Since being elected in November 2017, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, has visited Africa three times. Last week, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, followed suit. She visited South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
As if by design, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after hosting leaders from Niger and Angola in Berlin, visited Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria last week, accompanied by nearly a dozen German CEOs. Her mission: strengthening Africa’s economic development.
It is, however, fairly well-known that Germany exports more goods to Africa than it imports. Ask Senegal, which in 2017 imported around €117 million worth of goods from Germany and exported only €17 million worth of goods. It’s not been a tale completely Western, though: since June, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, president of Turkey, and Xi Jinping, president of China, have all visited Africa.
The visits, the controversies
The visits by Western leaders have naturally been interpreted differently. For instance, while recognising that on her tour of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, Theresa May finally made a positive case for Brexit, UK magazine, The Spectator, averred that she could have done more by listing how Brexit would be a better trading partner. The magazine accused the EU of protectionist policies that did so much to worsen poverty in Africa by placing tariffs on basic farm produce and keeping much African-produced food out of Europe through quotas and punitive tariffs. It said that climate change-related aid projects are often designed to keep Africans in a state of noble poverty, leading lives of environmental purity, so as to allow European countries to carry on polluting for a little longer. It cited the UK aid project, Green Africa Power, which spent £9.4 million trying to bring solar and hydro power to nine million Africans, yet failed to provide a single gigawatt of electricity in five years of operation.
Conversely, it said, China invests in Africa for the mutual benefit of both sides, although this last point may be debatable. “Chinese investment in Africa has nearly trebled since 2010, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, from £13 billion to £35 billion. Chinese money is going on projects which African countries have themselves chosen as priorities, such as the Mombasa-to-Nairobi railway and other infrastructure, projects which genuinely create wealth rather than offering Africans a slightly better class of poverty. African countries are fed up with one-sided discussions which have led to an increase in European exports to Africa but decreasing African exports to Europe.” Now that African countries have themselves instigated an African Continental Free Trade Area which seeks to create a free market for 1.7 billion people by 2030, the UK “should be thinking: can we join it, or at least get close to it in a way that the EU has not?,” wrote The Spectator.
To sceptics, though, Africa does not offer much promise. Advocates of this school of thought say that the 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a combined output of $1.4tn, less than half the size of France’s economy, and that the natural market for the UK is the European Union (EU) where consumers have far more disposable income. Indeed, in July, when President Emmanuel Macron visited Nigeria, he told Nigerians that France’s interest in Africa was not exploitative but anchored on mutual benefits. When he visited Senegal in February, he pledged €200 million for the Global Partnership for Education, which helps fund schoolchildren in developing countries. The French Development Bank is committed to creating a €65 million fund to promote digital startups in Africa.
Are we witnessing a ‘new scramble for Africa’? It depends on how Africa engages the Western interest, says Wale Are-Olaitan, a professor of political science and former vice chancellor. He told Sunday Tribune: “On the surface of it, the move by the West shows Africa’s increased relevance, at least at the level of perception. Africa can no longer be referred to as an ignored continent. In terms of population, the continent has crossed the one billion mark and that presents a huge market for these industrialised countries. Two, some of the countries with the highest growth rate are in Africa and everybody wants a piece of the action: China with the road and belt programme by which it is bringing a lot of money into Africa. The Western world has realised that China has taken over the space it yielded and these moves or visits may be an attempt to reestablish themselves on the African space.”
On the question of the benefits that the African people can expect to enjoy from the move, Olaitan averred that there is not much on the horizon. Pointing out that Britain’s promise of £70 million to create 100,000 jobs in Nigeria, for instance, is mere tokenism, he said that it was up to African countries themselves to leverage on the opportunities provided by the Western interest. In his words: “The point still remains that nobody is coming to develop your country/continent for you. The concern of the west has to be interpreted by the African countries themselves. Unfortunately, we don’t even have a leadership that is concerned with the people’s interest. If the West comes, they would rather exploit people because that is what African leaders themselves do to their own people. They’re coming here in their own national interest and if you don’t meet them with your own national interest, that’s your own problem. We are supposed to profit from it if we have the right leadership. But we’re not even developing our own society: we asked China to help us develop our rail when China was looking up to Germany to develop its own rail.”
Olaitan’s views are shared by Ahmed Adam, a Research Associate at SOAS’ School of Law, University of London. In an essay published by Aljazeera, Adam noted that superpowers like the US, China and Russia, key European countries, and even Japan, India and Brazil and some energy-rich Gulf countries seeking to expand their economies beyond oil and gas sectors, are active in Africa. Sadly, though, “African leaders seem to lack the necessary political will to counter these efforts and protect the continent’s vital interests.”
“Russia is another key player in Africa. Earlier this month, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went on an extensive Africa tour during which he visited Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. All the other countries he visited were Southern African countries that have huge natural resources like oil, uranium, copper, gold and cobalt. This shows that Russia’s main priority in Africa is not reviving its Soviet-era prestige and influence, but extraction of natural resources. But Russia is also investing in security and military projects in Africa.” As if to buttress Adam’s point, a top Eritrean delegation comprising Foreign Affairs Minister, Osman Saleh and presidential adviser, Yemane Ghebreab, is currently in Russia in pursuit of greater economic cooperation.
Adam added that as the world’s second-largest economy, China has become Africa’s most important and influential development and trade partner over the past two decades. “In 2000, the China-Africa trade volume was just $10 billion. By 2014, the value of contracts that were undertaken by Chinese companies in Africa reached $75 billion. In 2015, China pledged to invest a further $60 billion in Africa to cover major collaborative projects.” But China has been accused China of “locking down strategic natural resources, locking up emerging markets, and pursuing a “new form of colonialism” and “massive resource grab” in Africa. Furthermore, Chinese programmes have an adverse impact on the environment. Adam recommends that “the AU should develop a coherent, unified and comprehensive strategy to deal with the three superpowers’ competition over its natural resources, and implement robust institutional reforms and start acting as the decisive power on the continent, while African states should work towards ending their financial dependency on the West and other international players.”
Of nations and national interests
To Ebenezer Obadare, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, the Western interest in the African economy is only natural, and it is up to African leaders to make the most of the opportunities offered by any partnerships. He told Sunday Tribune that there is no doubt that the West has been eager to roll back Chinese influence in Africa ever since the turn of the century when the Chinese, eager to bolster their domestic economy and international diplomatic standing, started courting African countries. He, however, pointed out that the question whether the recent visits by Britain’s Theresa May and German’s Angela Merkel have anything to do with that is a different question entirely.
He added: “For the moment, it would appear as if Russia is not eager to join the fray, which stands to reason since, under the iron grip of Vladimir Putin, it seems that its primary diplomatic and strategic aim is to project and consolidate its power in its immediate vicinity, hence its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. In Africa, and unlike in the immediate post-Independence era when it was one of the major protagonists in the Cold War, Russia today stands a distant third behind China and the West in terms of its influence in Africa.
“There is an ongoing race by China and the West to acquire influence and natural resources in Africa. That is totally legitimate, it’s what nations do—struggle to enhance their political and economic interests. Whether that legitimate struggle becomes a scramble is up to African leaders.”
According to Obadare, the idea of a scramble invokes the situation in the latter decades of the 19th century when, wielding enormous military power, Western countries basically carved up Africa among themselves. He added, however, that unlike then, Africa now has sovereign countries with the power to determine who they do business with and on what terms.
“If African countries sign bad deals with China and the West, neither China nor the West can be held responsible for that. When China and the West send out people to negotiate deals, they send their most qualified experts. African countries need to do the same. If they don’t, they only have themselves to blame. If, at the end of the day, ordinary citizens in Africa are left holding the short end of the stick, it is African leaders, not outsiders, who should be held responsible,” he declared.
Indeed, if the US president Donald Trump alleged unflattering comments about Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari provides anything like a metaphor of the continent’s current leadership, the question whether or not there’s a new scramble for Africa will need to be asked again and again. Many would certainly agree that the phenomenon of Kenyan citizens expressing delight at President Uhuru Kenyatta’s phonetic capabilities (as against Buhari’s) rather than hard negotiating skills during his recent White House visit is not exactly cheering.
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