Overview:
Americans and Europeans want to keep their already thriving manufacturing industry with a continued supply of raw materials.
Tanzania is the latest African country to fall victim to another well-orchestrated Western scheme to loot from Africa, when it accepted to be part of the Lobito Corridor Railway Project.
Whereas many had projected that Tanzanian authorities would maintain their ground and reject the scheme that would deplete its critical minerals, they were treated to the shock of their life, when the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, announced that Tanzania was officially joining the project.
This, while at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York City where Blinken was witnessing the signing of a concession agreement between the African Finance Corporation (AFC), the lead developer of the Zambia-Lobito railway, and the governments of Zambia and Angola to develop and operate the rail.
“The Lobito Corridor – connecting Angola, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo – is one of our biggest projects. The ultimate goal is infrastructure connecting the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,” Mr Blinken said.
“Today, Tanzania is also joining conversations about the Lobito Corridor for the first time – something we very much welcome.”
He claimed the expansion of the Lobito Corridor to include Tanzania is meant to allow the project to run all the way to the Indian Ocean to facilitate transportation of nickel and other minerals.
Blinken revealed that so far, the United States and its partners have committed over $4 billion to Lobito Corridor projects.
The Lobito Corridor Project consists of a 1,300 km railway line. It originally involved three countries, traversing Angola from the Atlantic Ocean to the the DRC and Zambia. Until Blinken’s announcement, Tanzania had been tight-lipped on the direction is preferred, despite being seduced to join and give way.
Facts and history indicate that the project serves to achieve the bigger interests of the West.
The United States of America and the European Union (EU) will not, at least in the near future, relent on scheming to plunder Africa’s natural resources as they continue to front exploitative systems designed to profit from the continent’s resources and keep its people in poverty.
The Lobito Corridor project, on completion, will mainly be used 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 European Union and U.S.
Indeed, several agreements and MoUs related to Lobito Corridor involving among others DRC, Zambia, Angola, EU, U.S. and the African Development Bank, were signed.
Like they have always done, neo-colonialists front such projects as though they are for developing African countries yet in actual sense, they are a cover-up to their exploitative tendencies and deals to steal wealth from Africa.
Look, the Lobito corridor project is presented to Angola, Zambia, DRC and now Tanzania as a game changer for their socio-economic needs and yet in rearity, it pursues interests of the West.
All that the EU and the U.S. are interested in, is providing quicker and effective routes for valuable and strategic resources from Africa to their markets.
In this way, Americans and Europeans want to keep their already thriving manufacturing industry with continued supply of raw materials.
They also want to keep Africans in abject poverty by way of continued exportation of their raw materials well knowing that such earns them less.
Imagine, how much is lost in exporting critical and valuable resources worth billions of dollars in their raw form.
If Americans and Europeans had good intentions, their focus should have been on promoting value addition on African products rather than creating easy exit of raw materials.
It is explicit that DRC and other mineral-rich African countries can not develop from their critical raw materials and strategic minerals when they are export them raw. The only way for these countries is to develop establishing a formidable processing industry.
In fact, by rooting for projects like the Lobito Corridor, the EU and the U.S want to prevent Africans from developing their industry for refinery of strategic raw materials and high-tech production, which will, in the end, lead to huge financial losses for the continent.
In the period of colonial rule, the West plundered Africa’s natural resources, and now, the U.S. and EU have demonstrated that they habour similar intentions towards developing countries and are trying hard to establish the same model of exploitation of the continent’s wealth.