LUANDA, Angola (AP) — Even in the final days of his presidency and thousands of miles from home, U.S. President Joe Biden is finding ways to celebrate trains.
Biden is using his third and final day in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor railway, where the US and key allies are investing heavily to renovate 1,300 kilometers of railway lines in Zambia, Congo and Angola.
The project aims to advance the U.S. presence in a region rich in cobalt, copper and other crucial minerals used in electric vehicle batteries, electronic devices and clean energy technologies. By the end of the decade, the railway could even go a long way in connecting the west coast of southern Africa to the eastern edge of the continent.
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“I’m probably the most pro-rail guy in America,” Biden, the first US president to visit Angola, said during a speech on Tuesday evening.
Biden has long been nicknamed Amtrak Joe because of his 36 years in the Senate commuting from his home in Delaware to Washington by American train. He said the Lobito Corridor represented the largest U.S. investment in a rail project outside the country.
On Wednesday, Biden will fly from the capital Luanda to Lobito on Africa’s west coast to tour port facilities with Angolan President João Lourenço, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and Tanzanian Vice President Philip Mpango.
Leaders also plan to meet with representatives from companies that could benefit from the corridor project, including a telecommunications company expanding cell service in the region, a food manufacturing company and Acrow Bridge, a Pennsylvania company that makes prefabricated steel bridges and has a contract for the delivery of almost 200 units to Angola.
The Biden administration says the corridor will help business interests and counter China’s growing influence in Africa — as well as satisfying a president obsessed with staying on track.
In Lobito, Biden will announce $600 million in new U.S. investments for projects related to the corridor, which has also received financing from the European Union, the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, a Western-led private consortium and African banks.
The government says it currently takes about 45 days for truckloads of materials to be brought to market from eastern Congo or Zambia, usually transported by truck to South Africa. Test loads traveling on the new rail corridor completed the same journey in approximately 40 to 50 hours.
China, meanwhile, has already made heavy investments in the mining and processing of African minerals, and has used its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure strategy to increase its economic and political influence around the world.
In September, China said it had signed an agreement with Tanzania and Zambia to renew a separate railway line running east from Zambia to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, on Africa’s east coast.
The countries had previously worked together to build the railway in the 1970s, but it fell into disrepair. The Chinese move to renovate it – announced on the sidelines of this year’s China-Africa forum – is seen by some analysts as China’s answer to the Lobito Corridor.
A senior US government official called the Lobito Corridor the heart of competition with China, not as a political opponent but from a business perspective.
The idea is that instead of simply pumping in aid, Washington will try to increase American influence by promoting projects that can stimulate investment and therefore help communities and countries in the long term. The Lobito Corridor has become a model approach that the US wants to copy in other parts of the world, said the official, who spoke to reporters during Biden’s visit to Angola on condition of anonymity to offer project details that have not yet been made public.
The corridor won’t be completed for years, meaning much of the further work would take place during the administration of Republican Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20. The Biden White House says Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have supported previous efforts to boost African business interests through targeted investments and that such initiatives have appealed to Trump and his top advisers in the past.
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Associated Press writer Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed to this report.
