White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Chopstick Invasion of Africa Continues Apace

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Even the celebrated 19th-century scramble for Africa seems to pale compared to the huge and growing Chinese presence, which is roiling the continent.

For a decade, China has been buying its way into Africa to secure the fuel and raw materials it believes it will need for its economic expansion.

These Chinese moves in Africa are breathtaking in their scope. Whereas the European grab for Africa and its treasures in the l9th century was haphazard, and fed by rivalry in Europe as much as interests in Africa, the Chinese neo-imperialism has a thoroughness and a planning that no European power — not even Britain — ever aspired to.

China is reported to be active in 48 countries out of the roughly 53 real state entities on the continent, or on its offshore islands. The Chinese formula is simple: Buy your way in with soft loans and generous arms deals but, above all, a preparedness to overlook the excesses of dictators. No wonder Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe lavishes praise on his new best friends.

The same is true in many other African countries. All that is needed for Beijing’s embrace is a supply of raw materials — and especially oil.

From Cape Town to Cairo, China is on the march. From South Africa it buys iron ore, among other minerals; from Zambia, copper; and from Zimbabwe chrome, gold and iron ore.

In Zambia, the Chinese have promised $3.2 billion to revive the copper industry — an interesting development because Western mining companies pulled out, unable to deal with the wholesale and destructive corruption.

At a meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt earlier this month, the Chinese pledged $10 billion in aid to Africa. Quietly, they also forgave a tranche of maturing loans.

But government-to-government loans are the least of the Chinese investment in Africa. Most of the investments, such as that in Zambia, are made by Chinese corporations — all state-sanctioned and some state-owned. It is a concerted effort.

While oil producers like Angola, Chad, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan are prime targets of the Chinese investment, the rapacious Chinese economic imperialism also extends to lumber and agriculture.

The ruling elites of Africa are ecstatic. The Chinese presence is, for them, heaven-sent. Polling, albeit rudimentary, reveals about 80-percent approval of China’s African role by Africa’s elites.

At the street level, these findings are reversed. The Chinese are roundly resented. They have no experience in the world outside of China; no curiosity about these strange African lands and their people; and a morbid indifference to Africa’s long-term future. Most Chinese workers, as opposed to executives, brought to Africa are poorly educated and ill-equipped to live in different cultures.

A study by Loro Horta, a visiting fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, found deep unhappiness in a study conducted in many African countries.

First and foremost, Horta found, China does not employ local labor, preferring to import Chinese workers and to house them in “Chinatowns.”

Second, the indifference of Chinese enterprises to environmental damage is of concern.

And third, China is accused of dumping inferior goods and medicines on the African markets. Africa’s fragile but important textile industries are being killed off by a flood of cheap Chinese manufactures.

More, Chinese merchants are flooding in and displacing local traders.

Horta quotes a school teacher in Mozambique, “They (the government) say China is a great power, just like America. But what kind of great power sends thousands of people to a poor country like ours to sell cakes on the street, and take the jobs of our own street-sellers, who are already so poor?”

Then there is the Chinese language push. The Chinese government has set up schools in many places to teach Chinese to reluctant people who would prefer to improve their English and French skills, legacies of the last scramble for Africa.

But while China buys off Africa’s elites, and provides them with weapons to suppress their own people, the rape of Africa will continue. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.