China & The US Are Competing For Access To Mineral-Rich Southern Africa

Southern Africa, which includes the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) erstwhile Katanga Region, is rich in the critical minerals upon which the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”/“Great Reset” is dependent. China is far ahead of the US in extracting them after clinching agreements over a decade ago, yet logistics remain complicated, and it’s here where the US believes that it can compete with China. Such is the goal of the Lobito Corridor that it announced during the G20 Summit in Delhi last year.

That project was initially envisaged as connecting Zambia and the DRC’s mineral-rich regions with the Atlantic via Angola through the modernization of a colonial-era railway, but it’s now planned to expand to Tanzania and thus become Africa’s first transcontinental railway. That last-mentioned country also has its fair share of mineral riches and is known for its geopolitical balancing act. Some words about that foreign policy strategy will now be shared so that the reader can better understand its significance.

Tanzania and Zambia had revolutionary socialist governments during the Old Cold War but were more aligned with China than with the USSR. As proof of that, they agreed to host the first modern-day Silk Road, the TAZARA Railway, which was built by the People’s Republic in the 1970s. It’s become dilapidated in the decades since, but China proposed a $1 billion revamp earlier this year several months after the Lobito Corridor was announced, which shows that it’s ready to compete with the US.

Upon the end of the Old Cold War, Tanzania reformed its foreign policy and is nowadays friendly with everyone. Of particular interest is it hosting the Valdai Club’s second Russia-Africa Conference this summer, which was the first time that it was held in Africa. The Valdai Club is Russia’s top elite networking platform and one of its most prestigious think tanks so it was immensely important that Tanzania helped bring these influential Russians and their African counterparts together.

Mayya Nikolskaya, the Acting Director at MGIMO’s Centre for African Studies, published a detailed report at the time about the vast untapped potential in Russian-Tanzanian agricultural cooperation. For as promising as this is, Indian-Tanzanian ties as a whole are even much more so after they elevated them to a strategic partnership during President Hassan’s trip to Delhi last October. Readers can learn more about their potential from this report here by India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis.

It's also worth mentioning that India participated in trilateral maritime drills with Tanzania and Mozambique in spring, the Adani Group will now operate Dar es Salaam Port for the next 30 years, and those two and the US also agreed to a renewable energy partnership too among other forms of cooperation. Moreover, Tanzania is part of the Indian Ocean Rimland and has around 60,000 citizens of Indian descent that serve as a bridge between them, which works to further strengthen their ties.

Although Indo-US ties remain troubled due to an alleged Indian assassination plot against a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist with dual American citizenship on US soil, both have common interest in competing with China in Southern Africa, and Tanzania is poised to profit as a result. The planned revamping of TAZARA and expansion of the Lobito Corridor should help some of its rapidly growing population, which is expected to triple from 60 million to nearly 300 million by 2100, find employment.

Its 2017 “Natural Wealth And Resources (Permanent Sovereignty) Act” forbade the export of raw materials for processing outside of the country so as to incentive investors to help it build a domestic processing industry. This could scale accordingly as Tanzania becomes the convergence point of America’s and China’s competitive connectivity projects in Southern Africa to turn it into a regional hub. That would add extra value to its exports and lay a firm foundation for its future economic growth.

Tanzania can learn a lot about how best to maneuver amidst this geopolitical competition from the Central African Republic and Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the last three of which formed the Alliance of Sahel States and are working towards merging into a confederation. These four countries are leading anti-colonialism and multipolar processes in Africa. Not only have they allied with Russia, but they’ve also kicked French and US forces out of their countries. Their leaders are also very politically astute.

Although Tanzania doesn’t have any foreign troops on its soil, its forces still train with their American counterparts, which is fine as long as it doesn’t lead to the opening of bases. Neighboring Zambia was reported to be in talks with the US about establishing such facilities, but it’s denied these reports. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, and the truth is that the US hopes to control the transcontinental railway that it’s now officially trying to build.

To that end, it might seek to strengthen its military partnerships with Angola, Zambia, and/or Tanzania to that end, which is why all three of those should be wary. It’s one thing to economically benefit from trade with the West and another entirely to host its forces. They should thus do their utmost to resist American pressure to transform their transcontinental railway partnership with the US into a full-fledged military-strategic one, and expanding ties with other countries can help them in this regard.

Powers like Russia, India, and even the UAE (which has become a force to be reckoned with in Africa) can maneuver amidst this superpower competition for access to those resources to get in on this as well, ideally to the benefit of Tanzania and other nearby countries so long as they negotiate properly. It’s in their interests to expand their number of partnerships and the quality thereof with a view towards averting disproportionate dependence on any single one.

All of this sounds great in theory but might be difficult to implement in practice, especially if the US resorts to Color Revolutions and other intrigues (including simply bribery) to elbow out China. America’s strategic interests rest in controlling China’s access to critical minerals and then depriving it of this in order to gain an edge over its rival, yet this could lead to cascading consequences that risk throwing the region into chaos, thus possibly complicating everyone’s access to these resources.

The previously mentioned powers would also be adversely affected in that scenario, and sudden disruptions of critical mineral supply chains caused by this meddling could reverberate across the world, both in terms of the global economy as well as the global systemic transition. Regarding the first, this could lead to a slowdown depending on how severe the unrest might be, while the second refers to maintaining the gap between the middle powers and the superpowers that the former want to narrow.

It remains to be seen how the contours of this competition will evolve, but in any case, observers should keep an eye on Southern Africa going forward since there’s no other region of the world where the US is trying to seriously compete with China on the infrastructure and resources fronts. China has the advantage by far due to getting a head start one decade ago, but the US isn’t deterred, hence why it announced the Lobito Corridor last September and is now planning to expand it to Tanzania.

That country’s geopolitical balancing act will play a large role in determining how everything unfolds, as will the involvement of middle powers, particularly India. It’s uniquely positioned to tip the scales of economic influence there away from China, not necessarily towards the US, but in a more neutral direction due to its own enormous critical mineral needs. If successful, then India might replicate this policy elsewhere, which could then make it integral to its partners’ New Cold War balancing acts.