316 - Biden Goes to Africa: A Strange Foray

President Biden is in Africa, his first and last trip to a continent that has mostly been neglected by official Washington since President Obama swung through a few of its fifty-four nations. Yesterday Biden arrived in Angola, neither the most important nor the most strategic of Africa's critical states. But he is at least on the African continent, however briefly and irrelevantly -- considering his successor's heinous views of Africa and its countries and leaders.

Angola, with 37 million people, is a former Portuguese colony wrested from Lisbon only after a major liberation war, backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, succeeded in 1975 thanks to a timely overthrow in Lisbon of Portugal's military dictatorship. The U.S. and South Africa backed the losers before Jimmy Carter became president; President Reagan's team even supported a rebel Angolan movement against the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) that took control from the retreating Portuguese. (I testified before Congress' Joint Intelligence Committee against sending Stinger missiles to Jonas Savimbi's anti-MPLA National Union for then Total Independence of Angola [UNITA]).

MPLA supreme leader Eduardo dos Santos ruled Angola kleptocratically from 1979 to his death in 2017. His daughter Isabel reputedly became Africa's richest woman. The family's wealth reflected its siphoning of much of the proceeds of Angola's petroleum exports. Dos Santos and his loyal cronies acquired the vast financial largesse that came from Angola becoming the second largest African oil producer after mighty Nigeria. For much of this century, nearly all of its petroleum has been shipped to China; in the last decade, nearly every drop of its oil now goes to Shanghai to satisfy great borrowings from China that the dos Santos regime used to pad its earnings and support capital projects in Luanda, its capital, and other coastal cities.

But little of this vast wealth was allowed to trickle down to the people of Angola. Ordinary Angolan living standards remain lower than should be acceptable in a major oil producer. Health and educational levels are paltry. In 2023, Angola's annual per capita GDP was $2310. Its average life expectancy was 62, low for Africa. Infant mortality was 53 per 1000, a high number for Africa.

Angola is still ruled in an authoritarian manner even though Joâo Lourenço, who succeeded dos Santos as president, is friendly to the West, anticipates good relations with the U.S. and, he hopes, significant new investments by Americans. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly is still nearly as constrained as it was under dos Santos. Amnesty International in September critiqued Angola's continued denial to its citizens of fundamental human rights. Dissent was harshly punished. President Biden has gone to Angola this week despite its abuse of civil liberties and Lourenço's denial of open political participation to his long-suffering citizens.

Biden wants to showcase U.S. support for the Lobito Transportation Corridor, a refurbished rail route that will bring copper and cobalt from Zambia and the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) along a modernized rail route that was used in a limited way in the twentieth century mostly to export copper. Originally a Portuguese narrow-gauge rail line with wood-burning locomotives, the Lobito line was largely abandoned during Angola's liberation war. Lobito is an Atlantic Ocean port that has abundant harbor capacity for the kinds of upgraded exports that Biden has been promoting. But improving the carrying capacity of the rails and the Lobito port will not necessarily upgrade the lives of rural Angolans, through whose lands the Lobito project will pass.

For all of those reasons, Angola is not the best choice for a flag-waving visit by an American president. Yet, Biden and his team may primarily be visiting Angola to counter Chinese influence both in Angola (with its long-term loan paybacks absorbing nearly all oil exports going forward) and in nearby Equatorial Guinea, where China seeks a naval base. Russia's influence in West Africa is also growing. A Biden visit to Africa, however, offers little counterweight to both China and Russia. Yet, although Biden may not realize it, funding the Lobito Corridor rejuvenation project provides some recompense for Reagan's opposition to Indigenous independence.

Instead of a visit to an authoritarian country in Africa that still oppresses its citizens, President Biden could have celebrated vibrant democracy in Africa by visiting Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, and Zambia -- all of which recently deposed previous regimes through the ballot box. He could have showed support for Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa -- the continent's most advanced and ambitious economy. Ramaphosa will shortly assume leadership of BRICS as well. Or he could have dropped in on Nigeria, Africa's most populous and oft troubled nation. He might have descended on Ethiopia to admonish Prime Minister Abey Ahmed for sponsoring civil wars in his now embattled country. Or he could have used a visit to Addis Ababa or Mogadishu to demand that the United Arab Emirates wind down their support for the Rapid Support Forces' pursuit of a horrendous fratricidal war in Sudan, the home of the globe's worst ever humanitarian crisis.

Angola is still wildly corrupt, almost as it was under dos Santos. (Angola is trying to recapture Isabel dos Santos to recoup some of her ill-gotten gains.) Biden could use his visit to Luanda to excoriate rulers in the world who steal from their people, take advantage of their political positions to amass illicit and questionable proceeds, trade influence for pecuniary reward, and generally disadvantage citizens. Such a statement would provide a clear message for Africa and, indeed, for much of the rest of the world -- even Washington. If Biden only emphasizes his economic message, and fails to deliver a strong moral message that could resonate across the globe, a major soft power moment will have been lost.