Opinion
China-Africa: The dragon dealmaker has Africa dazzled and dizzy
By Bright Simons
In May last year, China’s President Xi Jinping announced during a visit to Tanzania that the great Asian power shall be providing $20bn in credit lines to Africa over the next three years. The announcement, some observers opined, may have prompted United States President Barack Obama’s $7bn pledge, a few weeks after, to expand Africa’s energy infrastructure.
Predictably, the pundits and the newswires went hysterical with analysis. The usual clichés about ‘no-strings attached’ aid and ‘fierce Sino-Western competition over the Africa prize’ were unleashed with characteristic repetitiveness. No one remarked that exactly the same pledge had been made in Beijing the year before, at the summer meeting of African heads of state and their Chinese counterpart, or that the $20bn figure first surfaced in a Chinese government announcement in 2007.
It gets more curious when one realises that the $20bn sum is dwarfed by the money that often gets bandied about when African presidents make their way one by one to Beijing. In 2008, China pledged $9bn to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for access to the latter’s huge mineral reserves. Furthermore, In 2010, Ghana’s then President John Atta Mills signed credit framework agreements with pledges totalling $13bn; In the same year, China pledged exactly the same amount to Mozambique for investments in tourism, mining and energy and in 2013, China pledged $5bn to Kenya.
All these promises outstrip the total pledges made to Africa, and we have not even included commitments to major allies such as Angola and Nigeria.
‘Chinese Assistance’
It is immediately clear that the math does not add up. And if the Chinese are good at anything, they sure are good at math. So what is going on here? The truth is actually very simple, and it goes to the heart of the China-Africa economic relationship. Most of the world cannot stop interpreting China’s actions through a Western prism. To many observers, a Chinese deal with an African country is similar to an American deal with the same country.
This is, of course, patently nonsense. You can attribute some of the complexity to the fact that when it comes to China’s engagement with Africa – whether it is actual state-offered aid, a brokered supplier credit arrangement with Chinese state-owned enterprises, concessional financing from state-owned banks or projections of project financing by private Chinese firms – the Chinese rendition of the matter is kept simple: it’s ‘Chinese assistance,’ period.
