Category: Loans
Economist: It Doesn’t Matter If Nigeria Looks to China or Europe For Infrastructure Loans, It Still Won’t Solve the Underlying Problem
Last week's acknowledgment by Nigeria's Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi that China will no longer finance the country's large-scale railway projects has prompted a lively debate over how Abuja should fund its future infrastructure development. Amaechi said he is now ...
Nigeria’s Transport Minister Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud: China’s No Longer Funding Large-Scale Railways in Africa
Nigerian Transportation Minister and likely presidential candidate, Rotimi Amaechi, publicly acknowledged what's been widely known: that China is no longer in the business of financing massive, multi-billion railway projects in Nigeria. “We are stuck with lots of our projects because we ...
Influential U.S. Group Calls on China and Other Creditors to Be More Transparent About Emerging Market Debt
An influential group of scholars and finance leaders in the U.S. appealed for a new "global consensus" on debt transparency in developing countries and described China's involvement as "critical." The Bretton Woods Committee said in a report ...
The Hidden Debt Problem Extends Far Beyond China
The global discussion of the growing debt crisis in some Global South countries has been frustratingly slanted around the assumption that Chinese lending is particularly opaque. This is not to say that Chinese lending isn’t opaque – it is. In fact, some Chinese loan contracts are so ...
Uganda Should Borrow Less, Says President
President Yoweri Museveni wants to stop borrowing and would rather finance his government through increased trade and domestic economic activity, according to comments he made this week in an interview with Reuters. "Uganda can do much better without borrowing in my ...
An Exchange Between British Lawmakers Highlights How Bad Information About China Makes Its Way Into the Foreign Policymaking Process
A virtual meeting of the House of Lords International Relations and Defense Committee in London on Wednesday revealed the extent to which faulty information about China's engagement in Africa has become embedded in the UK's foreign policy process. In a brief ...
Right Now, It’s the U.S. Fed, Not China That’s Making African Borrowers Very Nervous
While one U.S. foreign policy analyst after another sounds the alarm on the threats posed by Chinese debt in Africa and elsewhere, the reality is that finance policymakers across the continent are currently more anxious about what's going to happen in Washington, specifically at the ...
Africa Check Challenges a VOA News Report on the Share of Kenya’s External Debt Owed to China
The African fact-checking service Africa Check called out the U.S. government-run news channel VOA for mischaracterizing the share of Kenya's external debt to China. In an article published on January 6th about Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to ...
African Governments Need to Prepare For a New Era of Chinese Lending That Will be Smaller and More Targeted, Says Analyst
The recent pullback in Chinese lending for African infrastructure development makes sense, given debt sustainability problems in more than a third of the countries across the continent, explained Damilola Akinbami, the Lagos-based head of research at Financial Derivatives Company in an interview on the ...
It’s Difficult to Overstate Just How Much the “Debt Trap” Accusation Irks Chinese Officials
Wu Peng, China's top diplomat for sub-Saharan Africa, on Wednesday posted a tweet that featured a week-old video of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari defending his decision to borrow from China. Wu didn't include any other reference in ...
China’s African Debt Experiment
The Financial Times today published a deep dive into the issue of Chinese lending to African countries and what struck me was how it crystallizes some of the underlying issues that aren’t necessarily made clear in the debt debate. ...
Fact-Checking a Kenyan MP’s Assertions About the Risks of Borrowing From China
Kenya's former majority speaker and current MP from the northeastern city of Garissa, Aden Duale, is not a big fan of China...to say the least. He took to Twitter during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit last week to tell his 650,000 followers how Africa's ...