Bring on the Chinese

A few months ago, at the height of the Christmas shopping season, Oxfam encouraged us Britons to give “the gift of dung” to Africa. That’s right: dung. Apparently poor African farmers like nothing better at Christmas time than to receive a bucket of shit with which they can fertilise their crops.

Oxfam called on British consumers to donate some of their Christmas shopping money to its new campaign to send “funusual” gifts to poor parts of Africa. Alongside the gift of crap, you could also lavish poor Africans with the gift of condoms (“Rubberly jubberly!” said the Oxfam website), five bags of seeds (“We’re sacks maniacs!”) or a goat (“a mobile source of income”).

“Buy someone a gift related to Oxfam’s work and make a real difference to the world,” the charity yelped.

Contrast this “funusual” approach to Third World development with the work of Chinese businessmen and officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, BBC TV’s Newsnight revealed that the Chinese have a signed a trade deal with the DRC worth a whopping $9-billion. As part of this package, the Chinese will help to build 2 400 miles of road, 2 000 miles of railway, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres and two universities in the DRC.

Now, if you were (or are) a poor African struggling to make ends meet, who would you prefer to see treading a path to your village? A worthy, well-spoken NGO volunteer from Islington in London laden with the gifts of shit, contraception, goats and seed? Or a Chinese guy in a suit wielding plans to build roads and factories and schools and in the process create thousands of new jobs?

I thought so. Bring on the Chinese.

China’s trading with Africa has given rise to a great deal of tortured, handwringing debate in Western commentary circles. A few weeks ago the Economist, the bible of Western capitalism, ran a front cover showing a Chinese man riding through an African desert on a camel, under the heading: “The new colonialists”. Others complain that China simply wants to get its hands on Africa’s resources and is not really interested in African welfare.

Yet one spin-off consequence of Chinese investment in Africa has not been properly commented on: the way that it has implicitly undermined the arguments of leading Western charities and NGOs.

For more than a decade now, groups such as Oxfam have tried to convince us that poor Africa needs small-scale, sustainable development, and that caring Western consumers can change an African child’s life forever by sending him a pencil or a cutlass. Westerners have tended to believe that for the price of a Starbucks latté they can have a meaningful impact on an African person’s well-being and future prospects.

In one fell swoop, the Chinese have nuked these rather patronising ideas by showing that it is possible to build massive infrastructure in poor Africa, and what’s more, that Africans want this kind of investment. The spread of Chinese trading in Africa is causing a severe crisis of confidence among sustainable-minded Western charity and aid workers.

China’s trade with Africa has grown exponentially in recent years. Between 2002 and 2006, it rose from $12-billion to $40-billion. In December 2005, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao confidently predicted that Chinese trade with Africa would increase to $100-million by 2010. This has meant more jobs for Africans and more infrastructure in their towns and cities. And not surprisingly, many African officials and workers seem happier dealing with the no-nonsense, large-scale Chinese than with the small-scale NGO representatives who often hail from former colonial powers.

The policy of the Chinese government is to trade with Africa on “the principles of independence, equality, mutual respect and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs”. Contrast that to the attitude of Western NGOs and financial institutions, who often attach various strings to their aid: they demand that African governments must be more “transparent” and that African adults must agree to be “sexually responsible” before they can receive their Western handouts. As one British writer argues, “China’s anti-colonial approach and its ability to ‘get the job done’ has clear appeal” for African leaders who for a very long time have had to “jump through hoops” in order to receive a bit of cash from Western organisations.

Sahr Johnny, Sierra Leone’s ambassador to Beijing, put it well in an interview in 2005. He said: “We like Chinese investment because we have one meeting where we discuss what they want to do, and they just do it. There are no benchmarks and preconditions, no environmental impact assessment.” This makes a dramatic change from the form-filling, impact-measuring culture of Western aid to Africa, where Africans must continually prove their goodness and honesty in return for the gift of dung or some extra farming equipment.

Western activists and commentators have responded to China’s rise in Africa by trying to problematise the idea of “trade without strings”. BBC News recently complained that China offers “no-strings aid”, which is “a marked contrast to Western donors who impose conditions on aid and tie trade sweeteners to human rights issues”.

Human Rights Watch seems to believe that China’s non-political trading and aiding with Africa will nurture more dictatorships on the continent: “China’s growing foreign aid programme creates new options for [African] dictators who were previously dependent on those who insisted on human rights progress.” In short, Chinese investment is a problem because, unlike “enlightened” Western investment, it doesn’t use financial and political blackmail as a way of keeping African rulers in line. With attitudes like that among Western human rights activists, it is no wonder many Africans are welcoming the Chinese with open arms.

Western observers should have more faith in poor Africans and their leaders. If Africans want to deal with Chinese investors who treat them as adults rather than as victims, good for them. And if they are exploited by their Chinese employers, as many no doubt are, then they are more than capable of standing up for themselves — as demonstrated by the recent riots over poor pay in Chinese-owned factories in Zambia. It is time for Oxfam and others to cut the apron strings: Africans are grown-up enough to determine their own futures, and to decide who they want to work with.