Opinion
China-Africa: The dragon dealmaker has Africa dazzled and dizzy
Right People at the Right Time
The confusion wrought by this lack of rigour in the way packages are bundled together is, however, merely the first stage of befuddlement. After studying several of these packages and consequential matters, I believe I have gained a handle on some of the issues involved.
As a centrally planned economy, China’s style of tracking financial numbers, where the state is concerned, has never been a matter of mathematical precision. And this is not because Chinese statisticians are weak. Far from that. Just that statistics, like all other disciplines in China, are expected simply to serve the favoured public narrative of the moment.
As Chinese officials like to say in response to charges of opacity: ‘The right people have the right information at the right time.’ Thus, China’s goal at this point is to signal that money is not the issue when it comes to its strategy for the African continent. It will spend whatever it needs to spend to pursue its interests, including outspending any competitor that dares get in its way.
But what then happens when the money does not show up? Or more precisely, when far less than the advertised amount shows up within the promised timeframe, to echo growing complaints across the continent? The angst that long-delayed Chinese funds has generated in places like Guinea and Zimbabwe – where massive and game-changing projects have been banked on the receipt of apparently committed funds – is almost always due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Chinese perceive three things: time, contracts and project success.
Firstly, Chinese leaders are not subject to the same political cycles as their African counterparts. They are happy to wait till the right set of leaders are in place in a client state before moving forward with a commitment, if the details are not synching with their original vision and the incumbent project leadership is not upping its game.
No strings attached
Secondly, for the Chinese, contracts are simply deeds of honour to enable the commencement of relationship building. The Chinese employ the contract as a management tool to allocate precious time to conduct full due diligence and obtain hitherto unavailable data. The fact that most African negotiators are trained in the Western deal-making mould and therefore have different conceptions of these things cannot be blamed on the Chinese.
Lastly, and more crucially, the same principle that many claim has pushed African leaders into the Chinese financial orbit is also what often defines the scope of project success for the Chinese. This is the principle of ‘no strings attached.’ In practice, what ‘no strings attached’ really means is that the technical viability and soundness of a project incorporated in a commitment is the burden of the host country or debtor and not the Chinese side.
