The BBC has a remarkably feel-good story about Angola’s newly-refurbished Luanda-Malange train route. While I love positive stories about Africa in any media – if for no other reason than to offset the over-reporting on conflict and poverty – this story completely misses the important point here. This line was refurbished through Chinese financing . . . despite the fact Angola cannot really pay the bill. The story intimates that China was somehow surprised or dismayed at the non-payment, and held up the opening of the line until they were paid. Really? Anyone who has been paying attention to the growing Chinese presence in sub-Saharan Africa will find this storyline borderline hilarious. The Chinese simply don’t care all that much about getting paid now. Their interest is in the rich agricultural areas around Malange, and securing reliable transportation routes in and out to enable the movement of agricultural goods from this area to future Chinese markets. In other words, they will get theirs later – this is an investment, not a repayable loan. The new scramble for Africa has been on for nearly a decade, but nobody seems to be paying attention except the rank-and-file Africans, who grow more leery of this sort of thing all the time. At what point will the US or another power step in to try to counterbalance the massive growth of Chinese influence in Africa?
I remember my dad telling me a few years ago about the Chinese restaurants in Accra and I was like, “huh?”. There aren’t Asians in Ghana. I guess I wasn’t paying attention either.
Yeah, they have really surged – there was Chinese food (OK, “Chinese Food”) around, but not like this. Interestingly, though, even in Ghana the Chinese are not really out and about among the Ghanaian population – when they were building all of the stadiums for the African Cup of Nations, they were more or less sequestered away from the Ghanaians . . . which did not do much to build trust, you know?
“At what point will the US or another power step in to try to counterbalance the massive growth of Chinese influence in Africa?”
If the US or Europe did so, they would quickly be accused of colonialism and exploitation.
The question also arises – why would we want to? If the Chinese can remove barriers to trade and get the economy moving there again, then good. If they use their own capital to do it, then that’s fine. They will, I am sure, expect a return on their investment; but if it’s a slice of a bigger pie, then that benefits everyone and is fair enough. Do we know for sure that greater Chinese involvement in Africa is necessarily a bad thing?
Well, this is realpolitik, no? From the point of view of the Africans with which I work, though, there is a lot of mistrust of the Chinese and their intentions. My colleagues recognize the parallels of Chinese activity and policy with the open colonialism from which they emerged in the mid-20th century. I think my use of the term “counterbalance” was intentional – there are a lot of ways to counterbalance Chinese influence . . . these range from really problematic interventions (i.e. military) to which I completely object all the way to rethinking our development policies to enable greater and more meaningful local participation in project and policy design (which would do a world of good, and avoid the colonialism accusation). Right now, however, we are largely standing by, watching what amounts to a subtle land/resource grab in Africa. The Council on Foreign Relations has a good, if moderate, take on this issue with regard to oil here. More worrying is the trend, exemplified in this post, of opening access to agricultural land – for an interesting take on this, see here and here.
When we get into land resources, things are zero sum (more or less), even with agricultural technology advancing as it does – so whatever the Chinese get, it will not be a slice of a bigger pie – it will be a slice of whatever Africa was feeding itself with up to that point. Of course, this is my opinion: Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid) thinks it is an opportunity, but that presumes that the Chinese will remain as hands-off in their dealings with Africa in the future as they are with their lending now. History demonstrates that hands-off policies eventually fade away in Africa . . . and many Africans know this and are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“…though, there is a lot of mistrust of the Chinese and their intentions.”
And so there should be. China will of course be in it for as much as they can get out of the deal, and if you don’t watch out for your own interests, you’ll get a lot less from them than you might have. Someone might well be willing to pay $10 for the goods, but if they can persuade the owner to part with it for $2, they usually will.
That said, a farmer does not profit by starving the cattle.
Your last sentence is dead on – which is why I think development is such an important field. Not that you are suggesting this, but we can’t just suck a place dry and expect that nothing bad will ever boomerang back on us. Same with the Chinese. Yet there is a very long history of such behavior . . . and a part of me feels it is too naive to hope we have finally learned.
This is wordy but please, please read it:
This post makes very good observations. One thing I must point out though is that we shouldn’t want the US to step in. Instead we should want both the US and China to step out. The reason Africa must endure much poverty is because of the US in the first place [more on that in a minute]. Before the US’s oppression, there have been many occupations from the Mid-East and Europe. But the US’s oppression was different and new. It was a clandestine oppression that few could put a finger on. What many people do not know is that the Federal Reserve [look at any dollar bill – it says “Federal Reserve Note” … “The Fed”, as some call it, is not federal but privately owned by international bank owners and it is not a reserve but instead prints the money from nothing] has given loans to nearly every “3rd world” country in the world – that’s basically everything sub-Saharan (though I’m not sure if they loaned to South Africa because of its former English apartheid). The Fed bribed the leaders into taking these loans at 30% interest rates so that they would never be able to pay them back. Hence, the poverty and inability to stand on their own. If a leader refused the bribe he was assassinated or the CIA supported a coup.
Then there was the Live 8 concerts that Bono of U2 fought for a decade to have as a fundraiser so African countries could pay back their debt and become independent. The debt was bought at Live 8 and everything was supposed to be great but instead the “benefactors” turned out to be Vultures, as Greg Palast of the BBC has done a tremendous job documenting. And Africa is back where it started.
Whether China is making the situation worse, better, or steady I am not sure but China is certainly taking advantage of Africa’s need for capital, and ideally I think Africa is better off without China’s occupation if they could just bring the Vultures to justice.
In many ways, I am sympathetic to your argument. However, I do take issue with a few things. First, I am not sure that everyone disengaging from Africa is going to make anything better at this point. There are very few “African problems”. There are a lot of global problems that play out in very difficult ways in Africa. And many of the challenges Africa faces stem directly from things like colonialism. Finally, at this point to argue that disengagement would be better than engagement is to argue the counterfactual – that is, since Africa did engage with the rest of the world, there is no way to know if disengagement really would have gone better. It is just a guess. In a general way, I think colonialism was disastrous for Africa, and remains a legacy that weighs the continent down like an anchor. But I have great difficulty imagining what might have been had there never been any colonialism . . . I was always a mediocre fiction writer.
At another level, disengagement strikes me as immoral – I think there is a compelling argument to be made that through colonialism and development (yes, even development) we created many of the problems that Africans struggle with every day. Further, we benefit greatly from their poverty – if they were using natural resources at anything like the same rate we do in our lifestyles today, we would be living with a lot less. If we caused the problem, and benefit from their poverty, I think we owe them our attention and efforts.
Finally, the problems we face are too complex to be dealt with by anyone or any one group alone. Climate change affects us all – disengagement doesn’t change that, since the atmosphere will still circulate. We don’t need African solutions any more than we need “Western” solutions – neither is adequate to address the scale of what we face. We need real partnerships (and this is very, very hard) that bring together ideas from everywhere if we are going to change the path that we are on.
The history of lending to Africa is horrible, but much more complex than what you put forth here. First, the Fed’s lending was much more limited as a percentage of total lending than you make it seem. Bilateral loans from the US were important, but not even the majority of the money loaned out. Nobody bribed anyone to take the loans – but loans were made to corrupt leaders to, among other things, keep them from siding with the Soviets. The lenders knew these loans would never be paid back – they were effectively bribes – and yes, the US certainly pressured some institutions, like the World Bank, into these loans. But we were only wasting our own money (well, and lying about our real level of effort in development) until we demanded that the countries pay back these loans long after the leaders had run off with the money. The crazy interest rate problem was actually an issue of flexible lending, much as what caught people in the subprime mortgages. During the 1970s petrodollars washed over world banks in huge amounts, and the banks began looking for somewhere to dump the funds (rather than have them sit around being “unproductive”). This created an oversupply of available credit, driving interest rates way down, and a lot of countries jumped in on really low rate (but variable rate) loans because at the low end it was good economic policy. However, when the oil crisis hit in the mid-70s, credit dried up and the variable rate loans reset to much higher rates (though 30% is a bit fanciful in most cases), pushing many of the debtor countries into debt crises from which some have not really recovered. Were there cases of financial malfeasance in this period. Probably. Was malfeasance the principal cause of these massive debts? No.
That said, I am all for stringing up those who did lie, cheat and steal knowingly (and there certainly were some), and that includes those who demanded that poor countries repay the loans/bribes – robbing the poor has to put you in a special ring of hell, but I can’t recall if Dante ever specified one . . .
Finally, not to be a d*ck, but I have always enjoyed Noel Gallagher’s take on Live 8 (I referenced it in a post here). He’s completely correct. U2 is my favorite band. Bono is not my favorite activist – he just keeps backing the wrong horses (including Jeff Sachs). Some colleagues and I have an article coming out about celebrity activism, focused on U2 – we’re all huge fans, but have frustrations with how such activism actually plays out. Love the new album, though . . .
Oh, and a great history of the Fed, and the crisis that led to the Great Depression and World War II more generally, is Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed.