By Emmanuel Mboco
Africa-Press – Angola. The Angop media and other pro-government media outlets have spread the idea that the Lobito Corridor is Angola’s largest engineering project, which is true information. However, these same media outlets have also reported that this project was a wise decision by the “great leader” who was not elected by direct vote of the Angolan people.
Supporters of the Angolan elite have been spreading the word about how Angola will develop with the way the Lobito railway is currently managed, but they forget an important lesson from history, that of the Panama Canal.
There is a small country in Central America, but it has an important canal that allows navigation between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – Panama. Like the Lobito railway, this canal is one of the largest engineering projects in recorded history in the world and dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, in 1903, a time when the Americans, like Angola, said they supported the independence of the small Latin American country, in this case in relation to Colombia, one of the largest countries in South America, because Colombia was not interested in transferring the rights to build the canal to the Yankees. This project ended up costing around US$ 375 million, a figure that even included occupational safety issues, to prevent the deaths of workers working on the project (which for now is just a dream for those working on the Lobito railway).
But all the American “goodwill” in favor of freedom and democracy hid a cynical objective – total control of the Panama Canal, a situation that only began to change in 1977, with an agreement that would only grant Panama complete control of the Canal in 1999. Today, President-elect Donald Trump, claiming that the money spent was the United States’, has taken the decision to regain control of the Canal more than a century after its construction, more than 40 years after the signing of an agreement with Panama and more than 20 years after its return. For those who study history and draw lessons from it, it is more than clear that for the United States of America, what matters are the interests and ambitions of a certain administration, which, by the way, has not left out of its supposed “sphere of influence” even its NATO allies such as Denmark, which controls the island of Greenland.
Now what about a country like Angola? Does the current administration really believe that the Americans will not demand their more than 550 million dollars obtained from the signing of agreements after Joe Biden’s arrival?! And now that the oil issue raises more and more problems after the war in Ukraine, what prevents Donald Trump from demanding payment of the millions invested through barrels of oil?
The interactions of Angolan elites with Western elites need to be seriously questioned and rethought before Angola, which is now celebrating 50 years of independence, becomes a Central American-style republic.
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