In the increasingly acrimonious competition between the U.S. and China over technology standards, it’s often assumed that smaller countries in places like Africa lack the necessary agency to determine their digital destinies.
In some instances, that is, in fact, true, given that technology is developing much faster than most governments, particularly those with weak state capacity, can regulate. But it’s also starting to change as a new generation of young thought leaders is laying out a bold vision for how African countries can more effectively assert digital sovereignty.
Folashadé Soulé, a senior researcher at the Global Economic Governance program at Oxford University and a leading Africa-China scholar, led a pioneering research project that explored Africa’s digital partnerships in the context of the burgeoning U.S.-China rivalry. She joins Eric & Cobus from Accra to discuss the project’s key findings.
Show Notes:
- Oxford University Global Economic Governance Programme: Negotiating Africa’s digital partnerships: interview series
- Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships: Complex negotiations require a more strategic approach by Eliud Owalo
- Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships: The pursuit of digital sovereignty and local data ownership has implications for local capacity development by Motolani Peltola
About Folashadé Soulé:
Folashadé Soulé is a Senior Research Associate at the Global Economic Governance program at the Blavatnik School of Government, where she is the co-principal investigator of the ‘Negotiating Africa’s digital partnerships’ policy research project. Her research areas focus on Africa-China relations, the study of agency in Africa’s international relations, and the politics of South-South cooperation. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and a former Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow. Her research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, among which African Affairs, Global Governance, and Foro Internacional. Folashadé also teaches as a guest lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Oxford (Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies) and has been an adjunct lecturer at the University of Lille and at Sciences Po Paris where she taught courses on Africa and Global Politics, the Politics of Globalization and International Political Economy.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa Podcast. I’m Eric Olander, and, as always, I’m joined by China Global South’s Managing Editor, Cobus van Staden, in Johannesburg, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, it’s the end of the Chinese New Year holiday out here in Asia. People are coming out of their slumbers of eating too much, watching too much television, being fed up with their families, and getting back to normal life. All the stores out here in Vietnam or starting to open again. I’m, for one, I’m ready to get on with the Year of the Dragon. But I did want to wish everybody who’s listening to this a very prosperous Year of the Dragon and hope that everything in the Chinese Lunar New Year is going well and living up to all of the hype and expectations.
So let’s today, Cobus, talk about great power politics. And it’s very different when we talk about what’s happened in the Biden administration with respect to Africa and what we saw in the Trump administration because remember back during the Trump administration, guys like Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, would go to Africa and just scream at the top of his lungs — “China’s bad, China’s bad, China’s bad” — And one of the problems with the Trump folks is that they had no substance or any policies behind the China’s bad rhetoric. That is really the fundamental difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration because what we’ve seen just over the past few weeks, and certainly over the past year, is a lot of momentum in Africa to put some huff behind the U.S. policy.
Let me just bring you up-to-date Cobus, and I’d like to get your take on some of these things on just a few announcements that have happened in the past couple of weeks, which really show a very different style of the approach of the United States in their competition with China in Africa. And I’d like to get your take on this. So the Development Finance Corporation — that’s this government agency that evolved in part to confront China in the global south — they just approved a $250 million loan that will be used to help refurbish the Lobito Corridor. We’ve been talking a lot about the Lobito Corridor on our site in our newsletter, and certainly in our video and podcasts. And it looks like they’re starting to write some checks now.
And again, that’s something that’s very interesting. They also put a $10 million loan to Seba Foods, Zambia. This is the first U.S. food and agriculture investment that’s along the corridor. So the corridor itself is not just a railway, but they’re also going to build green hydrogen flows. They’re also going to build telecommunications. And they want businesses to set up along the corridor, and there’s $10 million there for that. Meantime, the Chinese are also making moves of their own. China’s ambassador to Zambia, Du Xiaohui, he presented a billion dollar proposal to revamp the TAZARA Railway that connects Zambia to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
That was put forward by a Chinese contractor who spent the past two months or so doing a feasibility survey. Now, we don’t know any details on this. We don’t think that this is going to be a billion dollars in the form of loans, given the difficulties that Zambia is having right now in restructuring its current debt. So, this will probably be some form of a public-private partnership, but it shows you there’s a lot of movement in the railway and logistics space on both sides of east and west southern Africa. And then earlier this month, there was a lot of talk about critical minerals at the annual Mining Indaba in Cape Town. Now, this is a very big issue. And this mining conference in particular is where a lot of Americans go, and there’s a pretty hefty presence from the U.S. and less so from China, but there was one deal there that caught a lot of people’s attention.
The U.S. signed an MOU with the Congolese state-run mining agency, Gecamines, and also Japan’s Organization for Metals And Energy Security known as JOGMEC, to create a framework for coordination in mineral exploration, production, and processing. Again, deals are being signed. Now, these are just MOUs. MOUs are not contracts. So, there’s a long way to go from an MOU to something shovel going in the ground. But it’s something. And now it’s something important to note here because the U.S. really does have a mixed track record when it comes to these kinds of MOUs. If you recall the December ’22 one, where they signed with Zambia and the DRC to build a value chain for battery metals, nothing came of that. But because of JOGMEC’s involvement in this one, and JOGMEC is already doing work in Botswana, it seems like there’s a higher chance that it may actually come to fruition.
And then there was the fascinating story this week, Cobus, in the Washington Post, about the Biden administration’s allocation of $1.5 billion to build out open radio access networks. Now, if you aren’t familiar with that, that’s the open RAN standard, which they’re hoping will be some kind of Huawei killer for countries in the global south who now rely heavily on the Chinese telecom giant. So, money, Cobus, is now flowing into projects in Africa. To answer that question that a lot of people ask the Americans saying, “Okay, if not the Chinese, then who? Then what do you have to offer?” And looks like the Americans are coming to the table now with some tangible proposals, but it does show a new evolution of the great power competition in Africa.
Cobus: Yeah, it’s very interesting. With many of these announcements, they sound amazing, and then one wants several more paragraphs with details that are frequently then not necessarily available. So with the open RAN kind of network proposal, I was wondering which companies are going to be pulled in? To which extent are they actually going to be building networks? Like what is the component mix going to be? All of these kind of quite practical questions I think that many African policymakers would also ask. And with that then specifically, does pushing Chinese kind of suppliers out of the equation, does that mean that African countries or cities will have to A, replace equipment, and B, how much freedom will they have to mix it up in terms of the different people they work with? All of these are issues that I’d love to hear clarification on when more of these details become available.
Eric: And what it speaks to is the difficulty that a lot of African countries, and this is not unique to Africa, it’s the same here in Southeast Asia and certainly in the Americas as well, where they’re having to balance the pressures on the technology side. Technology’s always changing at the same time as the geopolitical pressures that are coming down. So, as Africans, and we’re going to focus on Africa today, but again, this is a broader issue than just in Africa. These digital partnerships become a real question as to where they get the software, where they get the hardware, and where they get the intellectual power to frame their own digital policies. There was a fascinating two-year policy research project done by the University of Oxford’s Global Economic Governance Program. It was called Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships.
The initiative was led by our old friend of the show, Folashade Soule, who spoke with senior African policymakers, ministers, civil society stakeholders, all sorts of different folks to shed light on how African actors build, negotiate, and manage these very, very complex strategic partnerships in the digital sector. And we are thrilled to have Folashade back on the show again to tell us more about this two-year odyssey that she’s been in and this state of Africa’s digital partnerships in 2024. A very good afternoon to you in Accra, Folashade.
Folashade Soule: Good afternoon, Eric and Cobus. I’m happy to be back on the show.
Eric: It’s great to speak with you again, and thank you for making time. Congratulations on this project that you undertook. And again, we’ll put a link to all of the essays that you had all these great people, many of them have been on our show before, Bright Simons and others, and so it’s wonderful to see what they have to say in this digital realm. But before we get into the details of the specifics, maybe give us an overview of why you thought this project was needed. And when we talk about Africa’s digital partnerships, particularly in the context of the U.S., Europe, and China.
Folashade: Well, I would say that this project is part of larger project that I’ve been undertaking for a couple years now, and that is to look at how African governments manage the geopolitical rivalries across sectors, whether it’s transport infrastructure, now digital infrastructure, also a bit of critical minerals and security partnerships. I think it’s important because still there has been some change, but in the literature, there’s still much about how these rivalries unfold on the continent, how the U.S. and China are competing. And I would say a bit less on how African actors manage these relationships. And what is interesting to see are the variations across different sectors.
And so, when it comes to digital partnerships, first of all, there are many challenges that African policymakers are facing in achieving their digital transformation objectives. Let’s say the disparities in access and reliability of services are very high, and digital transformation has been set up as a key priority for many African governments in their national development strategies. So that was the main reason also behind this specific project, to look at how in this context where external partnerships become key and where China is leading, especially in the digital infrastructure pillar, how are African governments dealing with different requests, different office and also the different rivalries that are unfolding in this specific sector.
Cobus: And if you put these geopolitical challenges in contrast with all of the other challenges that African policy makers face, particularly in advancing digital connectivity and coverage in their countries, how do the geopolitical challenges, how do they compare, and how do they manifest? Like what kinds of barriers, practical barriers do African policymakers actually face in this kind of geopolitical field?
Folashade: Well, if I had to answer this question in just one sentence, what came out is that the choice of one partner over another is mostly guided by the alignment of the potential partner’s capacity to deliver with the priorities that are detailed in their policy documents. So, this suggests that potential partners understanding of these policy documents is critical for African governments. But as you mentioned, there are some geopolitical pressures that are playing out in their decision-making. And what came out of this research and all of the different policy dialogues and interviews that we led is that Western and Chinese partners alike are trying to outdo each other to offer favorable offers to African governments and operators that are looking for partners to execute especially large-scale digital projects.
And this has particularly been seen in the recent deployments of 5G network technologies in Africa where there’s been a standoff between the main Chinese technology players like Huawei and ZTE, versus the European ones like Ericsson and Nokia. But Chinese players have overtaken their European and American counterparts in terms of market share in telecommunications infrastructure and mobile phone manufacturing — talking about 73% share of the African internet market for instance. But more specifically, geopolitical Aries between these power, especially China and the U.S., they do have concrete repercussions on the local skill. And so they manifest themselves in several forms. On the one hand, the other formulation of requests, specific requests by certain partners, especially the United States, warning African countries against the purchase and use of technologies of Chinese origin for cybersecurity reasons.
And on the other hand, there are some injunctions not to use the equipment of certain Chinese companies, again, here, Huawei especially, on the, well, I would say a penalty of being unable to apply for funding from some institutions like USAID. And to give you some concrete examples, for instance, in Guinea, an internet service provider was informed by a western funder that the latter would not agree to use its services if it used equipment from Chinese companies. There also examples of Australian British American investors that have preferred for several years to avoid using Chinese digital equipment for their projects in Africa. But what was interesting was beyond African governments. What came out of this project also was that geopolitical pressures are also playing out with the African private sector, where some technology companies, thinking about a specific one based in Nairobi, well their business is to make commercial investments in broadband infrastructure in Africa.
But when their shareholders are mostly Western, they are encouraged, to put it politely, to avoid the use of Chinese equipment. So, these are some examples of geopolitical pressures playing out. But what we’ve noticed is that despite these pressures, African governments but also mobile network operators have still preferred technologies provided by Chinese companies due to better cost benefit, and even if the United States has tried to get these countries to stop chasing Chinese digital equipment, what we hear is that the price competitiveness of Chinese ICT equipment manufacturers like Huawei and also the access to loans that they offer through Chinese state-owned banks, it means that African countries that are looking to expand and update their digital infrastructure, often they have no other choice.
But what also came out from this research is that there seems to be a strategy of diversifying partnerships by African governments with some clear divisions of rules, meaning they would go to China more often for digital infrastructure. Whereas when it comes to services, digital services, there’s a mix of EU and U.S. providers including Microsoft also, for instance.
Eric: It’s interesting because Evan Feigenbaum, who is the vice president over at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, he has this great line where the Americans go around telling everybody that they don’t want you to have to choose sides between the U.S. and China. And then he says, “Well, watch what happens when you load up your entire telecom stack with Huawei,” and how the Americans are going to force you to take a side on that. And what you’re saying from the research is that’s actually starting to play out that American stakeholders and maybe other G7 stakeholders are not comfortable dealing with counterparts who have so much Huawei in their tech stack.
Also, I want to bring everybody’s attention to Africell, that’s out of the United States that’s backed by a hundred-million-dollar loan from the DFC. They’re active in Angola, also in the DRC. This is a semi-backed U.S. government, mobile telecom operator, but they position themselves in their marketing very much as we’re not Chinese. And American secretaries of State, Under Secretaries, Influencers like Peter Pham from the Atlantic Council are touting Africell as the kind of the anti-China mobile network that’s there. But it does show you, I think what’s coming in terms of this pressure. And Folashade, you talked about the financing piece, and I’d like to just hear more about that because China’s killer app approach to all of this was that Huawei would sit down and say, “I’m Mr. Jung from Huawei, I want you to be my colleague, Mr. Wong, from the China Exim Bank, and then Mr. Lee from SINOSURE.”
And they came as a team to sit down with many African telecom operators. And that was something that the west was never able to rival — Europeans and Americans, and to some extent the Japanese and Koreans as well. Samsung is a player in this market as well. Now that the Chinese are pulling back on a lot of their development financing, do you think that this gives an opening maybe for China’s rivals to kind of fill that space that China brought in because the Chinese aren’t bringing the China Development Bank or the China Exim Bank to the table as much anymore as they are?
Are we seeing some changes in this space?
Folashade: Well, what I’m seeing is that from African stakeholders’ perspectives is that they are definitely being pragmatic here. And something that came out here of this research, and I think it was quite interesting, it was the example of Senegal, because we would ask them, how do African stakeholders, how do you mitigate against these pressures, these geopolitical pressures? And what came out is, well, first of all, the avoidance of zero-sum games where they would be pushed to choose one partner instead of another. But countries like Senegal also believe that these rivalries could even have positive benefits for African nations as long as they are carried out peacefully. And this answers maybe directly your question is that they consider that geopolitical rivalries, although they do not affect directly Senegal, they also allow for more positive competition.
Meaning that the Senegalese government, by having China on its side, also now has more easy access to other Western partners due to this partnership. Meaning other partners would now come to offer partnerships with better financing mechanisms. Of course, they do not necessarily rival with the Chinese because as you mentioned, they talk as one, the Chinese talk as one at the negotiation table, they come with a very comprehensive offer. However, with this competition coming and being stronger, there is definitely more financing options that are coming to the table for these African countries.
Cobus: So, at the heart of some of these disagreements, lie also varied large systems, different large systems challenging each other, particularly in the case of internet provision, Chinese ideas of state sovereignty over the internet and kind of internet localization compared to Western ideas of a free and open onboarded internet with minimal government over oversight. So, I was wondering in your discussions with these African tech professionals and policymakers, are you seeing an emergence of it, kind of an African vision of what they want the internet to look like for them?
Folashade: Well, I would say it’s very diverse what I’ve seen. I don’t think we can talk about a common African vision of digital sovereignty. There are some nuances and variations from one country, I would even say from one region to another. But as you said, there are several interpretations of the concept of digital sovereignty, for instance. And in some African countries, there’s a common misinterpretation, and that is to draw a parallel between digital sovereignty and data localization. Especially states, African states believe that African governments can exercise their digital sovereignty by exercising greater control over data and that all data processing activities taking place on their territory, digital infrastructure and data centers, should be located on the continent and owned by African entities.
And some of these countries thinking about Senegal, but also to some extent smaller countries like Benin, they do think that they need to launch and create more national data centers. And Senegal was the first country to replicate what is actually closer to a Chinese data governance model that requires all service to be located within the country’s borders. But data localization, it is seen as a means of ensuring data sovereignty, but it remains difficult to achieve, mainly due to the financial resources we were talking about, the financial resources and the technical capabilities that are required to deploy the data centers that will be needed to meet this requirement.
Nowadays, many digital services, including those managed by African governments, are still hosted on servers outside the continent. And so I think that as long as more indigenous technological capabilities remain underdeveloped, achieving data sovereignty will remain more of a larger elusive goal. And another question is that while this push for digital sovereignty and its emphasis on data localization, seemingly, or it’s presented as something that would empower local actors, it also raises questions about digital rights and the capacity of civil society to promote these rights and combat abuses by local governments and accesses also of some private companies.
Eric: And while we’ve talked about what the U.S. has been doing in Africa quite a bit, this is a very important year because it’s a year of the forum on China-Africa Cooperation gathering. We don’t know if it’s going to be a summit or a ministerial gathering, but it’s going to happen sometime later this year, probably around November or December sometime. That’s usually when it happens. We’re not entirely sure, but digital is going to be an important track in the discussions, no doubt, as it has been in the past, particularly because China wants to promote its technology. Technology also expands beyond just telephones and computers now, to cars to energy, so many different tracks. You are quite expert in how African governments negotiate with the Chinese and with the major powers.
As we think about the work you’ve been doing in the digital space and the fact that this is a FOCAC year and where we are right now, in fact, as the Chinese world opens back up after the Chinese New Year holiday, it seems like for the next eight months, the negotiations between various African countries and the Chinese over the agenda for FOCAC is really going to intensify quite a bit. Could you just share a few of your insights in terms of, again, and I know you don’t have any special insight into the process because this is something that usually happens behind closed doors, but based on your experience and how you’ve seen African negotiating strategies evolve over the years in the FOCAC process, give us a little bit of an insight of what that compromises in terms of on the African side and what different African countries are thinking about right now in a FOCAC year.
Folashade: Well, as you know, preparation and coordination by African states for FOCAC usually take place at two levels. First, the first level is the African permanent diplomatic representations at Addis Ababa that coordinate and discuss all the thematic that should be put on the agenda in collaboration with the African Union as well. And secondly, the African diplomatic representations at Beijing, they also coordinate via the Africa Group Coordination Unit and in collaboration with the permanent representation of the African Union in Beijing. So, I’d like to say something also about this multi-level organization, although it looks efficient at mobilizing African representatives at various levels, its format is still mostly exclusively at the diplomatic high level and doesn’t always sufficiently reflect more local concerns that take place at the project level.
And that can have an impact on local populations. So here’s where I think local civil society organizations could have a better role. At the FOCAC Summit in Dakar, I remember that there were some discussions among local African civil society organizations on how to better coordinate and have a stronger voice. And some of them were even saying that they should use civil society monitoring mechanisms that have been implemented for Africa-EU relations and also have a similar model for China-Africa relations as it would allow them to have more efficient interventions both at the domestic and regional level, and also play a stronger role in the execution of the FOCAC action plans. Now, when it comes to Africa’s FOCAC priorities and what would be more of a successful negotiation outcomes, I think that first, at the last BRICS Summit in South Africa, there was already a China-Africa Leaders dialogue that was initiated by China and co-chaired by both President Xi and Cyril Ramaphosa, and some thematic stood out.
And I think that they are also likely to figure on a FOCAC agenda, the first one being the promotion of African trade integration and the participation of African regional economic organizations that play key roles in fostering intra-African trade, like the Continental Free Trade Area, but also trade-related infrastructure and policy. I also think that some priority issues that will be on the agenda might be the increase of investment flows, topics like climate change, also digital transformation. But maybe a bit more than at the last FOCAC in Dakar, I think that questions that will be discussed are also cooperation in the security sector, especially in a context where there’s an increase of both terrorists, jihadist attacks in the Sahel, risks also increasing for coastal West Africa. So, I think these topics are very likely to also be part of the discussions and of the priorities.
Cobus: So, returning momentarily to the negotiation process, to which extent… I’ve always assumed that the negotiation process around the FOCAC agenda is kind of dialectical process kind of where there’s a push around certain demands from African policymakers and then a kind of a push back from China in terms of what’s domestically possible or possible within their global strategy, and then they move back and forth in that way until they find some common ground. Is that a realistic way of thinking it? If one looks at the final FOCAC agenda, how would one kind of unpack the authorship of that agenda?
Folashade: Well, I think when it comes to negotiations, as you mentioned, and I also said earlier for the previous question that you asked, I think what happens, as you said, is that there is quite some back and forth, there are several processes. But when it comes to FOCAC itself or during the meetings, I think that there is still a lot of bilateral versus multilateralism going on. Meaning that, I think that it’s important for African countries to move beyond opportunism at the bilateral level during these summits and come up with a more strategic regional approach. And this was already suggested in 2017 by the ECOWAS Commission who called for a more holistic framework in dealing with China’s activities in the region and also as a means to plan more appropriately.
I think that African states could definitely give more leadership to specific regional entities or the AU Commission, other relevant African union entities who could better play this liaison role among member states’ requests and grievances.
Eric: Well that’s what member president, William Ruto, from Kenya said that these Africa Plus 1 summits don’t even make any sense, for 54 African countries to go schlepping off to Italy, to Russia, to Turkey, to China, and it would be better if the African Union Commission or some regional entity represented them. That’s not going to happen in Beijing obviously, it’s too important. But it’s interesting that there’s that sentiment that’s widespread there. Speaking of William Ruto, he was just in China last year. We also saw visits from Felix Tsheshikedi from the DRC and Hakainde Hichilema from Zambia. And what was notable about all three of those high-level visits was how poorly informed so much of their staffs were on China in 2024.
That many of the thinking and many of the proposals that were put forward were straight out of China 2016 as they were billion dollar loan programs is what the Kenyans wanted for road repairs. And the Chinese just don’t do that anymore. And this is a space that our colleague, Africa editor Geraud Neema, has been following quite closely as well, is that the competency in the China literacy within many of these governments seems to be, to us, rather weak and lacking and has not kept up with the changes domestically in China. You see this from a very different vantage point. You have an opportunity to engage with ministers and governments at the highest levels.
How would you assess the China literacy and the sophistication that they have about understanding China 2024 and going into these negotiations, how well you think that they’re bringing that knowledge to bear?
Folashade: Well, I do agree with you to some extent. I have also argued in several pieces that enhancing the capacity of African bureaucracies to deal with strategic partners like China, but also Russia, Turkey and India, this is really key. And that this could be done by building an internal pool of experts with knowledge of the modus operandi, the culture, and the languages of these countries. And I also argue that African leaders should better rely on the expertise of former African students who were trained in Chinese universities to provide expertise and language skills. What I’ve observed over the past few years is that, and it always depends on the countries, right? But there is better knowledge and in-house expertise on China that has progressively evolved in some African capitals and foreign ministries. Countries like Ethiopia and to some extent Rwanda, but also in smaller countries like Benin.
Well, when it comes to Ethiopia and Rwanda, they already have some kind of an internal China desk, but other countries are also increasing their internal capacities on China expertise. So, what I’ve seen across several, I would say more West African countries, that’s the region that my research covers more than other African regions. I’ve seen some improvement at a few levels. So, first of all, a better association of former China-trained experts in the negotiations, many of whom spoke Mandarin and who could provide better double translation during negotiation. And by double translation, I don’t mean necessarily language only, but also culturally speaking. And this, I would say it’s more used during bilateral meetings where many of these deals are negotiated in the African capitals.
But at the same time, I think that an African negotiator who speaks Mandarin and has good knowledge of the Chinese culture or even business culture is not enough to get a better deal. It may help in easing dialogue at the negotiation table, but it won’t necessarily be enough to secure the best deal. I think what is needed in addition to that is really the development of a permanent pool of in-house expertise to set up a better negotiation agenda on, for instance, infrastructure and mining deals with China, but also more importantly, provide better monitoring tools by equipping local leaders with a better capacity. Another aspect here is enhancing internal legal expertise that is already available within several ministries. Now instead of procuring external legal expertise on a case-by-case basis.
And finally, something that I noticed is that former diplomats or experts that know how to negotiate with China do not necessarily transfer knowledge when they retire. So, you do have some stories of some good deals, and that’s the case once in Ghana where I’ve been. But when this lead negotiator, that is often an ambassador, when he retires, how is that knowledge transferred? So I think knowledge also has to be distilled from senior officials to younger officials to ensure a perennation of negotiation skills and best practices.
Cobus: So, just a simple, but I think also very difficult question to answer, just from your perspective, like we’ve touched on the African priorities around FOCAC, so thinking of the kind of landscape of 2024 and if one thinks of some of the kind of barriers to African progress that are on the landscape in 2024, what would a successful negotiated outcome at FOCAC look like? What are some of the points of success that you’d be looking for?
Folashade: Well, I would say more larger or more collective bargaining — that’s what I would say. That’s what I would see as a better negotiation outcome. What happens in these summits, and you were talking about Africa Plus 1 summits earlier, is that there are already some internal policies within the African Union where these strategic partnerships to be carried out during these summits, there should be a better representation, a regional economic community should take the lead. And I think that, first of all, doesn’t happen always. Many of these countries and competition with one another, so they tend to go for it alone. Whereas collective bargaining with countries like China would be very useful. And I also think that they would allow for better deals, better clauses, and can also turn out to be cheaper.
I’m thinking about many of these, well, first of all, digital, digital infrastructure projects —submarine cables, fiber optic. There could be better deals if these countries come together and just talk with one voice. So, it’s very difficult for 54 African countries to speak with one voice. So coordination is always something difficult. But at the same time, when you look at sub-regional, at the sub-regional dimension where regional integration, trade integration, and digital transformation are common objectives for many of these economic communities, definitely having a better coordination mechanisms among themselves could lead to better outcomes at summits like FOCAC.
Eric Fascinating to think about FOCAC in the context of these digital partnerships. If you would like to see all the great work that Folashade and the project team at the University of Oxford, and we want to make sure we give credit to also Emily Jones and Leslie Mills who worked with Folashade on the Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships interview series and the research, I will put links to that in the show notes. What’s amazing is when you read through these different perspectives, and there’s almost, what? 12 or 13 of them, even more of them, you really start to get a much more nuanced understanding of this issue.
And also I want to really just commend you, Folashade and the team, that the majority of the people you featured in the interview series are women. And that’s not something we see a lot in the technology space in Africa or elsewhere. And people we’ve had on the show before, like Mandira Bagwandeen, also Jane Munga, Bright Simons, so many people who are there — congratulations again on this great piece of work. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights on both the digital partnerships as well as the preparations for FOCAC. And just once again, thank you so much for your time today.
Folashade: Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Thank you Cobus.
Eric: Cobus, I’ve said this before, I’m going to say it again — If you are studying or following or analyzing or you’re active in the China-Africa space and you’re not following what Folashade is saying and doing, and you’re not taking assiduous notes on everything she’s said today, you’re making a terrible mistake. I mean, it’s head spinning how to process everything that we just heard because it’s really… I mean, when we think about China-Africa scholars, I mean, she’s a GOAT. There’s no other way of saying it. I mean she’s a GOAT. And I just love the brutal honesty of saying, yeah, there are problems here. There are problems in the China literacy. It’s not sugarcoating it at all, but it’s getting better.
Cobus: And just for our transnational non-first-language speakers, GOAT is short for greatest of all time.
Eric: That’s right. I think it’s so funny because it was Meryl Streep who was from a different generation of actresses, and they were calling her the GOAT, and she was saying, “Why are they calling me a goat?” And there’s just like insult thing like a farm animal.
Cobus: Am I being called a farm animal?
Eric: And the younger actors around her were like, “Yep, Meryl’s the goat.” So anyway, but I think again, so this question of the digital partnerships so fascinating and it’s in such flux because tech is in flux — there’s no doubt. But as we said, the Americans are moving now and the Europeans are moving, the South Koreans are moving. This space is far more dynamic than it was 10 years ago when there was only Huawei. And in many ways, Huawei doesn’t have the tools that it had 10, 15 years ago in terms of financing. The Chinese have become slightly more risk-averse in extending large loans. That being said, technology is part of the smart and beautiful initiative that we’ve talked about many times on this show. These technology loans tend to be smaller than the big railroads and highways and those big projects. So technology definitely falls under the smart and beautiful.
So, it might be overstating it to think that the Chinese are going to pull back a lot on technology financing, but nonetheless, this is a very competitive dynamic space to be in. And I’m so grateful to Oxford and Folashade for this interview series that she did. I spent almost two hours going through all of the different columns that they had. And it’s absolutely enlightening. And it gives you a real strong sense that across Africa, in many different countries, there are really smart people thinking about these issues. And that is very exciting to follow as well.
Cobus: It’s very exciting. And the thing is, it’s become kind of a cliche in Africa’s China studies to insist how important it is to focus on African agency that obviously that has become kind of one of the dominant themes of Africa-China studies over the last few years. But this is what studying African agency actually looks like. It’s having conversations, all these individual policymakers and experts fighting your way into these offices, making sure, dealing with the assistance, getting on the policymaker’s radar. It’s a full-time and exhausting job. And her work just really enriches the field so much. Like it provides so much more concrete detail about how these processes work is completely invaluable.
Eric: I know where she’s coming from when she talks about the need for African countries to negotiate with the Chinese as a block, as a group, whether at a continental, a regional level, or even at some type of informal grouping level. However, it should be said two things. Number one, Africans have proved terrible at doing that, not just with the Chinese, but in general, aligning interests from Nigeria to Botswana has been very difficult. Or even Nigeria to Ghana, it’s been very difficult. So even in a ECOWAS context, it’s not easy to do. There’s not a great track record there. The other part is that the Chinese generally don’t like to negotiate with countries and blocks and tend to prefer the bilateral engagements. And so I’m not entirely sure that the Chinese would be that thrilled about ECOWAS or the East African community or any of the regional groups coming and saying, “Okay, this is the way we’re going to do it, and if you don’t like it, step out.” I don’t get the sense that that’s going to work.
Cobus: I definitely see that and I agree. And of course, China has very concrete reasons for wanting to keep these things bilateral. It’s much easier to negotiate Mauritania on your own than with an entire bloc. But at the same time, I think if there is one platform where they could be chipping away at that and start moving in more kind of regional representation, it is FOCAC. As Folashade was saying, it’s already kind of set up to do that anyway, through all of the diplomatic coordination. But also FOCAC, in a lot of ways, remains this kind of laboratory for China’s engagement with global south regions. And one has to say that this kind of problem of working together as a bloc, or negotiating as a bloc isn’t unique to Africa. I mean, South America has exactly the same problem.
Eric: And also the same issue in ASEAN here in Southeast Asia. Same problem.
Cobus: Exactly. And ASEAN shows that the more you insist on collective decision-making, the fewer decisions get made. Once you stop insisting on collective decision-making, you start losing members off the side of the boat pretty quickly. It’s difficult like back and forth to try and keep that balance.
Eric: ASEAN, in many ways, is like the African Union in that it has such divergent partners from Singapore to Laos. I mean, their interests are nowhere near aligned. South Africa to Mali, same issue. So it’s very difficult. But that being said, this idea of regional infrastructure development is something that would be so badly needed in many parts of Africa, if not all of Africa. And because we’re talking about power generation, so countries that generate a lot of power but can export that to countries that don’t have a lot of power. Telecom networks lend themselves to regional infrastructure development as well, so that you can have common standards, you can defray the cost.
There’s so many different things you can do with that. That’s still not being done. And that could be an area. So technology could be one of those areas that Africans push and say, we want to come as a group. I do hope it happens. I’m just a little bit skeptical. I’d like to get your take, Cobus, because, coming in March, you’re going to publish in our new research hub that we’re launching, some analysis on FOCAC from the Chinese perspective and then from the African perspective. You’re working on this right now. Why don’t you give us a little sneak peek on some of the different priorities from the Chinese and African sides leading up to FOCAC that you’re starting to think about.
Cobus: From the Chinese side, I’m trying to map the rhetoric of international connectivity, which obviously is core to both FOCAC and to the Belt and Road Initiative that we’ve seen over the last few months since China has really started reemerging on the world stage, and mapping that with what we know of Chinese domestic priorities. So, for example, we know that green energy has become a lot more prominent in the mix. We know that the rhetorical base has essentially been set for that at the Belt & Road Forum. And at the same time it overlaps with massive kind of domestic supply on the Chinese side. China makes I think 80% of the world’s solar components, for example. So there’s a lot of solar that China can provide. And what there’s been work on, as far as I can see, is to bring the kind of mechanisms of financing and so on to make them easier to deal with on the private sector side, which is where the renewable energy sector really lies in China.
So that’s one example. On the Chinese side, I’m mapping out what China is trying to achieve and then how Africa kind of fits into that. On the African side, I’m looking at a set of different kind of African, emerging kind of African demands that we’ve seen kind of become clear over several FOCAC summits and trying to gauge which of these align with Chinese interests and which are a long shot. For example, as Folashade was saying, there’s many calls in Africa, there’s been many calls in Africa over the last year, two years for a more robust Chinese peacekeeping presence. That’s one where I tend to think my personal kind of prediction on that is that I think we’re going to see a lot of announcements of financial logistical training kind of support for African peacekeeping but not many new Chinese boots on the ground, among others, because the situation in Africa is very, very complex and I think there’s a low appetite for that kind of underground engagement in China.
Eric: And also remember that the Chinese will only participate in UN-mandated peacekeeping operations. And the UN isn’t very popular in many African countries — the DRC, Mali, and elsewhere. So, there’s not an expansion of UN peacekeeping in Africa today.
Cobus: Exactly. And even in areas, like in the DRC, for example, and in the Sahel, where there’s clear very strong demand for greater kind of multilateral peacekeeping, those are exactly some of the regions where my instinct is that China may not want to commit actual Chinese nationals to being there because, just simply from historical precedent, we know that a few cases with a few instances where Chinese troops were killed while they were working under the auspices of the UN and Africa, that played very negatively politically within China. So, on the African side, I’m tracking how they’ve managed to enlarge the agenda of fac and then what some of the kind of areas are, particularly in connecting FOCAC 2021 to FOCAC 2024. There’s a few commitments there where the Chinese didn’t 100% get to, and then trying to see kind of how those will be tweaked and shifted as we move forward.
Eric: It’s also going to be very interesting to see how much the Chinese censor the FOCAC discourse as it’s happening in China. If you recall from the previous FOCAC in ’18 and ’21, the Chinese had to stop all coverage of it domestically in China because the perception was that, among social media followers, was that the Chinese were giving away all this money to Africans, our economy is suffering — why are we giving all this money away to Africans? And they had to shut down that conversation on WeChat and Weibo and other platforms. The economy today is much more brittle than it was back in ‘18 and ’21. So, people are much more sensitive about this. Youth unemployment is really in bad shape. And I think the narrative of having all these African leaders come to Beijing, feted, big pomp and circumstance, and everything, on Tiananmen Square and all of that. And then this big number, 300 billion, 200 billion, whatever the number is, is not going to go down well with the Chinese public.
Cobus: Well, and in that sense, it is an interesting moment where the Chinese public is joining the American public and the European public and so on in essentially misunderstanding how aid economies work and overestimating what their countries are giving in aid. In that sense, the Chinese and the Americans are exactly the same.
Eric: That’s right. The Chinese public did not understand that the bulk of what the Chinese were providing was in the form of concessional loans.
Cobus: Yes. All that money is coming back, that and plus — more money is coming back. Yeah.
Eric: Or commercial loans. All that money with profit. And just like the Americans, the misperception is that they think they’re giving away like a third of their entire budget to poor Africans, when in fact the United States is the stingiest country of the G7. I think it’s 0.001%. 1/1000th of their GDP goes to aid.
Cobus: And even the payments that do get made, I think it was Ken Opalo, the academic, who made the point that 75% never leaves the United States. It all just circles within the United States economy.
Eric: And European aid is much the same way in that respect. So a lot of misperceptions on aid. Nonetheless, though, we are in a moment in China where people are… they’re not in a good mood. And so it’s going to be very interesting to see if the Chinese authorities allow that discussion to take place on social media. Well, we’re going to be following FOCAC now, from now right up until whenever it happens, and we’re going to start doing research, we’re going to start doing trackers, where Geraud is working on a pledge tracker. I think it’s something that you guys are going to work on together where we’re looking at what they pledged in ’18, what they pledged in ’21, and then give that some indication as to what might come ahead in ’24. So that’s going to be something very interesting.
We’re also covering all of the little negotiations and the meetings that are going to start taking place — think tank forums, military forums. There’s a whole bunch of things that lead up to FOCAC, and that will start probably sometime in April and May if I remember, where the various sidetracks start to happen. And I think you might even participate in some of those in the Think Tank Forum, correct?
Cobus: It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but I think that Think Tank Forum is happening I think in March or April, I think.
Eric: That’d be fantastic. So it’s a very exciting year for China-Africa relations just because we get a lot more discussion than what we’ve had in previous years. So, we’ll be following all of that. If you’d like to see all of the research that Geraud is doing, that Cobus is doing, and the daily coverage that we’re producing, go to chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe, sign up for subscription. It’s what keeps the lights on for us and keeps independent journalism agenda-free coverage going. And that is something that is so rare in the China space today, and we need your support. There’s no two ways about it. If we don’t get your support, we go away. And there’s numbers of publications that are fading and that have already died.
And so this stuff doesn’t happen for free and it doesn’t happen by accident. So, we hope that you will support the work that we’re doing. And the team in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are doing every day to produce great quality coverage. Once again, chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe. If you are a student or a teacher, email me at eric@chinaglobalsouth.com. I’ll send you a link for a 50% off discount. Subscription’s just 10 bucks a month or $99 a year. That’s a good deal. That’s a great deal for what you get. So, well, that’s it for this edition of the show. Cobus and I will be back again next week with another episode of the China in Africa podcast. Until then, for Cobus van Staden in Johannesburg, I’m Eric Olander — thank you so much for listening.
Outro: The discussion continues online. Tag us on Twitter @ChinaGSProject and visit us at chinaglobalsouth.com. If you speak French, check out our full coverage projetafriquechine.com and AfrikChine on Twitter. That’s Afrik, with a K, and you’ll also find links to our sites and social media channels in Arabic.
