Africa must stop expecting handouts from China and instead work with Beijing to develop more balanced African economies, the South African government has advised.
A senior government official said that the summit of Focac – the Forum for China Africa Cooperation – which takes place in Sandton next month, would not be a donors’ conference.
South African President Jacob Zuma and Chinese President Xi Jinping will co-chair the sixth Focac which will take place for the first time in Africa at summit level.
Ghulam Asmal, director of Nepad and international partnerships in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, said the list of attendees was not yet final, but that most African leaders were expected to attend.
Asked if Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) – would be among them, he said Sudan had been invited and would decide who would represent it.
Asmal was asked if he expected Xi to announce a major new aid package for Africa, as China had at past Focac meetings.
“We have to get out of that mode of ‘What can Africa get from a relationship?'” he chided. “It’s not about what we can get. It’s what we put in, we will get. And we will get what we ask for. And what we are asking for is development and socio-economic upliftment.”
Although Focac has already added impetus to Africa’s developmental agenda, “South Africa feels China can further strengthen the partnership by assisting Africa’s development in its industrial and manufacturing capacities; the beneficiation of minerals, skills and technology transfers, and local sourcing of materials for cross-border industrial development.”
And he said that Africa wanted to merge the first ten-year implementation plan of its ambitious Agenda 2063 into Focac. South Africa hoped to work very closely with China to realise the AU’s North-South corridor which would connect the Cape to Cairo by road and rail.
South Africa also believed Focac could help implement its own National Development Plan. (NDP)
“The most challenging aspect of the relationship for Africa was to convince our Chinese partners to create more industrial capacity on the continent, to have more beneficiation, and to make this a development relationship rather than one which is extractive of natural resources,” Asmal said.
Changing this unbalanced economic relationship has been a major objective of the African side in Focac for some time. China has been widely criticised for merely exploiting Africa’s raw materials and selling it cheap manufactured goods in return, creating large trade imbalances.
Asmal said China had been responsive to Africa’s appeal for a change in this economic relationship.
Asked if Africa would point to any results of this change, he said there had been some Chinese industrial developments in Ethiopia particularly.
Analysts have also pointed to some Chinese developments in South Africa, especially the joint agreement between the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and China’s Hebei Iron and Steel Group to open a steel mill in Phalaborwa. This would boost manufacture and create jobs in South Africa instead of just exporting raw iron ore.
However, some analysts are sceptical about the claim that China has done much to boost industrialisation and domestic benefication in Africa and especially Ethiopia.
Romain Dittgen, a senior researcher at the SA Institute of International Affairs, said at a Focac briefing that when China talked about beneficiation in Ethiopia it was mainly talking about the Huajin shoe factory in an economic development zone in Addis Ababa, which was beneficiating Ethiopian leather.
Asmal said he expected Xi to announce new industrialisation projects at the summit in Sandton next month where there would also be an exhibition of Chinese-African business partnerships.
Focac will also cover a wide range of other areas of cooperation including peace and security, health, agriculture, cultural exchanges and development.
