Opinion: China, Africa and the World After COVID-19, By Kingsley Moghalu
The Coronavirus crisis has created a welcome opportunity for us to reassess the relationship between China and Africa on several levels – trade, supply chains, excessive borrowing and predatory lending, racism towards Africans.
How did we get here? My purpose here is to set out the back story on Africa and China, and perhaps we can use it as a guide to the future. The motto of my alma mata the London School of Economics is “rerum cognoscere causas” . This is vital for sustainable progress. The China-Africa relationship offered an opportunity to both parties to create an axis of influence that, unlike Africa’s history with the west as nothing more than exploited client states, Africa’s strategic relationship was also served by this relationship.
Third, with China’s capitalist economic transformation started in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, it’s influence in Africa is now driven more by the need for raw materials and energy to support its economy than was the case in the socialist past when it was more about “solidarity”. The China-Africa relationship must be shifted away from a focus on extractive industries. Trade relations, marked by a hideous imbalance, should be repositioned. Africa’s development salvation doesn’t lie abroad; it can only come from within. China won’t and can’t “develop Africa”, and nor can the West. The sun may rise in the east but even China knows it hasn’t set in the west. Africa should use its relationship with China to seek strategic changes in that with the west.
China’s vastly expanded foray into Africa over the past two decades is part of a worldview of global expansion and economic dominance. The question for Africa is: what is the continent’s worldview approach to China? For all of Africa’s strategic importance to China, Africa still remains a small part of China’s total world trade, roughly in the region of 3%.
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