The outgoing president of the United States visited Angola to start the construction of a railway that will convert mineral resources from Congo, through Zambia to Angol’s Lobito seaport for shipment, but people are more concerned with his mental state on social media than the child abuse brought about by the uncontrolled mining.
Videos that are making rounds on Twitter, now X, show Angola’s president João Lourenço directing Biden to make the right turn as the two walked on the red carpet, and again, holding him back from tripping at a stop (watch below):
The clip had Americans talking about the outgoing leader who few months ago, was said to be very fit to run for a second term. Others questioning his sanity, wondered if he was legally able to pardon his son for his litany of crimes.
Another berated the Biden administration for gifting out $1billion while her citizens remained homeless and unsettled following the destruction by Hurricane Helene. The poster shared a video of the shanties and poor living conditions Americans were still languishing in.
Biden’s visit to Congo also revealed a darker truth about the concerns of the West regarding the problems of modern-day slavery caused by the mining of these natural resources in the African country.
An article from NPR revealed that although the Democratic Republic of Congo had the largest amount of cobalt used for the manufacture of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries used in mobile phones and electric cars, the country had no “clean supply chain”.
While studying human trafficking and child labor, Siddharth Kara, a researcher at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health at the Kennedy School revealed that Congo was one of the major countries where such practices abound – in their mines. Though the information is widely known, the DRC’s major buyers – China and the second-place contender, the United States, have done virtually nothing to address the issue.
In describing the extremely poor conditions in which the cobalt miners are forced to work in, Fox News Jesse Waters said the laborers – “little African kids” can use their bare hands and fingers to dig up the red soil for the minerals needed for the wealthy Americans to drive their teslas in pursuit of the “green new deal”.
NPR revealed that the people who work in these mines are kept poor by being paid just a few equivalent of dollars per day, and are made to use pickaxes, and shovels to work their way through the trenches that Biden’s train will now connect to.
While the United States pushes for climate change awareness and promotes the use of EVs by subsidizing its production costs, Congo, the African country that provides the natural resources for the change gets its landscape devastated, trees massively cut down, air contaminated with haze and dusts and water not-fit-for human use as a result of the mining.