Forum/Discussions

History is a good mirror and gave us a good lesson that unbalanced marriage will end up with misery.  China’s rapid growth has transformed its relationship with Africa. Industrialization has boosted China’s import demand for oil and minerals (e.g. iron ore, bauxite, nickel, copper), which Africa can satisfy. China is now Africa’s third largest trading partner and its government’s global strategy encouraged Chinese companies to become multinationals. The China-Africa relationship could be described as “commodities-for-infrastructure”, although a shift to broader cooperation on development

It’s now evident that China’s relationship with Africa is contributing to its overall development and emphasizes. Central to this China-Africa Forum is cooperation. (FOCAC). The primarily, China’s aim is likely to remain engaged with Africa in the medium term, maximize it benefits, African countries need to transform this engagement into development opportunities. 

China and African countries has more to gain from this cooperation, hence, fostering mutual support for development remains important. In the past, China-Africa consultations focused on fostering mutually beneficial trade and investment. Recently, this relationship has expanded to address contemporary development challenges such as climate change, food insecurity and energy insecurity.

Our concern

In this regards, the major challenges include but not limited to quality assurance that Chinese imports meets quality and safety standards, China’s growing monopolies both in the medium to long is a concern to be address and avoid Africa’s best to embark on collusive and predatory business practices, for instant: the monopoly in the extraction of mineral resource sector. This could be enterprises are state the particularly because a considerable majority of Chinese enterprises are state own entities closely link to either the central or provincial government. The daunting challenge is that cheap Chinese imports are already flooding African’s market, this has equally eroded industries in many African countries leading to job losses and government lost in tax collections hence retard development and industrialization process.

What is visibly common between China and Africa is that none has a good record of transparency nor do any have a history of making information available for public consumption. Corruption remains a common denominator to both parties. However, critics of African governments were surprised to learn that some African governments have taken a tough stand against Chinese companies and businessmen who were found not obeying local laws nevertheless the overall practice still need proper attention.

Our recommendations

First, Africa speaks encourage both parties to build a stronger social base for Sino-African relations. E.g. non-governmental capability, current people-to-people exchanges have more negative than positive contributions. China should strengthen NGOs and civil society groups to nurture these relations, create better platforms for public dialogues and diversify diplomatic skills and stakeholders.

Second, China should make concrete contributions to African peace and security. On the other hand, initiating peace and security cooperation poses a risk of violating China’s principle of non-interference. Thus, China needs a strategic plan for such an initiative, with multilateral institutions as the main platform.

In conclusion, it must be acknowledged that the phenomenon of China in the global arena is quite significant. It presents opportunities and challenges which African policy makers and thinkers must take very seriously and respond to it very intensively. 

Yours in Pan Africanism 

Seife Tadelle Kidane