ZIYANDA STUURMAN AND DUNCAN MONEY: New deals probably won’t save infrastructure investments in DRC, Angola and Zambia

With Donald Trump’s pullback of investments in development, humanitarian, healthcare and infrastructure projects globally, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the worst-hit countries on each front.

According to the New York Times, the world’s largest humanitarian aid programme in 2024 was in the DRC, where the US spent $910m on food, water and sanitation for more than 7-million people displaced by conflict in the country’s eastern regions. The UN estimates the country will need $2.5bn in aid to reach 11-million people this year.  

In the long term, the DRC is losing far more than humanitarian aid. In recent weeks President Felix Tshisekedi and his government have faced an onslaught from the Rwanda-backed M23 militia group, which has taken control of much of the resource-rich North and South Kivu provinces.  

Faced with no good options and enemy combatants gaining ground, Tshisekedi’s government and the Africa-USA Business Council advocacy group focused on lobbying the Trump administration to provide security guarantees in exchange for access to minerals such as cobalt, lithium, tantalum and uranium plus infrastructure, including deep-water ports.

In return, the US would equip the DRC army and gain access to military bases in the country. The deal is not dissimilar to the one now under negotiation between the US and Ukraine for access to the latter’s rare earth minerals. 

The DRC’s advantage is that unlike Ukraine it actually produces critical minerals in large volumes. Its disadvantage is its location in Africa given that Trump alternates between disparagement and lack of interest in Africa. African countries are likely to be low on the priority list for any business and trade development initiatives.

There is another potential stumbling block: vacillation in the Trump administration between protectionist and acquisitive impulses. On February 25, the White House issued an executive order announcing an investigation of “dumping of foreign copper into the American market” and suggesting  introduction of tariffs on copper imports. Copper is DRC’s largest export by far. 

Where this leaves the planned Lobito Corridor railway expansion is unclear. Individual road, rail, energy infrastructure and mineral mining projects envisioned in the Lobito Corridor linking ports in Angola to copper and cobalt mines in Zambia and the DRC (with a once-vaunted possible expansion to nickel-producing mines in Tanzania) were heavily backed by the Biden administration, in political and financial terms.  

The economic rationale for the railway was underpinned by the export of growing volumes of copper and cobalt to a port on the Atlantic Ocean, where those minerals could be exported more easily to US and European markets. If DRC metals are deemed a threat to US domestic producers and subjected to tariffs, the railway has no obvious purpose.  

US withdrawal

The wider Lobito project is meant to be financed by the joint US-EU Partnership for Global Infrastructure & Investment. The US share was due to be $553m, provided via the International Development Finance Corporation. However, the US is now poised to pull out of the partnership due to cuts in government spending, especially spending overseas.  

There are no other obvious alternative investment partners for the Lobito Corridor. Investors from Middle Eastern and Gulf states who have been pouring money into mines in the region have shown no appetite for big infrastructure projects beyond ownership of ports.  

China has no obvious interest in building a railway line to an Atlantic Ocean port and is now negotiating with Zambia and Tanzania to revive the Tazara Railway, linking copper and cobalt mines to Dar es Salaam. Two state-owned Chinese companies also signed a deal in January to build a railway line to ship nickel from Burundi to Dar es Salaam. 

Moreover, China already gets what it needs from the region. In this sense there is no real competition for minerals from the DRC. Last year the DRC exported 1.48-million tonnes of refined copper to China, and only about 31,600 tonnes to the US. Reorientating export markets, even with the hypothetical offer of US security guarantees, would be a mammoth task. 

Potentially lacking finance and even a raison d’être, there is a real risk that the Lobito infrastructure projects will not happen at all. Risks are growing and potential gains are still years away — factors that are not encouraging for private sector financing.  

The DRC and Zambia still plan to ramp up copper and cobalt production, but may now have to rely on China’s new infrastructure plans, or SA’s Transnet, for backing.  

• Stuurman is an independent political risk analyst focused on politics and public policy in Southern Africa. Money is a historian and researcher who focuses on copper and Southern Africa.