Deal or No Deal?

It’s no secret China’s immense involvement in Africa. It unsurprisingly comes up during any hot debate on Africa’s development and the way forward for Africa. Curiously though, the conversation is mostly taken from one particular angle i.e ‘Is China’s involvement in Africa good or bad?

If you are novel to the arguments from both sides on this debate the first question that would probably pop up, and rightly so, is why China? I mean every country is more or less present in Africa so why the particular interest in China? Vice versa, China is everywhere as well so why the particular interest in their involvement in Africa? Well, a simple answer to this question in my opinion is because both Africa and China are ‘hot’ topics now and their interaction is bound to be ‘hotter’ :). Honestly, their involvement is inevitable. Africa needs what China has to offer; monetary resources, and China needs what Africa has to offer; natural resources. A simple case of Supply meets Demand. So why all this fuss then?

To summarize…

The argument against China ranges from labour abuse to poor-quality 'made-in-china' infrastructure. Numerous international newspapers report china’s ‘inappropriate’ work ethics. Others are not very pleased with the flooding of their local markets by cheaper goods from China. But the biggest headline has been ‘China is only a new form of colonialism. They are only using us for our raw materials’. African leaders counter by saying “ well no one else is prepared to give us this amount of money we need for this duration of time with no stringent conditionalities”.  The deal doesn’t get sweeter than China.

The way I see it…

Well both sides most certainly have valid arguments but in my opinion Africa needs to move away from trying to figure out whether China is good or bad. Whether we accept it or not, China has come to stay. Their economic hegemony is exploding and I personally wouldn’t want to be caught on the wrong side of that explosion. What Africa and her leaders need to start figuring out, if they havent already, is

WHAT DO WE WANT FOR AFRICA? And how can we get China to give us exactly what we want?

For instance, does Africa give more priority to protecting its labour force than just monetary gains? If so then Africa needs to allocate more resources to outlining and enforcing the appropriate labour laws needed to safeguard its people. And simply tell anyone who wishes to do business that “Hey, my people are my priority, you mess with them, this deal is off” and actually enforce this. If on the other hand, our priority is to sell off as much of our natural resources as we can possible do for any good price without stressing the importance of labour force protection then we need to shut up and stop blaming China. Or any other country for that matter. We need to go back and draw a simple scale of preference for investor participation.

I know the arguments I’m putting across may be oversimplified, as a country would definitely have conflicting priorities coupled with a complicated political economy. But the point im trying to make here is that in my opinion if we as a continent allow colonialism/neo-colonialism to prevail a second time around, then we should be prepared to take up part of the blame and not point fingers at others. 

Once Bitten, Twice Shy.