A Ravenous Dragon’s Unrelenting push into the ‘Dark’ Continent

With the spectacular Olympic Games held recently and the collapse of the WTO talks, due to its defiance of Western positions, China has projected itself into the world stage for a second time; since it acquired the status of a nuclear power. It influence on Africa has also been steadily growing. Sino-African trade has increased rapidly, rising to a towering $75 billion last year. Its economic might and tolerance of abuses by African polities has contributed to Beijing’s highly successful diplomatic move in Africa.

Initial efforts by the African leaders to develop and integrate Africa included the Lagos Plan of Action and the subsequent Final Act of Lagos and NEPAD - the most comprehensive programme yet adopted. Others are the outcomes of the Monrovia Symposium, Arusha, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa Declarations, African Common Market, Cairo Agenda for Action, Abuja Treaty, and Abuja Declaration… Yet, like many other efforts, these have not yielded the desired results.

Such a declaration notwithstanding, WTO came into force with new set agreements, negotiated, for the most part, without the effective African participation. The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have evolved a common understanding and strategy with regards to the movement and management of international financing between them within the framework of the Washington Consensus. This is true particularly with those related to trade liberalisation and FDI that have found their way into the WTO articles of association. The complexities involved and the pains that await African countries are reflected by the increasing numbers of disputes referred to WTO; that included allegations of contravention of the national treatment provision of GATT - Article III.

“Threats, deception and manipulation are the underhand negotiating tactics used by rich countries such as in the current round of global trade talks”, warns ActionAid in a new report, 'The Doha Deception Round: How the US and EU cheated developing
countries'.  “Power politics, exclusive meetings, diplomatic arm-twisting and 'take-it-or-leave-it' ultimatums would have lead to a final trade deal that could have a devastating impact on millions of people worldwide. Hardball tactics are undermining the very goal of the current trade talks which is supposed to have the interests of poverty and development”.

Hence, not surprisingly,  China has become one of the voices for the poor nations and Africa's most audacious financier, “providing almost $12 billion in aid and soft loan, and buying over a tenth of SSA's exports (over $25 billion) and the China ExIm bank has facilitated loans to the tune $10 billion to African governments, albeit, on more commercial terms. While well managed economies have earned IMF’s blessing to take-on more debt even on commercial terms, badly managed economies have moved on to China, which is prepared to ignore such conditionalities. China bestowed $800m to Sudan in 2005 and a similar amount last year—as Sudan queued up to have its multilateral debts written off” (The Economist, May 17th 2007). When African nations went into internal political and military crises, China saw this as an opportunity to expand its influence. New aid grants soon rolled in, followed by bank credits for Chinese companies, which have today become a dominant force, building highways and bridges, power stations, mobile-phone networks, and exploring for oil”…(The Wall Street Journal, March 30th, 2005). In nations such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Angola, and DRC, China's tolerance for sleaze and political risk has met with warm reception; even as we witness that the plundering of public wealth directly hampers development and undermines trust in democracy and its institutions.

Indeed, 2006 was billed as "The Year of Africa" in China that culminated with the China-Africa summit focussed on securing Africa’s natural resources for its rapidly growing economy, market expansion for its cheap goods and gaining international political legitimacy with almost all 53 African countries supporting Chinese positions on literally all issues in the UN General Assembly.

In an age when globalisation has been heralded to have ushered in a time of unprecedented global wealth and extraordinary opportunities for human kind; largely stemming from the triumph of the market over the ideologically-loaded command economies; an important dimension that features prominently in the Africa discourse is the relative contribution and weight of competent leadership for developing negotiating instruments for partaking in it. After all trade-not-aid has become the slogan of African leaders. Beijing has come up with the answers and has moved in rapidly with the necessary resources for business and infrastructure development that have so far been the subject of lengthy negotiations, many times at the cost of project redundancy, and which hitherto marked African institutions relations with global funders. Beginning with the construction of the Tanzam rail link that opened up vast markets for Zambia’s produce and Tanzania’s services, China has indeed speeded up to fill a crucial gap.

Nonetheless, there is a mounting backlash from civil society and international watchdog agencies to some of such business practices. For instance, China is trying to balance its non-interference policy in Sudan and ensuring the stability of its investments. As long as its aid and loan packages can help African governments to get round some of the pressure from the Breton Woods institutions, Beijing can ensure its African leverage to grow rapidly and on its own terms.

With Chinese dominance of the African economic and political landscape, powerful forces and trends of chaos and order mark this moment of China-driven globalism; dissolving old boundaries in a network of flows of trade. Its style of ‘market liberalisation’ is creating one vast global marketplace in Africa. Considering the drive, characteristics and dynamics of the Chinese economic assault, the fundamental question facing African nations is not whether they have options for participating in a process of balanced benefits in the spirit of true globalism; it is indeed how they wish to integrate into the process as partners and actors and at which speed. Beyond GDP growth, performance anatomy is perhaps the most subtle trait of all economies - the interactions between leadership and strategy, innovation and technology, and human quality development and meritocracy that are critical to defining a high-performance market–driven development; that is the solitary course known to mankind to lift nations out of penury.