Just before the Covid-19 crisis struck Africa, Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, concluded a three-nation tour of the continent in Ethiopia. There, in remarks echoing former national security adviser John Bolton’s accusation that Beijing was using Africa to “pursue global dominance”, he told his hosts to be “wary of authoritarian regimes and their empty promises”. He sought to portray China as wanting to wrap the continent in a skein of debt, seize its assets, extract its riches and smooth its own way with bribes. The audience must have smiled at the thought that what was being described was hardly new — and present long before China emerged on the scene.
Under Donald Trump, the US has looked at Africa almost exclusively as the scene of a strategic and ideological battle with China. This is both offensive and self-defeating. The continent of 1.2bn people is through with being seen as a battleground for anybody. After centuries in which western powers have extracted slaves and raw materials from Africa and fought proxy wars on its soil, above all Africans seek agency. The last thing they want from the one-time beacon of democracy is a policy defined in terms of a new cold war.
Yet that is what they have got. Washington seeks to counter what it likes to portray as China’s pernicious influence on African institutions. It threatened to withdraw funding from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention — which has performed wonders during the pandemic — because Beijing had offered to pay for a new building. Washington has also, incredibly, chosen the middle of a global health crisis to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization, a body run by an African, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The former Ethiopian health minister complains that US-led criticism — centred on his supposed complicity in China’s initial cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak — has been tinged with racism.
Most Africans remain well-disposed to the US, a country that still exerts enormous cultural and ideological pull. A survey by Afrobarometer found that 30 per cent of people saw the US as the best model of development in Africa, against 24 per cent for China and lower for former colonial powers. Numerous polls showing popular support for the concept — if not necessarily the practice — of multi-party democracy demonstrate the continued pull of American ideals.
One might have thought that this pandemic would blunt any enthusiasm for China. After all, a virus that originated in Wuhan, even if it was spread to Africa mostly by Europeans, has laid economies to waste from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The ensuing recession has helped expose the huge financial obligations to Beijing, which now holds about a fifth of all African debt. Ben Igbakpa, a member of Nigeria’s national assembly, has called for an investigation into Chinese loans, which he says were concluded in secrecy and carry “neo-colonial proclivities”.
Yet, if anything, China has used the pandemic to enhance its reputation. While Americans (and Europeans) have been accused of hoarding diagnostic tests and personal protective equipment, massive donations from Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba, have made their way to all 54 countries on the continent. The US has been cagey about waiving intellectual property on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. By contrast, Xi Jinping, China’s president, told the WHO’s general assembly that any vaccine developed in China would automatically be made available in Africa. While he was at it, he pledged $2bn to help fight the virus in developing countries.
Talk is cheap. The US continues to make a far larger contribution to African health than China through government and through foundations such as that run by Bill and Melinda Gates. Yet, somehow, China has managed to look as though it is doing more.
Nor, says Lidet Tadesse Shiferaw, an Ethiopian writer, has US democracy exactly covered itself in glory. The haphazard response to coronavirus by the US and the UK has knocked faith in western democratic institutions. Writing in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist party mouthpiece, Kenyan economist Mark Kapchanga goes one further, arguing that China’s development state offers a better path for Africa than western democracy.
This is not true, yet you do not need to look far for evidence that China is gaining ground. Its trade with Africa is more than four times that of the US. More Africans study in China than in the US. And when it comes to wiring up the continent, China’s Huawei has no serious competition. Whatever the US is doing in Africa, it is not doing enough.
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