to the 1,306 loans it has granted since the beginning of the century, worth $182.3 billion, half of which were to finance major energy and transport projects. In all African countries, there are Chinese buildings and their influence is such that they financed the $200 million cost of the new headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the community institution.
The culmination of the investment came with the arrival of Xi Jinping to the presidency in 2013, with the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative, with more than ten billion dollars in loans on average each year for five years.
However, in recent years, China has applied the handbrake for two main reasons: the inability to return the money and the economic downturn itself. Countries like Zambia and Ghana have declared default and many others have asked to restructure debt due to inability to pay and the Asian country has been put in the eye of the storm as it is the largest bilateral creditor with 15% of Africa’s debt.
Today, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have led to volatility in the markets, and since Beijing, they have reached a minimum of $1 billion in 2023, more than ten times less than ten years ago. The United States now wants to take advantage of this weakness, which, with the administration of Joe Biden renewed its interest in the continent.
US seeks to increase presence
China’s economic efforts have borne fruit in international diplomacy. Only one African country, the tiny absolute monarchy of Eswatini, recognizes Taiwan, and the vast majority of governments support its expansionist work in Southeast Asia.
Added to this are the votes at the UN: the African bloc has 54 precious votes and these are more aligned with the Chinese position than with the American position, where it agrees on less than three out of ten resolutions. The majority of countries voted in favor of Xi Jinping’s government in the accusations of abuses against the Uighur minority, they abstained like Beijing in condemning Russia for the Ukrainian invasion and They preferred to elect Chinese politicians rather than Americans..
Economic interests and geopolitical influence worry the United States, which, ironically, has decided to copy the Chinese strategy to counter its power.
In December 2022, Biden welcomed 49 African heads of state to Washington with all sorts of luxuries at the Africa-US Leaders Summit. There, he promised them $55 billion over three years. The duration and amount were not chosen at random. In 2021, Xi Jinping promised FOCAC to invest $40 billion over the next three years.
Biden also told them he would personally visit Africa in 2023 as a sign of his commitment, but the president did not comply and sent his vice president, Kamala Harriswhich was in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia. The choice of countries was not insignificant either: the first, a reliable partner of the West in a serious economic crisis that had forced it to default; the second left its mark on the president Samia Suluhu Hassan; and the third at the beginning of the mineral road.
Two weeks ago, the White House announced that it was studying extending the Lobito Corridor to the Indian Ocean in Tanzania.
The pressure from the United States has raised the alarm in China, which for the first time in seven years has increased its loans to the continent, although they still remain at just over a third of what it granted in 2013. Added to this is the renewal of the Tazara railway and green energy projects that have brought investments for the next three years to 50 billion dollars.
Even if it is slightly less than what the United States has promised, Washington still has a long way to go if it wants to at least match Beijing’s influence in Africa.
