The Nigerian military signed a deal with Chinese state-owned weapons manufacturer Norinco to set up a factory as part of an effort to develop a domestic arms production capacity in the West African country.
The deal is the latest in a series of announcements about increased Chinese weapons sales to African militaries, which are rapidly changing battlefield dynamics across the continent.
This week, Eric, Cobus & Géraud discuss how Chinese drones, surface-to-air missile systems, and other advanced arms technologies are now commonplace, often available at a much lower cost than comparable weapons from the U.S. and Europe.
Show Notes:
- Reuters: KoBold Metals agrees on framework to buy stake in Congo lithium deposit
- Military Africa: Nigeria looks to China’s Norinco to bolster fledging air defense structure by Ekene Lionel
- The China-Global South Project: Nigeria Backtracks Solar Import Ban Amid China’s Supply Dominance by Njenga Hakeenah
Transcript:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander, and as always, I’m joined by CGSP’s two leading Africa editors, Geraud Neema, normally joining us from the beautiful island of Mauritius, but now he is back again in Washington, D.C., where he has been up all night due to jet lag and is exhausted, but he still is joining us for the show. A very good early, early, early morning to you in D.C.
GERAUD NEEMA: Good morning to you guys, and good afternoon in Africa, in Asia.
ERIC OLANDER: It’s already evening already, yeah. It’s already evening out here in Asia, but it’s still in the, you know, reasonable time for Cobus van Staden, our managing editor in Cape Town, South Africa. Good afternoon, Cobus.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Good afternoon.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, not a lot going on this week in the China Africa space. It’s one of these weeks where it just feels like a lot of things are on hold and waiting, and there’s just some massive events that are going on outside of the China Africa space.
Of course, we saw, you know, war breakout between India and Pakistan. I mean, that’s not an overstatement. When you have fighter jets up in the air shooting each other down, drones going, you’re basically in a state of war.
We have Chinese President Xi Jinping in Russia this week, and also trade talks between the U.S. and Chinese are supposed to start in Switzerland. So a lot going on around the world. You know, we were looking for some topics, and we came up on a couple good ones here.
So I hope you’ll bear with us. But it’s not the hot news that we normally cover. Gérôme, let’s start with you in Washington.
You’re going to have some really interesting conversations coming up this week. The DRC is back on the map in Washington in terms of their interest. There was a deal that was just announced by Cobalt.
Now that’s K-O-B-O-L-D. That is an American cobalt and copper mining company that was active in, or that’s been active in Zambia. It’s famously backed by, I think, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and some very famous American luminaries.
They now did a deal in the DRC to buy AVZ. Is that what it is? Yes.
Yes. Okay. Give us the details on that and why it’s important.
And there is a China angle to this story.
GERAUD NEEMA: I’m going to start by the beginning of how they framed the cobalt company. Cobalt is based in the United States, has a lot of funders. Among them, you have some funding company in which you do find like Jeff Bezos and everything.
So when I look at that, I always kind of, I don’t know if it’s a media thing where they say backed by Jeff Bezos to see, because it’s presented as like Jeff Bezos is personally interested in what cobalt is doing. And reality is just one of the funders of one of the big funders that are supporting cobalt. So I don’t know, maybe they want to create a media hype behind it.
That’s why.
ERIC OLANDER: I think the shorthand for that is that it’s well funded. And I think that is the key. Without Gates and Bezos, I mean, listen, if Gates and Bezos funded us, they would say we’re a Gates and Bezos funded organization.
GERAUD NEEMA: But they don’t have only Gates and Bezos, they have a lot of them. I’m pointing that element because I do believe that somehow it’s plays a lot in the narrative on how they want to present that situation in the context of the DRC, where you do have the DRC trying to attract United States companies coming and becoming the guarantor of peace and security and stability in the country. So when they put that narrative in front, it’s as if they’re low key suggesting that, you know, we have a powerful U.S. companies and billionaires that are personally invested into getting that project.
ERIC OLANDER: But it’s still pretty small as an entity, though, I mean, especially compared to the big ones, you know, what CMOC Group is doing and CNMC and the Chinese mining companies.
GERAUD NEEMA: Yes, they’re very much small. They still do an exploration, not only in Zambia, in other parts of the world, they’re also doing exploration. They have not really stepped up as to be a big mining company.
They’re still doing exploration to find good project they can find and they can start operating and move forward.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. And the reason why this is so important for our context is that 80 percent of the cobalt market in the DRC is, I don’t want to say controlled, but it has Chinese kind of inputs in it. And so there’s a lot of excitement both in Kinshasa and in places like Washington when a company like Cobalt starts to make its way back in.
By the way, this is the first American company, fully American company, to be back in the DRC since Freeport McMoran left in the first Trump administration. So it’s a big milestone. The folks at Jekamins, the Congolese state mining company and the Congolese government, they don’t have a problem as far as we can tell working with the Chinese, but they have said that they want to diversify and reduce their reliance on having just one big player dominate so much of their cobalt in their copper market.
So that’s what brings us to this deal between Cobalt and AVZ. Pick up the story from there for us.
GERAUD NEEMA: So interesting name, Cobalt, not really Cobalt, but Cobold. But in reality, they did not come into the cobalt industry in the DRC. They came into the lithium project in the DRC.
And that lithium project is what we call the Manona Lithium Project. It’s a very famous one where you do have an Australian company, a relatively small one called AVZ, which got the permits under very tricky OPEC situations, DRC kind of style of mining deals. And later on, that mining permit was stripped away and given to a Chinese company, Zijin Mining.
And after that, AVZ went to court and arbitration against the DRC and Zijin Mining over that lithium project. So when we see Cobalt coming down, buying the AVZ shares of the project in the lithium project in Manana, the question becomes, what is the next step forward? Is Cobalt is going to pick up on AVZ litigation against Zijin Mining or Cobalt is going to go in the direction where there were some rumors in the past, where we had another major company, Rio Tintum, was interested into buying AVZ share and say, we’re not going to fight against China, Zijin, but you’re going to partner with them over that lithium project in the DRC.
So the question is, is Cobalt is going to go to the same direction that Rio Tintum was kind of hinting to go to, or they’re going to say, we bought AVZ and we are going to continue the same fight against the Chinese company, which I do believe is going to be a very complicated one given the current circumstances of the cases. So I’m expecting that we might see in that lithium project, one share, one part being Chinese, another part being Cobalt, a kind of Simandu, like Simandu style kind of project like in Guinea.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, the big problem facing Cobalt and all of these companies, especially in the lithium market is that earlier this year, the price of lithium fell below $10,000 a metric ton to a four-year low. Like a lot of other battery metals, the prices still remain stubbornly low. So will it make financial sense for Cobalt to export from the DRC, especially when lithium is available in so many other countries around the world, namely in the lithium triangle in South America, in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and by the way, BYD and Qingshan, another very, very big Chinese mining company, just pulled out of a deal in Chile.
So that’s something to kind of keep an eye on there as well. So beyond just the Cobalt deal in the DRC, folks are going to be interested to talk with you about some other issues. One, I think they’re going to ask you about what are the Chinese doing these days in the DRC, but also they’re going to ask you about this, a lot of this talk about U.S. weapons going into the Eastern DRC in exchange for mineral rights. And there’s a lot of this talk. What’s going on with that?
GERAUD NEEMA: Yeah, a lot of going on on that, but let me pull back a bit, go back on the Cobalt. And this is one of the things I think we should be looking into, like what’s going to be the future of that project in a sense where not just talking about value addition, transformation on the ground and locally of value, all of that. The question is, is Cobalt under the current market circumstances is going to come and say, I’m going to build a full refining processing in the DRC of lithium or I’m going to export it to another country for refining and processing.
Now the question becomes which countries they’re going to export that lithium for processing and transformation. That’s basically take us back to the current geopolitical debate about U.S.-China access on critical minerals. At the end, it’s about processing and transformation.
I’m quite curious to understand what’s the game plan of Cobalt was going to be under the current circumstances, if they’re going to move in that direction or they’re going to find a way to build a local processing down in the DRC, which is going to be quite costly and very complicated.
ERIC OLANDER: Come on. Come on. But Geraud, we have to stop this conversation about processing.
No, we’re going to have to keep having that. No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I get, listen, we sit in all of these conferences all the times and we hear people talk about, you know, putting more value onto the product.
The DRC does not have the power to add processing to it. Period. Full stop.
So until we resolve the infrastructure issue, all of this talk about processing is never going to happen. Never going to happen. So I just, it’s just infuriating.
GERAUD NEEMA: You can build a close kind of project where you have electricity and mining. And just on that note, DRC and Zambia recently signed, I think yesterday, an agreement where Zambia is going to build a high powered transmission line from Zambia to the DRC to be able to power some mining companies over there. So just to say that, despite the reality on the ground, the DRC still maintain their demand for processing and transformation on the ground.
So that’s for me, the question becomes how those companies are going to react given the current market circumstances. I wanted to put that out there because I really want to see how they’re going to move the pieces and what the agreement will look like. And to the point that you’ve mentioned about, of course, the DRC war situation, Eastern DRC with Rwanda backing up the M23, how the US is moving around.
The reality is there’s never been a serious talk about the US sending weapons in the Eastern DRC. When you do know how US weapon procurement works and how DRC weapon procurement works, you do know that there will never be a connection between the two wars. They’re quite different.
But we do know that DRC was counting and expecting, still expecting and counting of the US diplomatic and political weight over international institutions to be put pressure on Rwanda to redraw its support from the M23. And the recently appointed special envoy, quote unquote, special envoy from the US to the DRC, Massad Boulos, even reiterated that a few weeks back when he said that it’s because of what he said to Kagame, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, that the M23 redrew from the city of Walikali, where there was an American company, Alpha Min BCA over there. So this kind of influence, this is what the DRC is expecting from the United States to create a kind of context where Rwanda doesn’t have incentive to go back into the DRC in a way that if it does that, they can infiltrate the United States and have sanctions all over them.
This is the plan on the table, but I’m not really expecting much of that plan. I know there’s a lot of discussion on the ground. I’m not expecting much of that plan because of one point, the one I hear Donald Trump talking about the deal in the DRC, that situation.
He talks about it with so vague terms, with so broad words that you understand that there is no personal investment from himself. There’s no personal knowledge of the case from himself, which means that it’s a very low hanging fruit that can really also can easily blow out and can easily fail. And there will not be a serious engagement from himself, from the White House to make it happen.
So this is the part I think that people should also be paying attention to in those discussions.
ERIC OLANDER: Now, just before we move on to another topic, just want to let everybody know that we’ve been keeping an eye on a story also in the far Eastern DRC in Kalemi territory, which is on Lake Tanganyika, bordering Tanzania, where a Chinese national was taken hostage last week and negotiations have been underway to secure his freedom. Six FARDC soldiers were killed in the assault. And apparently there is a word among the militants who are in and factions and bandits out in the Eastern DRC to target Chinese nationals for ransom.
And so this is part of a broader trend that we’ve been seeing. Just a very quick clarification. Some of you may remember from three or four years ago when the Chinese embassy gave a warning to all Chinese nationals.
Correct me if I’m wrong. It was in North Kivu, South Kivu. North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces.
In Ituri province for them to evacuate and to leave. This is not part of those three provinces. So Kalemi territory is outside of those three provinces.
But we’ve seen quite a few problems over the past few years with Chinese operating out there.
GERAUD NEEMA: Before moving forward on the other topic, still on the topic of Eastern DRC in that crisis recently before coming, I gave a short interview to the Dutch level because they wanted to understand why China is diplomatically also involved, even though they’re not playing the first role. They’re pretty involved into finding a peace in that situation. One simple reason, like China was feeling kind of worried about how the M20 was expanding beyond the North Kivu and South Kivu.
They were worried that maybe the M20 is going now to get to the Katanga region, where you have the crust of Chinese mining interests there. So there was a lot of talks among Chinese companies, among Chinese executives on the ground in DRC, worrying about how they would have behaved in the case where the M23 got into Kalemi, moving forward to Kolwezi and moving forward to Katanga. Would they have been forced to stop production or would they have been forced to continue production, angering maybe Kinshasa, how the international community is going to react to that.
So China is really interested into finding peace in that situation. So that’s why I believe that they’re rooting for the United States to find a way to stop the progression of M23, not to go beyond the North and South Kivu provinces in the eastern part of DRC.
ERIC OLANDER: Hard to imagine that that’s going to happen. And I share your skepticism, even about American weapons making it into that part of the world. So be careful in some of those narratives that are out there.
Cobus, let’s turn it to you. So when we were doing the newsletter this week, it was very interesting because earlier this week, again, as we mentioned at the top of the show, India and Pakistan started going at each other. And one of the key takeaways that we saw was how well Chinese equipment, military equipment performed on the battlefield, particularly the Chinese J-10C fighter jet that now, depending on who you talk to, shot down either four or five Indian Rafales, you know, which the French made Rafale jets, or some of them say they broke.
Oh, none, depending on the Indian press, yeah. Who knows? But what we do know definitively, though, is that the share price of the manufacturer of the J-10C shot up on Wednesday, almost 20 percent on the basis that these weapons are performing well.
This coincides with a number of trips that Nigerian military leaders have been taking to China over the past several weeks. Let me just read you two of these trips, and I think there’s been more recently. The minister of state for defense, Bela Matawele, he went to talk with the Chinese, with the Chinese weapons maker Norinco, which is one of the huge state-owned arms manufacturers, and they signed an MOU to build a weapons plant in Nigeria.
On a second trip, Nigerian Air Force’s chief of the air staff, Air Marshal Hassan Bala Abubakar, he visited China from April 20th to the 25th, and those discussions reportedly focused on technologies essential to the implementation, now this is a name here, of the military total radar coverage of Nigeria. That’s the METRICON initiative. So this kind of comes on top of the fact that the Nigerians have already purchased JF-17 fighters, they’ve purchased CH-4 drones, they have troop transports, and the Nigerians are looking more and more to the Chinese to buy arms.
And this is part of a much larger trend, where China last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, which is the most reputable weapons research and arms sales research institute in the world, said that at least 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa received large deliveries of Chinese arms between 2019 and 2023, and China now is either the number one or number two, depending on how you count it, arms supplier to sub-Saharan Africa.
So Cobus, this was a story that you followed this week, what’s your takeaway from those deals in Nigeria?
COBUS VAN STADEN: So, this is quite an interesting development. The minister that you mentioned, who traveled to China recently, that was a follow-up to a Norinco delegation that visited Nigeria in March. And they signed a memorandum of understanding then, and he’s now finalized it now.
And that is not only for arms trade, it’s actually to set up a factory in Nigeria. So it’s actually arms manufacturing happening in Nigeria. On top of that, they’re also very interested in technology transfer.
So the manufacturing agreement also includes training and some forms of tech transfer. And that is partly also focused on, as you were saying, this kind of like setting up this huge kind of air defense and radar system.
ERIC OLANDER: Let me just read from the MOU. You’ve mentioned a couple of things. So from the MOU, it says technology transfer, facilitating the transfer of cutting-edge defense technology to Nigeria, local production, that’s the factory you talked about, establishing local manufacturing capabilities for advanced military equipment, and capacity building, providing technical knowledge exchange to enhance the skills of Nigerian personnel.
So that’s from the MOU.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so what was clearly involved there is from the Nigerian side, there’s interest in building up this local capacity and having some control over things like ammunition production.
But from Norinco’s side, there’s clearly also interest in a more regional footprint and, you know, possibly selling to other parts of the African market. So as you were saying, China is a big arms provider to sub-Saharan Africa, but globally it’s still a relatively small player. And so now I think, you know, part of its prominence in Africa is, you know, because I think so many African countries, you know, find it difficult to buy arms elsewhere, particularly now that Russia has kind of retreated from some of that space.
So there’s clearly this kind of interest, I think, among Chinese arms industry to develop that market. And what we’ve also seen over the last while is that there’s been quite a lot of interest, I think, from other African countries. There’s been all this kind of drip feed of announcements of drone buys here and there, and particularly a lot of buys in North Africa.
Algeria, every few weeks there seems to be some kind of announcement, something bought in Algeria.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. Algeria is taking a lot. But be also careful when you look at these headlines that a lot of the weapons coming into North Africa, particularly a place like Libya, are actually Chinese weapons from the United Arab Emirates that are being brought in.
So it’s not actually the North African countries themselves who are bringing it in. Gérôme, one of the headlines we’ve seen in recent weeks is that the Congolese now want to purchase more CH-4 attack drones. They purchased already a batch, but were those shot down?
GERAUD NEEMA: Yes, they were all shot down. They were destroyed. They are now purchasing other drones, not CH-4.
CH-4 was from another Chinese manufacturer. They are now purchasing three others, one from a different Chinese manufacturer. All of them stayed on companies.
Still in the same context where you do have training provided, not technology transfer, but training provided in a way that they can operate that. Just to follow up what Cobusaf was saying and what also you have been saying yourself, we also mentioned the J-10. Egypt is now also buying the J-10.
And mind you, Egypt is now in the bind, in a difficult relationship with the United States.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on, hold on, hold on. The Chinese government came out very clear and said they are not selling to Egypt.
There was a lot of rumors going back and forth. I spoke with Reuters about this, that, you know, very confusing situation whether Egypt is going to buy the J-10 or not. One of the reasons why I told Reuters that I don’t think they’re going to buy the J-10 is remember that Egypt is one of the top three recipients of US military assistance.
GERAUD NEEMA: But the US has cut two billions of dollars of military aid to Egypt as well.
ERIC OLANDER: They may have, but there’s still a lot of US military assistance going. And I don’t think the Americans would be thrilled with the Egyptians buying the J-10s.
GERAUD NEEMA: Keep it in the Hamas context and all the Gaza situation, the Trump plan for Gaza. When you put all of that in context, you do really have a context where Egypt can really now see China as a very interesting alternative to the F-17 they’ve been buying from the United States as well. So moving on from Egypt, we also see the same thing in Cote d’Ivoire as well, where you see now Cote d’Ivoire buying a helicopter from China.
There is a lot of movement of heavy equipment that China is now selling on the ground. You have like 300 million dollars of agreements signed with Chinese companies, with different air force units in Africa to acquire military equipment from China as well.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Just quickly back to Egypt. You know, obviously, yes, as you were saying, they do have this long kind of defense relationship with the US and a lot of this long funding relationship with the US. But obviously also Egypt just finalized a two week long, huge kind of military exercise with China, which really was, you know, set new precedents.
And it involved a lot of training also and using Chinese equipment, you know, because obviously the Chinese army came with Chinese equipment. And at the same time, the pressure that the Trump administration is now putting on Egypt, like the demand that American ships should pass without payment through the Suez Canal, a lot of Egyptian analysts have been linking that to to Egypt’s resistance to the Trump’s Gaza proposal, as Gerard was pointing out. So we may be seeing and it was also very interesting to see the Israeli media was extremely alarmist about these these military exercises in a kind of a US versus China geopolitical framing.
And so, you know, so it seems like some there may be things may be coming to a point in the US-Egypt relationship, I think, around around some of these issues.
ERIC OLANDER: It’s possible. I just urge you not to get ahead of yourselves. The Egyptians in many ways are like the Indians, where they have been masters at playing from all sides, where they were very close to the Russians in the Cold War and the Soviets in the Cold War, but somehow came out of that and then became very close to the Americans because of the relationship with Israel.
And again, this all came up in the media because the Chinese with their J-10Cs flew a beautiful and I mean, it was stunning. If you watch the video air demonstration show over the pyramids. And so that was just, again, an exercise in public diplomacy.
But it got a lot of people talking about seeing these J-10 fighter jets flying over at the same time as they’re performing apparently so well in South Asia. So that’s getting a lot of people talking about this discussion. When we look at the weapons, Cobus, you’ve said that maybe the Egyptians are going to start pushing back on the Americans.
We saw a very defiant move this week in South America where Colombia said it plans to join the Belt and Road Initiative. And at the same time here in Southeast Asia, Vietnam looks like it’s closing in on a deal with the Americans for a trade deal. And so a lot of the big pieces are starting to move.
But this defiance of the United States is very interesting because the only way you can interpret a country like Colombia that depends heavily on the United States for trade and was the subject of one of Donald Trump’s targets early on for retribution and attack, to say that they’re going to join the Belt and Road is remarkable. I just wonder from the vantage point of sitting in Congo or in Kenya or in South Africa, when you see some of this pushback coming, especially you, Cobus, in South Africa, do you feel that there’s momentum to have a similar pushback in Pretoria to some of the abuse that the South Africans have taken from the Americans?
COBUS VAN STADEN: I think at the moment, the South Africans are just trying to kind of ride it out. You know, like everyone is waiting to see what the reciprocal tariffs are going to look like once Trump kind of returns circles back to them. And in the meanwhile, I think they pretty much just laying low.
I think the South Africans have already made their point, right? Like around a lot of this stuff. So there isn’t really that much new they can say.
I don’t particularly think it’s a kind of a groundswell of global South countries, you know, pushing back. I think it’s more of a kind of a piecemeal.
ERIC OLANDER: No, no, no. Certainly don’t want to give that impression. But even one or two pushing back is kind of interesting, taking into account that we’re still only three months into the Trump administration.
So this is still very young.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah. I think also a lot of people are now taking cues from the East Asian plus ASEAN, you know, kind of statement. I think that came out earlier this week.
ERIC OLANDER: Maybe explain that a little bit, because not everybody knows what that is.
COBUS VAN STADEN: So this is very, very wonky. And also, if you want wonkiness, read that and read that communique. It’s like almost impenetrable if you’re not like a PhD in economics.
But it was a joint statement put out by what’s a grouping called ASEAN plus three, which is the Association for Southeast Asian Nations and China, South Korea and Japan. And they essentially aligned themselves, saying that they reject the current Trump administration’s approach. They plan to set up essentially a kind of a liquidity support fund, which they provided a lot of money for, which essentially operates like a kind of a second IMF, like an Asia centric IMF.
They plan to trade a lot more with each other. They all put the weight behind ASEP, the huge trade bloc. And they say that they plan to trade in local currencies.
So it’s a very, very notable moment where as close to US ally as Japan has come the closest to talking about something like de-dollarization, you know, like you all be it in code. So I think that was a real notable moment. And I don’t think, you know, obviously the rest of the world doesn’t have the kind of economic weight that East Asia and Southeast Asia has, particularly when they come together.
But still, I think the fact that they overcame that, that traditional kind of pecking order between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, I think that itself, I think, is very notable.
ERIC OLANDER: But let me bring this back to both of you. What lessons do you think African countries should be taking now from East Asia, from other parts of the world that are now doing these negotiations or now going their own way? Again, we’ve talked over the years about the lack of US literacy and China literacy in many African capitals.
This week, I had a conversation with somebody at the AFDB, and I was, you know, shocked and I shouldn’t be shocked anymore, but he’s an old friend of mine. But I asked him, I said, what’s your China competency? What are you guys doing to improve your understanding of China?
And he said, nothing, nothing. They’re not doing anything. And again, to me, one of the big lessons out of what the Vietnamese are doing is, number one, they moved aggressively.
They were first in line. Number two is that they’re really studying the situation. There’s a lot of effort to understand the Chinese, the Americans, the position, so you can enhance your own negotiating position.
What are African governments doing in this regard? Now, again, we talked about Kenya. Kenya, you know, did a great job in their negotiations for the Standard Gauge Railway.
So there is some competency. I don’t want to say it’s completely a blank slate, but I just wonder how much they’re investing in this knowledge development, you know.
GERAUD NEEMA: I don’t think there is enough competency in a sense where this kind of competency that those African countries do need to be able to exist and to navigate the current circumstances. And I think that there’s not much money or political impetus that people do have in those capitals to invest in that. Because let’s face it, in many of those countries, the diplomatic strategy and the foreign policy is not driven by an ideology, in a constructive, organized diplomacy, but much more from the, you know, the humor or, I mean, the feeling of the one who’s the head of state, how he wants to move forward.
And this is where you don’t see a structural organization where they say, we want to build competency on China, on Russia, on the United States, on those great power competition. We don’t do that. And we even had that discussion a few weeks back when we were in Salzburg, when we talked with some stakeholders who were present, they told us, yes, we don’t have that kind of competency.
We don’t have where the African Union or the AFDB or other African countries or African organizations are putting in place structure where they want to become expert on China, on the U.S. and all of that. Personally, I do think it’s just a reflection of the governance in general. Our governance is not really fact-based, organized in a way that we want to have those kind of, to put those kind of structure.
I don’t think it’s something that we don’t want to, I think this is just a reflection about all governance in general as it look, as it is. And to answer one of the point that you raised, what lessons we should be learning, they could learn, they could learn the fact that you have much more power in groups when you look into how you organize, how weak you are individually. So that’s the ASEAN thing that Cobus was talking about, negotiate as a bloc.
Exactly. The ASEAN thing, you say, negotiate as a bloc, but how African can negotiate as a bloc when its own regional economic organizations are weakened, its own continental organization, the AU, is weakened, its own structure, the ACFTA is not really structured in any possible way. So we know in paper what we need to do to move forward, but in practice, we don’t have the tools, we don’t have the expertise to be able to move forward.
So that’s why I do believe that at the end, it’s going to be each country trying to negotiate its own survival. And in the case, since we’re talking about Africa, the Diocese is going to be the case. Do you really expect in the current circumstances that President Felix Tshisekedi is going to go in a grouping approach with other African countries to push against Donald Trump, knowing that he’s betting on the Trump administration to save his regime?
I don’t believe so. So we’re going to see those kind of move where individual leaders are going to play their own card to survive. Cobus, what’s your take?
COBUS VAN STADEN: I agree that the Diocese is this kind of outlier, I think, in this case, and South Africa maybe as well. But like, I think for the majority of other African countries, I don’t know if there’s really any, even if it’s really worth even expending the energy to try and make a deal with the U.S. because it seems so remote, you know, there’s almost no chance. There’s not much trade that’s done with the U.S., right? You have no leverage, like Trump can’t even be bothered to find the country on the map, you know. So I think in a lot of ways, it really is the moment, I think, for them to speed up the integration of, you know, through the AFCFDA and to kind of like develop some kind of collective goals. But I think everyone can hear how cynical we are about that, you know, because the thing is in Africa, like it’s so frequently people have little fiefdoms, you know, and that’s their number one priority is protecting the little fiefdom, and they’re always willing to undermine collectivity to do that, you know, because Africans frequently don’t like each other, you know, like from different African countries, you know, they have longstanding beef, so.
ERIC OLANDER: I mean, but that’s not unique to Africans, though, by the way. Most regions around the world, I mean, you see that kind of tensions, certainly out here in Southeast Asia as well, where people just, maybe they don’t know each other, they don’t like each other, they have suspicions of one another, they’re just very, very different. Can we link stories number one and stories number two together?
We talked at the top about how Norinco is going to build a weapons factory in Nigeria. Is it possible then that if weapons are being built in Nigeria, could they be sold across Africa through the AFCFDA and taking advantage of that? Why not?
Exactly. It reduces the import bill. Cobus, I mean.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yeah, efficiency is increased, yes.
GERAUD NEEMA: And it won’t be the first one because Norinco is already building a weapon manufacturer with Uganda, so it’s not really, it won’t be the first one.
ERIC OLANDER: A bullet is the same kind of product as a phone, right? I mean, it’s just a product.
GERAUD NEEMA: But interestingly enough, you’ll find out that if Norinco does that, you’ll see Niger approaching Norinco to say, I want you to do the same thing with me, for me. You’ll see another country in the region, I want you to build the same manufacturer. At the end, Norinco is going to win because Norinco is going to find a lot of weapon manufacture on the continent, but you won’t have that kind of security in trade integration happening where weapon manufactured in Nigeria are sold in Ghana, are sold in Oman.
ERIC OLANDER: But why not though? I don’t understand.
GERAUD NEEMA: Because each of them would want to have its own weapon manufacturer.
ERIC OLANDER: I know, but they’re not all going to get Norinco countries. I mean, it’s not like an Oprah giveaway where you get a factory, you get a factory, you know.
GERAUD NEEMA: Because at the end, it has to play to the point that Cobus made. It’s about that each African country, most of them, they don’t trust each other. They cannot rely on each other for their own security.
You cannot be like, I’m going to expect for weapon manufactured in Cote d’Ivoire, arriving in Burkina Faso, for Burkina Faso to feel safe. No, I don’t trust that because the next day, Cote d’Ivoire is going to say, you know what? We’re going to shut down the border.
We’re not going to sell the weapon to Burkina Faso. I’m going to find myself in danger. So I’d rather have Norinco does the same thing in Burkina Faso as well.
So I can have my own weapon manufacturer for myself.
ERIC OLANDER: Or they just buy direct from China, you know, using the military equivalent of Aliexpress. Very quickly, before we move on, we have one last topic. I just want to bring everybody’s attention that our climate editor Njenga Hakena has done a fantastic report from Nigeria about how the Nigerians introduced this policy a couple of weeks ago to ban all solar imports.
And they wanted to make their own. And then three to four weeks later, they reversed the ban. And the motivation was to try and build up their own domestic industry.
And apparently, the motivation was also to try and negotiate with the Chinese to force them to kind of invest in Nigeria. What they actually have come to is they’re now revising their policy so that they’re incentivizing joint manufacturing between Chinese companies and Nigerian companies to produce solar panels. So but it kind of brings up one of the points we talked about earlier.
And we’ve talked about many times on the show that it is going to be next to impossible for any African country or any developing country to get into a product category that the Chinese are very competitive with. And you’re not going to make a solar panel cheaper than what the Chinese can do it because you don’t have the subsidies, you don’t have the technology, you don’t have the labor, the skilled labor and whatnot. But I encourage everybody to go check out that story on our website.
I’ll put it in the show notes. Last topic, and this is a good one for you, Gérôme, because you are in Washington. Kobes, you and I brought this up on our Tuesday show, on the Global South show.
And it struck me that it did not get any attention that the White House has submitted its budget to Congress. Let me be very, very clear that when the White House submits a budget to Congress, that is just the White House saying, this is what we want to do. It’s up to the US Congress to decide whether or not it actually happens or not.
They have what they call the power of the purse. In the fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget submitted to Congress last week, they proposed to scrap $555 million of funding earmarked for the African Development Bank and its concessional fund. The White House is calling this a, quote, realignment.
This is some reporting, by the way, from the Africa report in order to reflect Trump’s America first agenda. The United States is currently the third largest bilateral donor to the African Development Bank behind Germany with $670 million and France with $611 million. Wow, that felt like a big story to me.
Nobody else picked up on it. Nobody talked about it. And also, I don’t know if maybe someone in our audience can confirm this, but I think that China’s $2 billion Africa Growing Together fund has also expired.
And so here we are. The African Development Bank is struggling to get some of these big funders. Cobus, why do you think that this story did not gain much traction in the corners that you think it normally would?
Is it because we’re all just shell-shocked and kind of used to the US kind of pulling out of these kinds of things? Or is there something else going on?
COBUS VAN STADEN: I think so. I think it’s part of the kind of flooding zone reality of the Trump administration, that there’s so many announcements of this kind that when you hear it, you’re like, oh, didn’t they already withdraw? It has that kind of weird false déjà vu effect.
And so it’s that. I think it’s also kind of exhaustion, I think, also on the African side. But I think it also reflects, even though, obviously, as you were pointing out, it’s a big amount of money in terms of the African Development Bank’s budget.
But it’s not objectively so much money in terms of sums of money in the world. I would just compare it to, for example, the $12 to $13 billion that the US has sent to Israel over the last, I think, two years. So even before it was yanked, it reflected the kind of low prioritization of African development, I think, in US budgets and in the world.
And the kind of yanking then kind of reconfirmed that. So there was a weird kind of prophecy foretold kind of feeling to it, I think.
ERIC OLANDER: They say that they’re going to pledge $3.2 billion to the International Development Association, which is the World Bank’s concessional lending arm. So they’re going to boost up their spending there. That may actually end up in Africa.
Also, they’re going to boost development finance corporation funding as well, the DFC. So that’s been very active in Africa as well. Geraud, when you’re in Washington, does anybody care?
I think we’ll see if anybody’s care about it.
GERAUD NEEMA: I don’t think that a lot of people do care about what Trump did about Africa, about that budget. And the reality is, I think it’s good news. Let’s face it, I’m a cynical in that regard, where I do not find it normal for a bank called AFDB, a continental bank for AFDB, that its main shareholders are foreign countries.
I don’t find it normal. I’m sorry.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. I think something like 40% of the reserves are controlled by foreign entities outside of Africa.
GERAUD NEEMA: Exactly. I don’t find it normal. I’m really against that idea of keeping on maintaining, of babysitting continental organization for countries where we do know that we have money.
We do know that each African country has enough money to put on the table for the AFDB to be completely and totally funded by African countries. But somehow over the years, we found it normal. It’s easy for France, for the US, for Germany to fund us, AFDB.
And we talk about independence. We talk about autonomization. We talk about our own organization.
It just plays the same thing where we find it normal for China to build our ECOWAS headquarters.
ERIC OLANDER: African Union, Africa CDC, Kenya Foreign Ministry. We can go down the list.
GERAUD NEEMA: Come on. At some point, someone needs to say, why am I doing that? I mean, why am I, me as the United States, putting $500 million on a thing called AFDB?
Why should I be doing that? And I think it’s good news. And I think it’s good news.
And I think that France should follow through. Germany should also follow through. For African countries to start to think that, you know what?
We cannot be taken seriously into any kind of negotiation where we sit on the table where your vis-a-vis knows that, what are you talking about? If it’s not for my money, you have nothing to tell me on this table. So I don’t think that we should be crying over it.
I think, yes, it did a good thing. And I think that other countries should follow through. If they don’t, we’re just going to keep on finding normal for African countries to sit down and receiving money for consulting organisations from third-party countries.
I don’t think normal. I’m sorry.
COBUS VAN STADEN: I would add to that, that I think if it were a situation that some of these countries are using these payments to, you know, they’re developing Africa as part of kind of restitution of historical crimes, very clear historical crimes, then that was one thing, right? But we all know that’s not the situation. We know that these…
ERIC OLANDER: Never going to happen, Cobus. Never going to happen. The King of Belgium couldn’t bring himself to, you know, never going to happen.
COBUS VAN STADEN: We know that these payments are used as a form of leverage and a form of control. They function to keep Africa in its structural position, not to develop it. They’re in some ways anti-development funds.
So in that sense, then, you know, kind of what I would like to see, like if, you know, kind of following Giraud’s logic, what I would like to see is not only, like if, say, these other countries kind of withdraw from that space, what I would like to see go with them is any say about African governance, any say about how Africa should run anything. Like, you know, kind of like that era, I want that era to be over. I don’t want Europe or the US to have any say about what Africa is doing because they don’t have the money there then.
ERIC OLANDER: But guys, you are 100% aligned with what Marco Rubio and Donald Trump is saying. They don’t want to have any say in African governance. They say, this is your problem, not theirs.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Yes, but the big problem is that we want to see, like the logic behind what we’re saying is that we want to see a retreat of US power from the continent. That’s not what they want.
ERIC OLANDER: But you are, but you literally are. I mean, the Americans are pulling out. They’ve said, we don’t care about Africa.
They want to close AFRICOM if it was up to Donald Trump. He’s closed USAID. He wants to, he’s getting out of AFDB.
He’s going to leave you alone. I mean, he doesn’t, he’s going to walk away and he’s not going to care what happens in Tanzania.
GERAUD NEEMA: Me continuing that path? Yeah, it should be continued in that path. Personally, when I’m here in D.C., I talk to people, I say, guys, I’m really happy because at some point someone needs, something needed to give in to allow African to have to wonder what can we do to move forward. And so far, cutting USAID, I think, I know from a humanitarian perspective, it’s going to hurt a lot of people on the ground that really depended on those aid to be able to survive. I think the IDPs isn’t part of the DRC, but the reality overall, we cannot keep on babysitting bad governance on the continent by keeping on providing money. Well, we do know perfectly that those countries have enough money to fund those organizations.
Someone needs to say that. Someone needs to say, you know what? DRC, we’re going to cut the aid.
You know what? AFDB, I’m sorry. You don’t really need for three countries to put $1.5 billion on the table for you to fund your budget. You do have enough African countries with enough money to put on the table. But the problem is you don’t believe in those organizations well enough to say, you know what? We want to fund them.
We want them to be powerful enough. That’s the reality of Africa. We don’t believe in those organizations ourselves.
ERIC OLANDER: Why then does the Kenyan government accept a new foreign ministry building from the Chinese? Why does the Zimbabwean government accept a parliament from the Chinese?
GERAUD NEEMA: I don’t understand. We’ve mentioned that a few weeks ago.
ERIC OLANDER: And if you talk about this national pride and this Pan-African pride, yet there’s more than 180 government buildings that have been built and gifted. So, Cobus, I think you would probably say the same thing about the Chinese. These are not benevolent gifts, despite what they say.
There’s all, I mean, you’re not giving millions of dollars to build infrastructure simply because it comes out of the warmness of your heart, right? It’s insulting.
GERAUD NEEMA: I mean, I mentioned ECOWAS. ECOWAS headquarters in Nigeria. It was $36.2 million built by China. Do you want to tell me Nigeria or ECOWAS country do not have $36.2 million to build that? But somehow we fund it normally. It’s okay to let China say it’s a gift.
So why do they do it? Why do they accept it? Some gift, you have to say.
That the thing I don’t understand. This is the, we’ve been criticizing them. And this is the thing I say, there is at some point you have to say, you know, I’m going to say no to certain gift.
Well, how much is it? I’m sorry. We have enough money to build that.
You are Kenyans and you go to China. You are happy to say I’ve signed an MOU where China is going to be my foreign affair minister. When you look into the budget, how much is it?
50 million, 65 million, 122 million. I said, guys, come on. Let’s be serious here.
Let’s be serious here. And I think that we are not serious enough with our own independence. We’re not serious enough with our own pride.
We’re not serious enough with our own autonomy to say there are things that we can do by our own, ourselves, we can fund them, but we don’t do them. And I believe that having someone like Trump at some point say, you know what? Why should I be caring about what’s up in Africa?
Needs to happen for certain African country to start thinking of like what we need to do for our own. If no one does that, no one will do.
ERIC OLANDER: Cobus, you’re going to get the last word on this.
COBUS VAN STADEN: I think for a lot of African policymakers, I think it’s kind of the lesser of two evils, right? For them, they only have so much money in their budget and they need to get all of these different things done. And so, you know, like sometimes you kind of hold your nose and accept this kind of gift.
GERAUD NEEMA: I think- No, Cobus, they have enough money. The reality is they have enough money. They’re just wasting those money for things that don’t make sense.
They have enough money.
COBUS VAN STADEN: Well, exactly. The money is there. It’s just going to places they prefer to put it, right?
Which in some cases is a kind of a corruption problem. In other cases, it’s an inefficiency problem, et cetera. So I think it’s obviously, as Jeroz was pointing out, it’s a political world problem, right?
But with that also comes, if you look at what it would take, for example, to keep more money on the continent, right? If you look at, for example, illicit financial flows, then you realize that only a fraction, a sizeable fraction, but still only a fraction of that money is actually through this kind of old school corruption, right? This kind of like ferreting, you know, kind of state money away to tax shelters, sort of Sani Abacha style, you know.
A lot more of it has to do with the difficulty, for example, to make multinational corporations pay the kind of taxes that they have to pay. One of the things that I think really frustrates me, right, is the kind of money we’re talking about is actually, as Jeroz was saying, is actually not that much money, right? Kind of like this kind of one and a half billion dollars, you know, kind of for AFD, it’s nothing, right?
It’s really, it’s back pocket change for Elon Musk, right? So there’s an artificial smallness that’s imposed on Africa because it’s this kind of logic of scarcity, where within which they all have to try and kind of get a little bit of, you know, of the little bit of money that’s going around. In order to increase that pie and to increase the revenue, they then kind of have to, not only firstly, they’re going to have to like integrate and like build up these institutions and get legal teeth to do it, but then what the longer term thing is they’re going to have to start picking real fights with some of these multinational companies, with some of these like global North governments.
That’s, there lies the real thing, I think. You know, kind of like once you’re starting to talk about like what it takes to have a company, like, okay, I’m just taking one out of a hat, like Glencore, for example, to pay the kinds of money and revenues that they really actually need to pay to these governments, then you’re talking a big fight with Wall Street and you’re picking a big fight with the American government and, you know, and other global North governments. So I think that is where, that is the fight that Africa will have to have in order to become more empowered.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, if this week is anything to go by, 92-year-old Cameroonian dictator, Paul BiYa, was welcomed at Elysee Palace with a very warm handshake. And Cobus, I do not see these African leaders and, you know, picking a fight with Macron at the Elysee Palace, right?
COBUS VAN STADEN: Well, some of them have picked fights with Macron.
GERAUD NEEMA: Like, you know, Macron hasn’t been fight-proof. They pick and choose that they don’t take the kind of fight that can really threaten their own regime, their own power. They don’t do that.
They don’t. They pick and choose the kind of fight where they can say, I’m independent, I’m fighting for African independence, but they will never pick the kind of fight where the French can say, you know what? You have a castle here, you have a private hotel, you have billions of dollars of cars here in my country and you are still getting aid from me?
Come on. They don’t do that. They pick and choose the kind of fight they want.
ERIC OLANDER: I mean, I used to live in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and a lot of my neighbors were African landlords with ministers with beautiful cars. And it was really quite impressive to see what was there. Just a little footnote here of all that money, $89 billion left Africa in illicit financial flows last year alone.
So to Giroud’s point, if that $89 billion was actually captured somehow, both through better taxation and also just through transparency and better governance, you could solve a lot of the continent’s problems very quickly.
COBUS VAN STADEN: I mean, imagine what the AFDB would look like if it had that money.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, imagine what the Africa CDC, imagine all of these regional and multilateral organizations. So if you look at the problem, it comes down to governance. But gentlemen, both of you at different times have said that, you know, especially you, Giroud, that, you know, the distance between the rulers and the ruled in Africa is one of the widest in the world.
And that African leaders, and not all, and we’ve had really impressive, you know, democratic advances in Africa, much more so than in many other parts of the world. And that’s very important to note. However, in a group as large as Africa’s at 54, 55 countries, a lot of diversity.
You’re from a country, Giroud, where the president doesn’t always care about the welfare of his own people. So a lot of times this isn’t really about, you know, doing what’s in the best interest of your people.
GERAUD NEEMA: And I say that, and I’m gonna say it again, I do not find it normal for a country like the DRC, my own country, receiving aid when my president is wearing watches of 300,000 US dollars. I’m sorry, I do not find it normal. And I will find it normal if he goes somewhere, they tell them, you know what, Mr. President, with all the respect, we’re not going to fund you. We’re not going to give you aid. Because when we look at your watch, we realize that it’s a, you know, it’s a small hospital somewhere in the outskirt of Kinshasa, in the outskirt of Lubumbashi and Mujimayo, Katanga, but still wearing a watch of 300,000 US dollars. So we’re not going to do that.
But the reality is, in the international community, kind of, everyone kind of agrees that that’s normal, you know, we’re gonna, I mean, come on, that’s not normal. I’m really happy that those kind of moves are happening now in Africa.
ERIC OLANDER: If folks wanna get a sense of how kind of nerdy and weird we are as a group of people, this was a slow week in the China-Africa news space. And yet, we had no problem filling an hour of time. And so, that is what happens here.
And Cobus, I mean, this goes right back to 2010, when you and I thought to each other, like, how the hell are we gonna fill, you know, podcasts going on a weekly basis? And yet, here we are, all these years later, closing in on 1,000 episodes. So, it doesn’t even take a busy news week to keep us, you know, full of bluster as we did this week.
So, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today. And also, just wanna remind everybody that if you wanna see the fantastic work that Jiro and Cobus and Lucy and the whole team that are doing around the world, go to ChinaglobalSouth.com, and we would desperately appreciate your support. We’re like every other media organization out there.
You know, I’ll be honest with you, hang in by a thread. This is no guarantee that we survive, you know, in the long run. We’ve been around, we’ve been doing very well up until now, but these are difficult times for all media.
And so, your support makes a huge difference for us. Go to ChinaglobalSouth.com slash subscribe. We are so grateful to our subscribers and our Patreon supporters around the world who support independent media and want to have this great information that Jiro and Cobus work on so hard every day.
Once again, ChinaglobalSouth.com slash subscribe. And just a reminder, if you are a student or a teacher, and I say this every week, and every week we get new subscribers who are students and teachers. So, email me eric at ChinaglobalSouth.com and I will send you the half-off discount links. So, for Jiro in Washington and Cobus in Cape Town, I’m Eric Olander. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China in Africa podcast. Until then, bye for now.
