West Can’t Ignore China’s Evolving Africa Plan: Clara F. Marques

To be clear, Africa is overindebted. The headache existed prior to Covid-19, but the pandemic made it worse by prompting governments to take on more debt, while eroding most countries’ ability to service it as revenues crashed and Covid-19 undid years of progress. Zambia last year became Africa’s first coronavirus-era sovereign default. 

China is a significant part of this story, with financiers making commitments worth $153 billion to African governments and state-owned enterprises between 2000 and 2019 according to the China Africa Research Initiative, often with little transparency. That has left ample room for corruption, which has stoked public concern and hampered wider loan restructuring efforts. But China did not engineer the problem of African debt writ large; its credit is concentrated in a handful of nations. While Beijing plays a key role in cases like Zambia, there are many others where non-Chinese private creditors do instead. There’s no evidence that bungled outcomes were the result of concerted policy. Chinese takeovers and attendant graft, as with mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were not the result of ambushes.

Even “data traps” — as the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency described the threat to a country’s sovereignty when it surrenders too much of its societal data — suggest singular purpose and effectiveness when sometimes neither is present. Such formulations ignore that China is not alone in providing information and telecommunication technology to Africa.

The biggest problem with all of these preconceptions, though, is that they obscure Beijing’s evolving strategy — on display at last week’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Senegal, a once-in-three-years gathering that sets the tone for engagement with the continent. It was lower key than some past iterations, and China trimmed its high-level financial commitment. That’s less a reaction to criticism than a sign of more straightened times, of changing policies back home and a desire to promote private sector deals instead of state splurges. Local banks will play a bigger role.

The headline from President Xi Jinping’s virtual address, though, was a pledge to provide a billion vaccines to the continent, including 600 million donations and the rest to be supplied through joint local production. Considering that Beijing has so far delivered under 110 million vaccines to Africa of which only a fraction were gifts, that’s a leap — but one that puts wealthy nations to shame.

No less significantly, Xi tackled another major regional concern, the asymmetric trade relationship with China and demands forimproved market access. China committed to increasing imports of African goods and to opening “green lanes” for agricultural produce — a promising start, especially if combined with planned connectivity projects and the newly minted African Continental Free Trade Area.

There were also poverty reduction initiatives and rural development plans that seek to replicate, as Lauren Johnston, visiting senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, pointed out to me, China’s own path to middle income — with demonstration centers and ventures that aim to boost trade and enrich new consumers. 

These initiatives may not amount to a revolution — even with a sprinkling of green finance, security, digital innovation, skills — but the fanfare signals China’s commitment in Africa remains constant, significant and visible, even at a time when China is in other respects closing itself off. And optics matter. 

The West is not absent, Folashade Soule of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford told me, but its contributions have been less in tune with demand in a continent where the African Development Bank in 2018 put the infrastructure financing gap at $68 billion to $108 billion a year. “China’s cooperation has been much more tangible and aligned on African priorities like infrastructure funding, although criticism can be made on the modalities,” Soule said.

China’s understanding of the market has helped its companies to tailor products for Africa, like the popular mobile phones sold by Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co, which are cheaper, allow users to have multiple SIM cards (common due to patchy coverage) and even have cameras designed for darker skin tones. Its brands accounted for nearly half of Africa’s smartphone market in the three months to June, and over three-quarters of more basic feature phones.

There are some hints of change in the West’s approach, most clearly in the United States, which was mostly detached under a previous administration that described the region in less than flattering tones. President Joe Biden’s government is now reworking its Africa strategy ahead of a leaders’ summit next year — the last was in 2014. Although Washington will not follow Beijing’s approach, comments by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Nigeria last month suggest at least increased attention to local demands, including on the ability to balance multiple partners rather than choose sides.

For African countries, the next step is to leverage further their strengths with China and others. There is improved coordination around issues like market access, as Oxford’s Soule points out, with signs of countries like Senegal using rivalry between foreign powers to their advantage. There’s room for more, pushing for better terms, working in regional groups to promote projects to improve connections and, crucially, carving out a role in the green economy for a continent that wants to do more than provide raw materials for climate-friendly tech. It’s high time.