This rickety train running across Angola is at the forefront of efforts
to loosen China's influence on this part of Africa.
It's about to get hundreds of millions of dollars of US
investment with one goal in mind, moving valuable natural resources
from what's known as the Central African Copperbelt to the West.
China has spent upwards of a trillion dollars over the past decade
on projects at least partly intended to secure the supply of elements that
will underpin the upcoming technology, energy and transport revolutions.
Now, the US is trying to get back into the game.
They need to catch up with Chinese engagement.
I traveled across southern Africa to see just how much ground
they need to make up.
My journey will take me 1,200 miles
from northern Zambia all the way to the west coast of Angola.
My starting point is Chililabombwe,
at a copper project operated by the American company Kobold Metals.
One of the biggest challenges that American and European countries face
in the coming decades as we tackle the energy transition is
where they're going to source all the metals that are needed to fuel it.
The commodities coming out of countries such as Zambia and neighboring
Democratic Republic of Congo, which includes cobalt and copper,
have made these countries important destinations for investment.
Many of the mines in this part of the world,
especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
are already owned and operated by Chinese companies.
Kobold Metals as an American company cuts a lone figure, especially in Zambia.
In fact, the US lost its last major foothold here in 2020 when the Arizona-based firm
Freeport-McMoRan sold the project in Congo to a Chinese competitor.
With backing from Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman,
Kobold Metals is trying to change that.
It has already pumped $150 million into its Zambia project.
Drills are turning 24/7 as they try to prove early indications that they
could be sitting on one of the biggest and richest copper deposits in the world.
If their suspicions are ultimately proven correct,
this could end up being a major new copper mine.
More than a kilometer below
my feet lies enough copper in a high concentrated form
to power over 100 million electric vehicles.
But getting those metals out of the mines is only the first step.
Almost as difficult is getting them from the mines, hundreds of miles
across to the ocean, to the ports and onwards to their final consumers.
Anything that comes out of the ground here could go east to China and Asia
or west to Europe and the US.
That's where the Benguela Railway comes in.
It runs from Kolwezi, 250 miles north of here in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It cuts through the vast grasslands of Angola's
Moxico province to reach the port of Lobito.
The line's 120-year history
is a timeline of who wielded influence over the natural resources here.
The railway was originally built by the British
and Portuguese in the early 1900s.
By the 1940s, it was of huge significance to the United States.
All the uranium that went into the Manhattan Project
was transported from a mine in Congo on this line.
It was then largely destroyed during Angola civil war
that ended two decades ago.
The country looked for new sources of funding as it sought to rebuild.
In 2010, the Angolan government signed a contract with a Chinese state
railway company to rebuild this line at an estimated cost of about $2 billion.
Angola has taken out tens of billions of dollars of debt from China,
part of which they are repaying with deliveries of oil
from what is one of Africa's biggest crude producers.
All that Chinese investment was a precursor to Beijing's
so-called Belt and Road Initiative, a massively ambitious global
infrastructure investment program that China started in 2013.
I'm Hannah Ryder. I'm the CEO of Development Reimagined.
52 African governments have signed memorandums of understanding
with the Chinese government on the Belt and Road Initiative.
The World Bank hadn't until recently financed a new railway project
on the African continent since 2002.
Obviously that's a major gap for African countries.
So who could they look to?
They could look to China,
who did have expertise and also financing available on rail.
Over the last 20 years, African governments have taken loans from China
of around the value of $160 billion.
That was all well and good when the Chinese economy was booming.
It could afford to fund projects like this a lot more easily.
The slowdown in China's economy has resulted in a slowdown
in lending to African economies.
That implies that they're more selective in regards to the countries that they're lending to,
particularly those that are highly indebted.
That's created an opportunity for the US and G7
to step in and try to compete with China's Belt and Road.
In 2022 they pledged to invest $600 billion
in middle and low income countries over five years.
I think there's been a realization from the US
in the context of a broad competition with China, that the African region
could be an area where that competition could really play out.
Since the 2022 US-Africa Summit, we have seen the pace of engagement
from the US into African countries increase.
We've seen more US leaders visit the African continent.
We've seen many of the programs which were existing prior
to the summit scale up their activity.
Countries like Zambia and Angola realize they stand to benefit
from the competition if they play their cards right.
The refurbishment of the Benguela Railway is just an example.
What we do need is actual infrastructure on the ground
and I think that President Joe Biden has already pronounced himself on that aspect
regarding their readiness to assist in the construction of the rail line.
The Biden administration has a grand plan to finance the refurbishment of this railway.
That could include a new line
built with the European Union from mines such as the Kobold site.
The total investment in the so-called Lobito Corridor project
will cost the best part of $1 billion,
including a $250 million investment from the US itself
and another $555 million
from a group led by the commodity trader Trafigura.
Still, investment in the region from the US and its allies remains
a fraction of what China has put into the continent over the past decade.
What's needed from the US is scale and pace of engagement.
If you think about what happened in 2022, we had China backing
nine new African projects on the continent.
In comparison to 2023, we had the US backing three
new projects on the African continent.
Here in Lobito is where the journey ends.
From here, Zambia's and Congo's copper will be loaded onto ships
and transported onto global markets.
Lobito crucially, offers the quickest route to both the US and Europe.
But African nations no longer simply want to ship raw materials to the world.
Now that the US has woken up to China's head start, countries such as Zambia
and the DRC can more readily demand investment in local manufacturing.
The biggest question for African countries
is not about what the US or China are getting out of Africa.
The biggest question is what are African countries
getting out of their relationship with the US and China,
and is that delivering development.