China's growing influence in Africa is the continent's new slavery curse: Zimbabwe is already caught in China's mouse trap!

The Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is on his visit to Africa said China’s relationship with Africa is based on equality and mutual benefit. What is he on about?

 

Whilst the Chinese economy has grown in leaps and bounds in the last 20 years lifting millions of Chinese out of poverty Africa’s economy has hardly moved. Whatever little growth Africa’s enjoyed on the back of China’s growth it has been short term and, worse still, at the cost of its long term interests.

 

China has flooded Africa with mass produced low tech products; the kind of products Africa was producing already or should be looking at producing to get its foot on the industrial ladder. Right across Africa millions of workers have lost their jobs as local industries have been forced to close because their products could not compete with mass produced products from China. Millions of Africans are now earning a living in the informal sector selling all manner of cheap Chinese goods.

 

Africa’s trade with China has grown in leaps and bounds in terms of the volumes of raw materials being harvested from Africa and shipped to China to fuel her industrialization. China is now starting to compete with the developed nations on high tech products but has still remained the world’s greatest producer of low tech stuff.

 

China’s willingness to trade with Africa regardless of the individual country’s bad governance record has been Africa’s greatest curse because the continent was hoping the end of the cold war between Russia and the West in the 1990s, at the time China’s industrial recovery was just starting to take root, would focus the spotlight on Africa’s bad governance. Indeed there was a head of steam building only to be lost as China stepping on the stage.

 

Tyrants like Mugabe realised he did not have to hold free and fair elections as long as he could count of Chinese and Russian support on the diplomatic front. China’s economic clout bankrolled the tyrant’s financial requirements. Mugabe needed money and China needed Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth; yes it was a relationship that benefited China and the Zimbabwe tyrant but not the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans whose future and hopes the tyrant was sell cheap for a piece of calico cloth.

 

Africa suffered greatly as millions of Africans were sold as slaves during the slave trade. When that ended, Africa suffered under white colonial exploitation and oppression. It is just 20 years since the last chapter of white colonial domination was closed with the end of apartheid rule in SA and already a new form of very subtle and yet just as damaging neo-colonialism has already taken shape – Chinese.

 

Africa’s future is set; the continent’s experiment with democracy is over China will be using its growing influence to create regimes in Africa after its own Chinese Communist Party image. Africa will supply China with raw materials to fuel her industrialization and world dominance in return for the money to finance the corrupt and tyrannical ruling elite’s wasteful lifestyles and cheap Chinese products for the impoverished masses.

 

God only knows how and when Africa will be able to finally remove these Chinese shackles because countries like Zimbabwe are already up to their ears in debt with China and have sold billions of dollars of mineral wealth and tracks of prime agricultural land to the Chinese already. Zimbabwe is already caught in this Chinese trap of a mountain of debt and Chinese owning most the resources, sold for a song, already!