Angola’s $10bn rail “investment” shows America is only interested in Africa’s wealth

Africa is big business – for everybody except Africans. If the oyibos could have their way, Africans would be like Native Americans – forgotten people herded into small reservations to drink themselves to extinction while the people who actually understand the value of the land take it over.

That is why in Africa, whether you are a politician, journalist, researcher, policeman, soldier, academic or entertainer, there is always an oyibo with a suitcase of dollars, pounds and euros who is willing to fill your outstretched hand with just enough of them to get you to do what he wants. Mind you, never enough to actually set you up for life – just enough to keep you hungry and interested until next time.

Those dollars are not free money and the oyibo giving them to you is not a philanthropist. Every $1 he gives you will return $1,000 to him from the wealth that was bequeathed to you by your ancestors.

That’s why you get a $10bn rail “investment” in Angola that carefully avoids any population or industrial centres and instead chooses a 1,300 km path through a dense tropical rainforest, going from the impoverished mining area in DR Congo directly to the Lobito port, from where the ships will load the ores and take them straight to the US.

That’s why even the contracts to build, operate, maintain and secure this piece of American economic vandalism disguised as “infrastructure investment” do not include a single African entity. 1,300 km of railway through southern Angola, and the companies that ringfenced everything are Mota-Engil (Portugal), Trafigura (Switzerland) and Vecturis (Belgium). Everybody, including the workers who will weld the rails and the chefs who will cook for them, will be Europeans.

You can be sure, however, that whichever Angolan government official approved this giant heist would have received a few hundred thousand dollars from the oyibo suitcase, because that’s what Africans do – consistently lose the bigger wealth opportunity tomorrow for the sake of oyibo’s dollars today.

“This is a project that will showcase the American model of development.” These were the words of the US ambassador to Angola, Tulinabo Mushingi when he spoke to the Financial Times on the subject of a new $10bn US-funded rail investment in the country. At a time when terms like “de-dollarisation,” “multipolarity,” and “global realignment” have morphed from being aspirational fighting talk into evident realities on the African continent, the Lobito Rail Corridor was the statement investment that would roll back the advance of Chinese economic and diplomatic influence in southwestern Africa’s regional hegemon.

In addition to reaffirming America’s status as a solid, long-term trading partner that will go band-for-band with Chinese investment if need be, the funding of a 1,300 km railway line cutting laterally across Africa was evidence that the US was finally warming up to a new form of economic engagement on the African continent. Also speaking to FT, David Maciel, chief executive of Carrinho Agri, an Angolan agribusiness conglomerate planning to locate processing facilities and silos along the railway, the Lobito railway represents “much more than a minerals train.”

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510 km up the EN100 highway from Lobito, Angola’s bubbly capital city, Luanda, has benefitted from an altogether different sort of economic partnership with a foreign power. I have previously written about the Chinese-built city of Kilamba – on Luanda’s outskirts – and how it became the biggest success story for planned urban expansion in Africa after initially being written off as a ‘Chinese ghost city in Africa.’ Elsewhere around the capital, Chinese investment has been quietly but busily carving out new areas of influence in Angola that betray an altogether different set of goals from those of the Lobito Corridor. Within commuting distance of Luanda, the $1.6 billion Huatong Aluminum Industrial Park is taking shape, with the aim of creating an Aluminium industry chain in Angola.

Over five construction phases, this project is expected to generate 12,000 jobs, $3 billion in annual turnover, and $400 million in annual export earnings for Angola. The Chinese investment behind this project is obviously not born out of philanthropy, but the key difference between the Chinese model of African economic engagement exemplified by the Huatong Industrial Park, and the American model of African economic engagement exemplified by the Lobito Corridor is that one exists at eye level to make a profit, while the other is persistently condescending, pathologically grasping, and seemingly incapable of evolution. While China’s success on the African continent shows that both parties can win in a trading relationship, the Lobito Corridor exemplifies all that is parochial and hopelessly out of touch about US Africa policy.

China has invested billions of dollars in rail connections, ports and communication infrastructure in Angola, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda. Clearly, a big motivation for doing so was to place itself in pole position to access resources from the mining belt that spans DR Congo and Zambia – which it has done. But beyond simply building colonial-style railways from mine to port, China has also figured out that it can win in Africa by investing in industrial parks located within commuting distance of cities with 9 million inhabitants. It has figured out that supporting the emergence and growth of a prosperous middle class in Africa does not take anything away from it. That realisation, unfortunately, appears to be fundamentally beyond the intellectual reach of US policymakers.

Left to the folks at the US State Department, the United Fruit Company would still be arming death squads in Latin America, and US intelligence agents in Kinshasa would still be plotting to assassinate outspoken African presidents using poisoned toothpaste. The purpose of Africa, according to US foreign policy doctrine, which has not changed in over 200 years, is to be the cheap resource base of the US-led global industrial economy, a continent populated by zebras, giraffes, lions and people who are deemed to be worth less than the resources under their feet.

If America intends to ever hold a candle to the vast amount of influence and goodwill China has built for itself on the continent, it needs to drag its Africa strategy, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. It needs a new economic engagement model that recognises Africans as aspirational humans who have a right to enjoy good lives, as against organic traffic cones that must be avoided while hauling 200,000 tonnes of copper ore a year in straight lines through Angola’s rainforest.