Category: Politics

Former South African ambassador and current President of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), Lin Songtian, was the keynote speaker at an online event this week organized by the Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined and the Ghanaian embassy. Ambassador Lin devoted the bulk ...

High-level representatives from the African Union (AU) Commission, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) as well as officials from China and various African countries met on Tuesday to discuss the "fight against the pandemic in Africa." ...

China's apparent unwillingness to engage Nigerian civil society in a discussion over the ongoing loan controversy is eroding what's left of Beijing's credibility in the media, politics and among the country's enormous young, online population that gets most of its news from social media. ...

Over the past couple of weeks, W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., has been writing thoughtful essays on Twitter where he reflects on Africa's current positioning wedged between China and the proverbial "west."

The current anti-Chinese sentiment in Nigeria is a fascinating sign of the times, but I'm a it baffled about what it signals. I don't know enough about Nigerian society to be able to unpack it in detail. However, it seems like a symptom that China's narrative of ...

Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe confirmed on Sunday that Kenya stopped importing PPE from China since they failed to pass the Kenya Bureau of Standards quality tests. “Regarding the issue of masks that was supposedly raised by Kenya Bureau ...

The presence of China's distant water fishing (DWF) fleet in so many areas around the world made it almost inevitable that this too would become a point of contention in the increasingly acrimonious stand-off between the United States and China. Earlier ...

Former Liberian Minister of Public Works and now a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, W. Gyude Moore, wrote a compelling 10-part Twitter thread on why African countries are strenuously avoiding taking sides in the rapidly escalating dispute between the ...

As leaders in Africa no doubt watch with some measure of disbelief how their wealthier peers in China, Europe, and the United States marshall trillion-dollar relief packages to fight the COVID-19 induced economic crisis, they've got to be wondering how it's possible that these rich countries still ...

The first thing to say about the ongoing controversy about Chinese loans purportedly compromising Nigerian sovereignty is that it's based on a misreading of standard language found in loan contracts. Rather than stating that, in the case of a default, China will have the right to seize ...

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made leadership changes in its African policy team. Dai Bing, who was the Director-General of the African Affairs Department (a role comparable to that of the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) is now in New York where he's ...

For much of the past week, Nigerian news outlets across the spectrum have published a series of alarming stories claiming that the country's sovereignty is now jeopardized by its various infrastructure loans, specifically on account of the standard sovereign immunity clauses in the loan agreements.