Related Posts

The Complicated Role Chinese Business Plays in Kenyan Corruption

One of the many simple, widely-believed narratives about the Chinese in Africa is that PRC businesses fuel corruption across the continent. That caricature, although overly-simplistic, is amplified by China's insistence there be little to no transparency in ...

Continental Shift: How China is Changing Africa

In their new book "Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa's 21st Century," South African authors Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak embarked on 14-country odyssey across two continents over a span of five years to report on ...

China's Role in Africa's "Looting Machine"

China goes to great lengths to differentiate its engagement in Africa from the continent's former European colonizers by emphasizing so-called "win-win development." Chinese leaders regularly visit Africa where they emphatically reject the accusation of neo-colonialism and that Beijing is only interested in exploiting the ...

The Dark Side of Chinese Investment in Africa

Sam Pa is a mysterious man, largely unknown to the outside world. Yet Pa, who goes by at least 7 different aliases, represents the nefarious side of China's engagement in Africa. Sam Pa and his associates in the Hong Kong-based consortium known as the ...

Sam Pa, China's Mysterious Middleman in Africa

Publicly China's engagement in Africa is based on "mutual benefit" or, as Chinese officials like to phrase it "win win." Behind the scenes, though, it's a little more complicated. Many of those multibillion dollar natural resource-for-infrastructure deals have been arranged by mysterious middlemen like ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

Plugging into African Agency

After several years of declining funding, the African end of the Belt and Road Initiative seems to be roaring back. The newest Griffith University/Green Development Finance Center data on the Belt and Road Initiative shows that engagement with Africa jumped by 395%, while a few big projects boosted engagement in Nigeria alone more than twelvefold.

These shifts indicate a window of opportunity for African electrification. 60% of Africans still lack ...