China is Everywhere in Africa

"The Chinese are everywhere," writes a friend who is a missionary in Tanzania. News of China building sports stadiums, roads, railroads, pipelines, ports, bridges, hospitals, schools, and office buildings throughout the continent confirms her observation. China enjoys a reputation of making the lowest bid, not requiring local reforms, and bringing projects in on time.

     A consortium of companies led by the China Communications Construction Company broke ground this year on its $478.9 million contract to build the first three berths on phase one of a $5 billion infrastructure project on Kenya's coast at Manda Bay. To the Chinese, the islands of Lamu, Manda, and Pate that lay just off Africa's Indian Ocean coast may have resembled the Hong Kong and Macau areas of China.

     When completed in 2030, the Lamu area will be a deep-sea port hub with 32-berths, a pipeline to oil fields in Kenya (10 billion barrel reserve) and Uganda (2 billion barrels), a natural gas power plant, and a railroad that runs south to the Mombasa-Nairobi line and north to link landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan to the Lamu port. The latter link would help free South Sudan's oil shipments from depending on Sudan's northern pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.

     Security at the Lamu project is a major concern. Islamic extremists, the Shabab from Somalia, killed in Lamu county in 2014 and at a Nairobi shopping mall in 2013. Earlier, violence left 1000 people dead and another 600,000 displaced during the 2007 election of Kenya's president, Uhuru Kenyatta. Poaching of elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns for art objects and folk medicine in China, Vietnam, and Thailand continues to reduce Africa's wildlife population. One Chinese woman was jailed in Kenya for two and a half years for trying to smuggle 15 pounds of ivory pieces onto a Kenya Airways flight by claiming they were macadamia nuts.

     Originally, China's interest in Africa resembled that of the Europeans who carved up the continent in the 19th century. They were intent on extracting raw materials. While it is true that China still builds roads in Ghana to mine gold and into Mozambique to cut timber, the forecast of three billion people added to the continent's population between 2000 and 2100, now also motivates China to open manufacturing plants in Africa and to develop a market for its exports. Some African manufacturers suffer by not being able to compete with China, but resellers benefit from higher profits on, for example, Chinese shoes, motorbikes, smartphones, and counterfeit goods. In return, China is a market for Africa's tea, cut flowers, and, of course, chemicals, minerals, and lumber. But China's infrastructure improvements will not benefit China alone. They will be open to all marketers who see an opportunity to get more goods in and out of Africa.