President Biden welcoming President João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço to the Oval Office in November 2023.
President Joe Biden’s visit to Angola is intended to amplify how U.S. leadership impacted trade, investment, and Infrastructure in the region, and highlight the “remarkable evolution” of the U.S.-Angola relationship, senior White House officials said in an online briefing. Scheduled from December 2 to December 4, 2024, it will mark the outgoing president’s first African visit.
Biden’s Special Assistant and Senior Director for African Affairs Frances Brown said the visit would be a fulfillment of the president’s commitment to African leaders but the trip also “fits into the Biden administration’s approach to Africa”, and how the U.S. champions African leadership across multiple fora, including at the UN, G20, and other international financial institutions.
Brown said while Biden may be making his first trip to the region, “more than 20 Cabinet members and leaders of U.S. departments and agencies” have visited in the last two years. The “prosperity of the U.S. is tied to that of our African partners, and this trip is a recognition of that,” he said.
During the briefing, Brown highlighted the “strategic” nature of the U.S. relations with Angola while noting that U.S.-Angola trade totaled nearly $2 billion, making the southern African country “our fourth-largest trade partner in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Brown said President Biden’s discussions with his Angola counterpart Joao Lourenco will include infrastructure, climate, and regional security.
Biden will also focus on one of his “signature initiatives”, the investment of the Lobito Corridor, Brown said – a reference to the railway project stretching from the port of Lobito in Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. The G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, supported by the U.S. and the European Union, launched the project in 2023.
Biden is expected to make major pronouncements during his visit, his aides said. One on them will be on Lobito, “since we’ve already mobilized billions of dollars … to date”.
The U.S. Acting Special Coordinator on Infrastructure, Helaina Matza, who also spoke at the online briefing, said when completed, the corridor will not only help close that infrastructure gap in the three countries “but provide sustainable solutions that drive economic growth, really enhance regional connectivity, and promote prosperity”.
The long-awaited Africa trip by the U.S. President, previously scheduled for October and the first by a U.S. president since President Barack Obama comes on the heels of a scathing condemnation of Angola’s human rights records by Amnesty International. In its latest report, Amnesty said authorities in the country were killing, injuring, or traumatizing dozens of people during protests between November 2020 and June 2023.
Source: allAfrica.com
