If it wasn’t a serious matter, you’d think Africa is a big, black-current rum cake for the seasonal taking and China has too much a big slice, so it’s time now for America to get its own big share – and before Christmas.
Take the White House’s invitation to African Leaders to Washington earlier this week, where Washington said it wanted to hear from them what they wanted for the continent, as the Biden administration feels China, with over US $254 billion in trade in 2021 alone, is too active and to deeply involved on the continent.
Most continental leaders sent foreign ministers and only Egypt got a royal White House welcome with bugles and fanfare, many recalling President Obama did the same in 2014 and virtually nothing came out of it.
President Biden, as Obama’s Vice President, was very-much aware of how the US military presence in Africa expanded between 2008 and 2016, from eight bases of different types to 88, in eight years, but with no similar expansion in American trade, aid or investments in or on the continent.
Unlike how Biden invited them to Washington without an agenda, China invites African leaders to Beijing every three years to discuss Trade, Aid and Investment and over the past few decades China has helped many African nations build their infrastructure and extract their wealth with investments in everything from railways and ports to mines and minerals.
Through negotiated bilateral agreements, Chinese and African governments and businesses make win-win deals that bring visible benefits and fruitful returns.
On the other hand, President Biden listened to his continental invitees at the White House and in the end promised what he framed like US $50 billion in Reparations to Africa for Slavery but was everything but that.
Instead, it ($50 billion) was a total amount to be spent for purposes decided by Washington, in areas the US will decide.
Interestingly and remarkably, the amount set aside for the entire continent of 55 nations is just as much as was recently given to Ukraine — in one go — by its UK, US, European and other backers.
The 2022 US-Africa Leaders Summit, eight years after the first, also comes at a time when more and more African leaders and diplomats are taking umbrage to being told about their countries’ ties with China.
The US, UK and other G-7 nations (the richest in the world) earlier this year launched what they called their own version of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also claiming it will help provide an alternative for developing countries, but which, when applied in traditional Western business sense, will result in receiving nations possibly being more indebted than imagined.
There’s also the claim by some that instead of inviting African leaders to Washing ton or Beijing, US and Chinese leaders should go to the African Union (AU) in Ethiopia – whose headquarters in Addis Ababa was also built by China.
Just recently, an African diplomat made the point that an American State Department official visited his country recently, landed on a runway built by China, traveled a highway built by China and attended a conference at a venue built by China “and had the gall to tell us not to do business with China.”
Washington’s approach to Africa is still today one of seeing the continent as a destination for wealth extraction instead of healthy investment; and the decision to decide how, where and when its money will be spent – and how much.
Interestingly, by making the $50 billion sound like reparations for Slavery, the Biden administration seems to also be saying that it’s adopted guilt for the sins of the British who introduced slavery to The Americas.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants joined the fight for US independence that came in 1776, but not one received the “40 acres (of land) and a mule” promised after they would have been freed.
Instead, the new US state, at birth, continued slavery even after Emancipation, with African-Americans subjected to racism of the worst sorts throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries – and still very much alive today as seen in the events leading to and since the George Floyd murder by racist police officers in 2020.
China’s ties with Africa today are the culmination of a long and testing period of courtship that dates back to the Deng Xiaoping era four decades ago and continued through succeeding administrations in Beijing, particularly sharpened in the last decade under Xi Jinping’s leadership.
It’s an insult to the continent for any other power to admit that the AU has the largest voting bloc at the United Nations (UN) and then think it can influence how African nations vote by just offering them selected and selective help and asking them to choose between China and the US.
African leaders are not all at one in their international political outlook, but the one thing they each have in common is being a leader of an independent and sovereign nation – and this is what must be respected by all other nations of the world, including the seven richest (in the G-7).
African nations’ debts to China are nowhere on par with their experiences with long-term loans from the likes of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the latter being the first real debt traps African nations faced after independence.
On the other hand, Africa can show what its debts to China brought, whether through bilateral negotiations or through the BRI’s Silk Roads to Africa.
But most of all, China’s support for Africa is not conditional, as indicated at the recent G-20 meeting in Indonesia, where President Xi openly supported and called for the AU to be admitted as a member – which President Biden only supported while meeting with African leaders earlier this week.
Indeed, US and China support for Africa and the AU can be characterized as chalk and cheese, respectively!