US outgoing president Joe Biden’s three-day trip to Angola signalled the beginning of the end of his administration. While the Biden presidency had prioritized stemming Chinese influence in Africa, he was distracted by the Ukrainian conflict, which would indelibly etch and certify his legacy.
At the bullseye of the US expanding footprint in African soil is the Lobito port, which the US expects after sinking billions of dollars in infrastructure, particularly railway and metal extractive capacities.
Copper in Zambia and cobalt in the DRC will eventually trickle to the West through the Transatlantic route, unhampered by the Middle East’s perennial pillow fights.
This article examines the Lobito corridor, its entailments, and its profound ramifications for Tanzania port and railway investments.
Revisiting the Lobito Corridor
In December 2022, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan promised 49 African leaders that, subject to Congressional ratification, the US was planning to invest around USD 55 billion in Africa over the next three years.
All that promise is now hot air, knowing President-elect Donald Trump has other cockeyed ideas, excited as “ Making America Great Again—MAGA.”
Trump’s foreign policy hovering around “America First” makes anybody’s guess how it will facilitate these projects, essentially a continuation of the past American policies in Africa that he supported during his first presidential stint.
In late 2023, the DRC, Angola, Zambia, the United States, the European Union, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) all signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) establishing a shared vision for the project.
The Lobito Corridor’s estimated cost is between USD 1 billion and USD 2.3 billion.
The Lobito corridor aims to maximize the US exploitation of African natural resources, particularly DRC cobalt and, much later, Zambian copper. It is part of a long-held US strategy to become a global leader in cleaner technologies.
By 2040, clean-energy technologies will need 40 times more lithium, 25 times more graphite, and 20 times more nickel and cobalt than 2020.
Copper will also be in high demand to transport the generated electricity, enabling chargers that will sprawl almost everywhere.
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These metals are essential to the batteries in smartphones, electric vehicles (EVs), and the entire clean energy transition.
This critical mineral crisis, likely to worsen with climate change, is exacerbated by the metals’ geographic concentrations.
Taking cobalt as an example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) holds about 80% of global reserves. China controls between 70% and 80% of the refined market and at least half of the battery market.
The United States and the European Union recently announced their investment in the Lobito Corridor, a sub-Saharan mine-to-port railway.
The initiative plans to refurbish 800 miles of rail from the DRC to Angola and possibly construct new tracks into northern Zambia.
The Lobito Corridor aims to improve the West’s access to cobalt and limit its reliance on the Chinese supply chain.
However, The railway alone cannot fulfil and offset these ambitious goals. Cobalt mined in the DRC was not processed there but shipped to China for refining.
The safari from mining cobalt to the African ports is dogged with delays, which make the journey costly and take too many days, chipping away at the undertaking’s profitability.
The most popular shipping route takes nearly one month and involves driving 2,000 miles from the Congolese mining capital of Kolwezi to the Indian Ocean port of Durban, South Africa.
At border crossings, the line of mineral-carrying trucks can extend for over 30 miles.
Once the raw material reaches Durban, there are often further delays due to shutdowns caused by floods, strikes, social unrest, and the port’s general unreliability.
The other common routes are also by road, serving the ports of Walvis Bay, Namibia; Beira, Mozambique; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which are facing similar encumbrances and cost issues.
The roads and the trucks are in bad shape, with breakdowns or accidents contributing to the delays.
The traffic police corruption is another nightmare the truck drivers encounter and endure during the journey.
During the long, arduous journeys, trucks pass through manual weighbridges (instead of Electronic Truck Scales) to weigh them. They pay excess weight fees, and if they are overloaded, punitive fees are added to deter overloading.
The procedure may take a few days because trucks and Taxman assays are queuing.
Roads, too, shoulder a huge user cost because of overloaded trucks with metals mutilating them.
An uptick in road maintenance costs may sour countries’ relations, as Kenya and Tanzania bitterly learnt in the earlier 1980s, with Tanzanians naming and shaming Kenyans as “Manyang’au.”
Tanzania banned Kenyan four-axle trucks from passing onto her roads.
KENATCO trucks were most blamed for destroying Tanzanian roads due to being overweight.
By October 1983, KENATCO was placed under receivership after failing to clear her mammoth debt obligations.
Though mismanagement and rampant embezzlement of public funds dilated why KENATCO went under, the Tanzanian ban ramped up her demise.
The Lobito corridor will reduce travel times, carbon emissions, and costs of traditional routes.
This Lobito corridor route will commence from Kolwezi in the heart of the DRC and reach the Atlantic port of Lobito, transiting at the border crossing at Luau in northeastern Angola.
The journey to the South African Durban port will be over half the distance.
The travel distance will be truncated to around 800 miles, while the Durban route has 2,000 miles to travel from the DRC mines to the Durban port.
Each journey will take eight days compared to about one month to Durban.
The option is considered environmentally friendly because railway tracks are already there, so fewer trees will be felled to pave for new tracks, and trains generally release less carbon emissions than trucks.
Equally notable, evading towing the cargo through different countries with different tax regimes and tariff requirements will significantly reduce shipping costs when taken from the point of departure in a comparative appraisal.
Countering China and Russia’s African Influences
The US acknowledges it is playing “catch-up” to Russia and China regarding its impact in Africa.
Over the last two or fewer decades, China has invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa without attaching human rights, democracy, or any other conditionalities that tend to be dear to Western inclinations.
In Tanzania, former president John Pombe Magufuli never hid his understandable heartstrings for Chinese benevolence due to the same reasons for the lack of “western-type strings attached” in deal-making.
However, the US has been accusing China of brewing a vicious debt trap in Africa that aims to control and prompt partial or whole ownership of African prime assets.
China has vociferously denied those accusations, pointing out that her role in Africa yields mutual benefits to the participating parties.
China blames Western nations for luring, cornering and snaring Africa with an unbearable external debt through exorbitant interest rates and low-yield treasury bills while siphoning African natural resources for a song.
The US-China tug-of-war over African natural resources is not the real smoking gun we have been looking for. This altercation obscures the real facts.
Perplexing, both the Chinese and Western nations exploit African natural resources without empowering Africans to produce final products which add value while generating steady jobs.
China and Western nations are hungry for natural resources, unlike Russia, which is rich in natural resources and does not need to appropriate African wealth for domestic consumption.
Russian drilling of Mozambique natural gas solely benefits Africa, and the Mozambique-South Africa natural gas pipeline, which is in its final stages, reminds us that Russia’s stellar performance in Africa is unique and nonpareil!
This “from Russia with love” altruism has amplified and stratified SADC’s long-term aspirations of economically interconnected zoning.
The Russian African summits have laid an infrastructural foundation to act as a launchpad to the elusive African renaissance.
Africa will be covered with Satellites and nuclear plants, among other things, which will power Africa to the next level of industrial development.
The Russian sanctions imposed by the US and its European allies should allow Africa to strengthen its relationships with Russia.
Russia, too, is looking to diversify its economy, and Africa should grab this rare opportunity.
As the Lobito corridor takes shape, Dar-es-Salaam port will be one of its chief casualties.
We will lose a huge amount of DRC cobalt and Zambia copper. Tazara, infamous for living on borrowed errands, will face stickier relevance concerns.
Ultimately, the Lobito corridor will supplant TAZARA as a major conduit for shipping Zambian copper and DRC cobalt to Transatlantic destinations.
When the US and the EU join hands to develop the Lobito corridor, they know what they are doing.
What they are doing is paper over their domestic problems, inflicting more historical injustices to mother Africa as a source of cheap labour and raw materials with Africans left to fight over whatever crumbs fall from their high tables.
Can Lobito corridor help African capability to refine cobalt and copper before being shipped overseas? It is unclear whether that is the goal; the Lobito corridor will enhance the traditional African role of cheap raw materials and labour.
If that is the case, the success stories of multiparty democracy in DRC and Zambia will be rich in symbolism but short in substance.
African multiparty democracy has not empowered Africa to produce what it consumes but has played a major role in preserving and defending historical injustices of economic subjugation, and the Lobito corridor testifies to that harsh reality.
Lobito corridor may provide DP World at Dar es Salaam port with a generous scapegoat.
It can forgive herself that the business model has shrunk because the Lobito corridor has thrown a spanner in the works.
DP World may defend itself but cannot deliver on the initial “TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT” of showering our government with Tsunami windfalls because the Lobito corridor has peeled off a large chunk of business!
Tanzania may have bought for herself a legal arbitration suit.
Those who opposed the deal will find some absolution and redemption and may also find a reason to shout out aloud: “…We forewarned you, but you stubbornly refused to listen!
The Lobito corridor will avoid the Middle East’s unpredictable violence, with the Yemen Houthis firing deadly drones to blow up ships as a protest against Israel’s policies in Palestine.
The Houthis, who control large areas of Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, have been carrying out attacks on Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since November 2023 in what it says is a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians.
Israel, too, has shown little appetite to leave Gaza after a major terrorist act committed against her people.
Obviously, whatever truce between Israel and her sworn enemies, whether Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran and her proxies like the Houthis, is only a stopgap for future military confrontations.
All sides in the equation are using this window of truce to regroup and rearm to fight another day that the world of God spoken through His prophets may be fulfilled; human hands and wisdom will not cede peace to humanity, and this conflict is a living testament.
Once this information is added to the analysis, the Lobito corridor is a smart idea, albeit not necessarily beneficial to African nations.
The Lobito corridor will successfully escape the Middle East conflagration but will soil deep and catalyse the DRC’s never-ending civil wars.
Paradoxically, colonial injustices and regional inequitable resource distribution largely incite, stoke, and sustain the DRC conflagration, while the Lobito corridor project will deepen and inflame those historical and contemporary injustices.
Notably, the memoranda did not attempt to resolve these contradictions but proposed and dedicated itself to further stirring them to suit alien parochial interests!
With such a greedy and shortsighted temperament, the DRC’s never-ending civil wars are unlikely to end very soon despite the Lobito corridor project gawking amidst the warring sides.
Those in the DRC government are the fringe beneficiaries. At the same time, those who seek to oust them are the victims of the circumstances of this global arrangement of international division of labour.
A well rounded article! Which points into the glaring absence of African countries thrust to managing their resources. These MoUs between foreigners and Africans looks like Africans are not the sources of the initiatives and are just propelled along. Why not process those minerals, built batteries, here? Until when do we have to continue providing RAW materials to the north? The problem with Africa probably lies with our selfish, clueless politicians! Until we fix that, we have a long way to go!