Spendthrift governments bent on squandering what they do not have are selling their people onto a modern-day slave market. PHOTO | FILE | NMG
A steady stream of reports has been coming out regarding what has been termed as unfair economic relations entered into between Chinese economic giants and a
number of African countries over the past few decades.Accounts abound of agreements signed by the Chinese and African countries in which huge mineral, land, forestry and other concessions in other areas of economic engagements that have been faulted as giving one-sided advantages to the Chinese and pushing many African countries into heavy indebtedness, even threatening these countries’ very sovereignty.
Of course, one way of looking at it is to say that fair exchange is no robbery, and that since these countries were not dragged kicking and scratching into these agreements, no one should complain about what the Chinese are doing with those who freely elect to enter into economic relations with Beijing.
It may not be easy to take positions on the situation that many African economists and others have been complaining against. Traditionally, the Chinese authorities have been regarded as being very close to the interests of the African continent, all the way back to the days when many African colonies were stirring to regain their independence, and having to deal with the obduracy of most western countries.
Starting in the 1960s, chairman Mao’s China was receptive to approaches by African liberation movements who had taken up arms to fight a recalcitrant colonialism in places like Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde while practically the whole of the western world stood in Portugal’s corner.
The heroic fighters of MPLA, Frelimo, PAIGC and others could get the support they needed in their hour of need from the Chinese government which gave almost uninterested support, both diplomatic and military, to the gallant sons and daughters of these countries, till Portuguese colonialism was defeated in the mid-1970s, and continued to stand by their African friends until the Pretoria regime was brought to its knees in 1994.
This liberation struggle was accompanied with some great economic initiatives, stellar among them being the iconic Tanzania Zambia Railway (Tazara), which was built with a generous Chinese package at a time when the countries of southern Africa were in the death grip of the Apartheid regime in Pretoria. Zambia, especially, had to be assisted to reduce its dependence on sea-routes accessible only via South Africa. Western countries and lenders would hear nothing of a plan to build the long rail from Dar to Kapiri, and Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda had to turn to the Chinese, who obliged.
At the same time as Tazara was being hailed, in our quarters, as the “Uhuru Railway” it was getting a rotten press in the West, with suggestions that the southern part of the continent was now going decisively “communist.”
I was a young man at that time, and remember the propaganda that was being spread, in Tanzania itself, about the danger posed by likely intermarriages (and metissage) between Tanzanians and Chinese! (One has to remember that around this time, the bogeyman of the “yellow peril” was still very much in vogue, and Washington was spinning all manner of yarns around it, especially since the bruising experiences of the Korean war).
African countries were grateful for this support, and responded by working tirelessly to rid the world of the diplomatic nonsense wherein the People’s Republic of China was kept out of the United Nations, which instead recognised Taiwan as its member. The triumphal entry of Beijing into the UN in 1971 was the crowning of those efforts which sealed the extremely warm relations between China and the African continent, spearheaded by people like Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda, to the chagrin of the United States and its allies.
But, as they say, a lot of water has gone under the bridge, and now, reports that the Chinese are leveraging their humongous enormous economic heft to hurt African economies are alarming in the extreme, especially as it would appear that the indebted economies are near bankrupt and may not be able to repay the huge debts they have incurred.
One could of course decide to talk glibly about Beijing forgetting about the long standing relations it has had with Africa. But, honestly, I incline to think that the African governments are to blame for their own folly, which has made them spend more than they can possibly earn and use the money they have thus borrowed on capricious expenditure that does not benefit their people but are largely vainglorious programmes too often entered into for the sake of satisfying their rulers’ insatiable egos.
Thus, the rest of the world will have a field day warning unwary Africans about the new colonialism we are herding ourselves into, and the Chinese will continue saying — as they are saying already — that all this is political propaganda by a resentful west. Here was never any love lost between these two spheres.
But the really concerned parties are the African countries themselves. Spendthrift governments bent on squandering what they do not have are selling their people onto a modern-day slave market and they will find no mercy from a resurgent China that has set its sights on the top rung in the world’s economic ladder, and nothing else can matter.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: jenerali@gmail.
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