The Lobito Corridor is over a hundred years old — but it wasn’t until the G7’s infrastructure initiative, known as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), that it was thrust into the spotlight.
Why was Joe Biden insisting on physically visiting the Corridor in 2024 — right at the tail end of his presidency, and when his Democratic Party badly needed him?
The answer lies in what Joe Biden pledged — plans for Zambian rail extensions, loans to the Lobito Atlantic Railway consortium, and technical support — all commitments and management models, not a construction or improvement of the main line.
But this was not necessary, because under the PGII, the EU and US already had multiple MoUs with countries along the Lobito Corridor:
EU–US–DRC–Angola–Zambia–AfDB–AFC cooperation on corridor development;
The LCTTFA trade agreement among Angola, DRC and Zambia;
EU bilaterals with the DRC and Zambia on minerals value chains;
US support for an EV battery value chain; and
A concession involving Angola with Trafigura, Mota-Engil and Vecturis.
The Lobito Corridor is branded as shared prosperity.
In reality it is about conflict and mineral violence in the DRC, and Angola’s disconnected rail islands — Benguela, Luanda and Moçamedes lines that still do not form a national network. Local reporting from Benguela, Moxico, Bié and Huambo has also described stretches of track and rolling stock in disrepair, a contrast with the corridor’s promotional imagery.
Lobito mainly moves cobalt, copper and battery-chain inputs from the DRC and Zambia to Atlantic markets — on a Chinese-rebuilt railway Angola is still paying for.
The Lobito Corridor links mining regions in the DRC and Zambia to Angola’s Atlantic port. It is framed as a strategic European–US response to China’s influence in Africa. The operational purpose is clearer: transporting critical raw materials, strategic minerals and EV battery-chain products from the Copperbelt toward EU and US demand.
The physical heart of the corridor is the Caminho de Ferro de Benguela — a 1,344-kilometre railway built under Portuguese rule, destroyed in Angola’s civil war, then rebuilt by China between 2006 and 2014 under a reported US$2 billion rail-for-oil programme. Stations, bridges and rolling stock were restored by Chinese contractors. Angola continues to service the oil-backed loans that financed that rebuild. European and American “revival” narratives often treat that completed infrastructure as a fresh success story.
It is being hailed as a symbol of African progress. In truth, it is a mirror of everything negative the continent endures: Chinese debt, European opportunism, Congolese blood, Angolan misrule — and a railway that connects foreign interests more efficiently than it connects the people who live along its tracks. It promises prosperity while delivering the same old extraction dressed in new flags.
The major interest in the Lobito Corridor is to use it as a route for transporting critical raw materials (CRMs), strategic minerals, and products of the EV battery value chain, from the DRC and Zambia to the EU and the US.
A Chinese Project Rebranded as Western Cooperation
The Lobito Corridor’s potential is further undermined by Angola’s own governance crisis. And Angola still lacks a national railway system: the Benguela Railway (serving the central-eastern axis); the Luanda Railway (confined to the north-western corridor); and the Moçamedes Railway (restricted to the south-western region) are not interconnected. Three separate rail islands in a country of continental scale — none linking North to South or East to North — make national mobility nearly impossible and render any promise of shared prosperity hollow. Angolans cannot move freely within their own territory.
The question is not who laid the tracks or who runs the trains. It is who benefits — and at what cost to the people along the railway, from Lobito to Kolwezi to the war-scarred heart of the DR Congo. Until these questions are answered with integrity, the corridor remains just another extractive route — another line on the map where global powers profit while African communities stay on the margins.