Gyude Moore: “China in Africa: An African Perspective”

hi good afternoon we're gonna get started welcome again to another Paulson Institute Harris Public Policy contemporary China speaker series I'm the director of the think tank at the Paulson Institute Damien MA we've been doing this for for for a number of years so I don't think this really needs an introduction if there's some new people here you know you can check out the past five years of our of our of our speaker series we just all hosted on a website and on YouTube but I'm particularly excited for today's talk both the subject and the speaker because over the five years we really haven't touched upon a specific subject which is China and Africa and in the Indian in these intervening five years we've just had we've seen a lot more growth in terms of China Africa relationship we've seen a lot of coverage in media in policy circles and which you've been hearing a lot are words like debt trap or neo colonialism or mercantilism you know the words that tend to be generally pejorative I would I would argue and that's sort of the prevailing view I think out of Washington DC and as always framed around kind of the you know the two superpowers us in China competing in third countries in in Africa so I couldn't I couldn't think of a better speaker today to I think more or less demolish many of these views and I there's no one better equipped for him to do that because he's been on the front lines of the of the Chinese presence in Africa he was formerly the chief of staff did the former president of Liberia as he says the left hand man of the former president not the right hand for the left hand and he was also the Minister of Public Works so he's really literally been on the front lines of dealing with Chinese deals and infrastructure development in Liberia and and and and other parts of the continent and his current research at the Center for Global Development really focuses on this issue so I just can use some highlights I don't want to take up his time I think he's got some very interesting thoughts and yeah and be used to share with all of you so without further ado please welcome Jude a more [Applause] good dusting oh great it's working hi everybody I was enthusiastic oh great great how are you well it's good to be back at this my third time in Chicago I was just telling Damian that when my fellowship at the Center for Global Development ends I probably seek employment in Chicago because seem to like it I have done more events at the University of Chicago then I have done at my alma mater and it's right in DC so it's actually good to be here I think in a lot of ways the publican public's view and perception of China is filtered to two lenses on the one hand American businesses that seek access to Chinese markets or outsource some manufacturing to China are slightly sympathetic in terms of the portrayal of China and the way to see it and so if the American public hears about China from American businesses largely it will be slightly positive if the American public hears about China from the American government that is a little different the unclassified version of the twenty of the US national defense strategy in 2018 January of last year designated China and Russia strategic competitors and consequently in terms of strategic competition then you don't expect the US government to be flowery in the language about the portrayal of China I think an event like this one where a third party I would like to think disinterested but I'll leave that out there a third party who I was just saying to Damien that I hope and whatever happens that both the China and the US benefit but that is not my concern my concern is what is in the best interest of Africa and African countries and I thought I should provide a perspective in terms of China of the relationship between China and in our so I wanted to structure my thoughts in under three headings one of them is that the first one is what I call the inadequacy of Africa's previous relationships and then the second one is the suitability of China as a partner for Africa and third you know going forward what next so China doesn't just show up in Africa right I mean is it China doesn't show up in Africa in a vacuum there when here's what was happening throughout the 90s if you were to ask people anybody who remembers or who was old enough to remember what happened in Africa in the 90s you would know that in the 90s Africa was a place of the first things that were happening on the continent in the 90s were wars a lot of civil wars Black Hawk Down the Rwandan genocide the Liberian Civil War the Syria Union Civil War what was called Africa's World War when Rwanda Zimbabwe Uganda fought in the Democratic Republic of Congo with different rebels there and so with all of these wars happening across the continent then the the precipitated humanitarian disasters you have huge numbers of internally displaced people and you have had refugees I too was a refugee during the war I finished high school in a refugee camp in Cote d'Ivoire so these were these this was one of the things that was happening in Africa in the 90s a lot of Wars and those wars were in part funneled driven by what had happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union like weapons became easily available and in enterprising people sold arms to rebel groups across the continent and so you had wars and with the wars like I said you have significant humanitarian crisis but that wasn't the only thing there was a huge disease burden hiv/aids if you remember throughout the 90s and early art was ravaging the continent central and southern Africa were being wiped out you had entire villages where there were two generations with a missing generation you had the grandparents and the children an entire generation of parents were wiped out so you had that you had malaria you had all of the tropical diseases you can think about those were happiness so it was not just the wars that were ravaging the continent it was also the disease burden then something came back to bite us a lot of African countries have taken our significant dead in the 70s and that debt then came due and so we came to an to an instance where most African countries are spending up to sixty percent of government revenues on just simply servicing debt and in some instances it was just interest not even the and and because for years they had not serviced the debt they accrued punitive interest and punitive charges and so let's go back you had Wars disease dead within this context very few companies very few in the West looked at Africa as a place to do business most of Western policy to what Africa was actually filtered through the lens of development and aid it was this was the picture of what was happening in Africa in the year 2000 when China hosted the first forum on China Africa cooperation for CAC and the for CAC was held in in Beijing 40 African heads of states and and governments were invited and 2,000 happened to be a very fortuitous year because that was the year that China first did is going out policy when Chinese firms were encouraged to go out to seek access to resources but to seek access to markets so when everyone else and everybody everyone else I'm in the West so Africa mainly through the lens of development aid and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that there was still the Chinese actually saw an opportunity to do business so Chinese companies go out into Africa now why all right at this time something else was happening I mean globalization is actually taken off and we know what happened well I have an argument of what happened I mean he may not agree with me but in globalization labor lost in the capital one and so when capital one what happened was in places where capital was cheaper labor was high like here labor the capital them began to invest in places where labor was cheap initially it wasn't directly in China anyone who remembers what happens in the 90s it was the maquiladoras in Mexico along the border with the us-mexico border when these huge factories were moving over there but eventually as trade became more widespread and and travel became easier then global value chains began to develop and China was in the middle of global value chains China became like the factory of the world and what do you need in a factory you need resources to be able to convert that to finished products where did you have resources Africa had the largest endowment of Natural Resources so it made sense that China would go to Africa seeking resources so that's one it was just driven by what was happening in terms of the global economy but secondly China has always been suspicious of its presence and how it would be accepted by the rest of the world and so China didn't simply want access to resources China could always get access to resources on an international market you could buy or you could buy whatever you wanted on the international market but China wanted access at source right and the Chinese suspicion was vindicated right with the trade war and and and everything so China didn't want to have to depend on other people for material for resources that it considered crucial to its to its economy and so it wanted access to this at source so Chinese companies went into Africa and negotiated deals with African governments for access to iron or gold diamond oil whatever you can think about that they developed that and for the first time something changed it wasn't simply that but China offered a completely different model than the one that we have seen before so you can see and listen everything I'm saying here today obviously you're free to check it out later but recently there was a report where 101 companies either listed on the London Stock Exchange or domiciled in the UK owned the rights to one trillion dollars of resources in Africa so the resources are in the ground in Africa but ownership to this resources right access to this resources is for companies that are listed on the London Stock Exchange and that's how it was done a Western company or Chevron shows up in an African country signs an agreement with an African government and the way it works is we pay you in terms of royalty and taxes and then the government was responsible to take the resources and develop its country pay for services pay for infrastructure China offered a different model resource for oil for for for infrastructure deals so basically the Chinese effort was against payment on resources you should have you can take out a loan and build the infrastructure you need and up to today Africa still lags the rest of the world on every measure infrastructure coverage especially with built roads and electricity I'll give you an example and I always like to use this because it creates it tells you how stark it is that only 43 percent of the roads in Africa are paved and 30 percent of all the paved roads in Africa in one country South Africa that is the scale of the infrastructure gap on the continent and because we have a most especially Africa south of the Sahara doesn't have the resources doesn't have the infrastructure on which to be able to build a modern economy last year well 2017 Africa's total share of global trade was equal to South Korea which is around two point nine three percent this is a continent of about a billion people and so one of the Chinese show up and for the first time begin to build infrastructure that was not geared on the colonial infrastructure that most African countries inherited the colonial infrastructure was basically the center in the periphery and we and it was intended to take resources from the from the periphery and take it to the center now in a world where regional value chains and global value chains are becoming prevalent that's not possible in Africa because the infrastructure was not meant to connect African country to African country it was meant to connect African country to the hosts to the colonial whatever what China is doing now in terms of the infrastructure that they are building is connecting African cities African capitals making it possible for global value chains regional value chains to develop so it was it wasn't as if China showed up in Africa in a vacuum it was that the relationship that most African countries had there was there were things missing from it it was a bit inadequate so after the colonial experience of course then we had Western companies that were coming into into African countries and then negotiating wasn't now States it was Western companies and you know I don't know how to say this but the deals weren't always fair I'll give you a clear I'll give you an example actually printed it out you know the guy in Tanzania I'm not a big fan but he is he's onto something the the macro fully showed up and accused barrick gold so I kids here mining which is a division of Barrett gold he accused them of not paying taxes and eventually he decided to cancel their the concession agreement he said the olden bill Oh Tanzania billions of dollars but this is what the so and the reason he raised this was in 2015 between 2010 and 2015 they paid only eight percent in taxes and royalties to the government but between those years the pit four hundred and forty four million in dividends to the shareholders were not paying any corporate entire income tax in Tanzania and so when he came on the CEO of acacia mining admits that original mining agreement was not equitable these were the kinds of agreement a lot of African countries entered into with Western firms and so even though the resources would be mined in the country very little was actually been paid in the country in terms of taxes to be able to finance this and so it was the inadequacy of these relationships that made it easy for a partner like China and to show up and for most African countries to just welcome the Chinese the way they did so that was one the second thing was just the suitability of China as a partner one of the things that is not spoken about in terms of China in Africa is how with the arrival of the Chinese even contract civil works contrast building roads building power plants that are put out in terms of open tender are now increasingly won by the Chinese and it's not because they're providing low-quality works it's just because the costs of a Chinese company doing the project is significantly lower than the cost of a European company and doing the project and I was saying to him I was Minister of Public Works and one of the projects we did was financed by the African Development Bank the total cost of the project was around 70 million dollars that's what we knew for was a road project and we had one European firm French company that bid and we had about 17 Chinese companies right obviously just a law of averages you know the winner is gonna be Chinese but the the European companies bid price for a 70 million dollar comp contract was 86 million so on the day the bid was open he knew the European company who is not gonna win but this is but and the Chinese company came in at 68 point seven million in terms of being able to do that and why I mean there are there are concessions that sometimes is because the Chinese companies bribe African policymakers and that is true there are instances in which a lot of Chinese companies would win big projects by bribing but sometimes it's just basic project the European company is gonna mobilize with Mercedes trucks with Scania Volvo those strokes are really really expensive for to do the work the Chinese company is gonna mobilize with ho-ho sino truck right that sometimes one Mercedes truck is as expensive as two and a half four trucks right and so that's one most times when a European company mobilizes the European company mobilizes with insurance for Europeans working there of course you need insurance the need R & R the Chinese company I'm not sure what the insurance structure is like for the Chinese companies right and so over and over what we're seeing in several works is that Chinese investment in terms of Chinese companies tend to be more price competitive without reducing the quality of what is produced and I'd like to tell a story in terms of the relationship also between African governments and Chinese government the Chinese government when I was in 2008 I was very close to a friend of mine who was a part of the preparation for a delegation from Kenya to visit the US and the Kenyan Speaker of Parliament requested a meeting with then Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was before this hot water anyway and when the when the Kenyan delegation requested a meeting with Speaker Pelosi they were told I don't know if it's speaker Pelosi herself who told them but they were told by staff that speaker Pelosi meets with heads of state you know not speakers from Kenya so there's that I returned to Liberia and in 2010 I was an aide in the president's office just like a regular aid guy who takes notes and I accompanied the foreign minister of Liberia to China on a visit wasn't even like a state it was an official visit and we went to China and from so up to today I don't know what the Beijing Airport looks like just because we didn't use the regular we didn't come in like regular people like we were taken off the plane from when the plane landed and we didn't see anything until we were in our hotel room because you know where it's an official delegation there is something about how the Chinese would treat African delegations regardless of how small the country is in terms of how weak the country is in terms of his power that such a treatment a country most African countries would not get in any European capital or more importantly me and the foreign minister of a small country like Liberia but then we were like around three point eight three for nine million people our foreign minister met with Xi Jinping but then he was vice president of China and the only reason we didn't meet with who Jintao was because John Kerry was visiting China and he was meeting with who Jintao at the same time this was the quality of representation in terms of how the Chinese treated a small African government if you are an African policy maker and you stand back and think about it what about this relationship make you not embrace what the Chinese have to offer so it was also the suitability of China as opposed as a partner because Africa had a huge infrastructure need China had great capacity in providing that need Africa most African countries have been cut off from international financial markets China provided the financing to be able to do this and for the average African citizen for the first time in a long time they could see the direct connection between resources leaving your country and some sort of benefit when I was power an airport or Road available to you now having said all this it sounds like the relationship between Africa and China is perfect yeah I think it would be wrong if I didn't point out that there are significant problems of the relationship between China and Africa one of them is dead so you remember the story I told about the debt so around 2000 the Western powers most of the day highly the industrialized countries Western countries met and they create and they through the World Bank created a program called hypocrite indebted poor countries so countries about thirty three of these countries were in Africa and they had to go through a regimen to add to have the debts waived Liberia was a beneficiary of this five billion dollars of our debt was waived and a significant number of African countries because what happened was African countries were spending so much money just service in the dead there was no money left to invest in schools and hospitals and the continent continuing to get poor so one of the problems that began to we get so most African countries have actually are close to graduation or have graduated from HIPAA can in in in a six year period some of them were back with three billion 1.5 billion dollars in debt and a big chunk of that debt not a majority of it but a big chunk of that debt came from China so China's role in the rising debt crisis in Africa is an issue because eventually that money has to be paid back and if most of the money to pay back that debt is going away from schools is going away from hospitals then we're going to find ourselves back in the same place we found ourselves before but it's important to understand that of the total debt stock in Africa China's share of that death stock is around seventeen percent most of Africa's debt is all too mortal our Development Bank's but it's also all too private so a lot of African countries are now going to the financial markets themselves and issuing bonds euro bonds and so that is the the main driver of debt in Africa I should also say that we have 54 countries on the continent but at least seven or eight countries account for close to 90% of all of China's debt to the country to the continent Kenya Ethiopia Djibouti Angola South Sudan Democratic Republic of Congo did I call that's six right and maybe another one that I made in those countries alone account for more than 80 percent of Chinese debt on the continent so it's important to be able to keep this in perspective so the first thing is China's role in the rising debt crisis in Africa the second thing is China's role in the decimation of large mammals on the continent because of the aviary and a rhino horn trade in China that by 2015 if China had not introduced the ban most of those animals would have vanished but it's not just those I was saying also pangolins for the scales they're these myths of supposedly supernatural powers that these things have or with aviary is the prestige that comes with having ivory so in 2015 at least the Chinese government introduced a ban and on introduction of the banned the price of average dropped seven to five percent so there's that there's also the sale of Chinese arms in Africa so take for example Zimbabwe I mean anything you hear about Zimbabwe is bad right most things I hope but Zimbabwe still uses at least 5% of his GDP on the military most of the Bob will utter financing Muslims and Bob we're military purchases are from China the Chinese variant of the ak-47 has been linked to most of the small crisis happening on the continent because again China does non-interference so China's doesn't depend a country's human rights record is not taken into account when China sells arms to that country so there's that there is also the very real argument that the availability of cheap Chinese products makes it difficult for domestic industry to arise because they have to compete with this and so this is also one of the problems that we have to engage in terms of our relationship with China but I would say this in in the year 2000 there were less than 1,000 Africans studying in China today China as a destination for Africans studying outside a continent is only exceeded by friends and the only reason France exceeds Africa is because of Frances long colonial history in the next 10 years China we exceed France my deputy minister for administration studied in China in my last year as Minister eight of my employees at the Ministry of Public Works was sent to China for graduate degrees on the other side last year there was a conference at USC a conference on Africa that had to be cancelled because every single African invitee was denied a visa so if you're an African policy maker these are these are these are the facts is it's not sentimental it's not tied to any you're thinking to yourself in terms of what is best for our people what is best for my country which of these partners are we supposed to work with EU policy to our Africa EU foreign policy to our Africa now is shaped by immigration how can we prevent more Africans from immigrating to the EU that's why ships EU foreign policy when Ambassador John Bolton announced the u.s. new policy for Africa he spent more time talking about China you would have thought that he was actually talking it was actually us-china policy it seems as if US response in Africa was not driven by Africans needs but by a need to respond to what China was doing in Africa and so this is what I think is and this is Judy Moore is a former minister as a researcher on the China Africa of space and someone who tries to influence current African policymakers it is my view the China's presence in Africa has been and continues to be a net positive now would I be able to say the same thing ten years from now I don't know but for now that is my assessment thank you sure sure my name is Lorena Gupta I'm a first year student at the boot school sure I studied Chinese lived in China and did a lot of research on Chinese investments in Africa so really appreciate of your thoughts today thanks for joining us to your point about rising Chinese debt what's the alternative do you think there are organic ways of accumulating capital internally within Africa that could be moved to increase infrastructure or will that take longer right this is working yes right yeah I think so in 2015 in 2015 the Millennium Development Goals came to an end and a new one was introduced as the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs but before the SDGs were rolled out there was a big meeting in Addis and this meeting was basically about how do we finance the SDGs and that was a big point so what came out of that meeting was something called billions to trillions and billions to trillions was one how can we do domestic resource mobilization in terms of getting money from within the countries themselves or within the region but the second part of billions to trillions was we would use the money that say the African Development Bank or the World Bank has and we would do risk projects in risky places and attract private capital so then the billions was basically Development Bank financing and the trillions would be the private sector in terms of being able to do that there is currently I think according to Price Waterhouse Cooper about 100 trillion and it's supposed by 2025 is supposed to be about 125 and that's how much money under under management in terms of wealth managers think hedge funds and so the role of the private sector in providing infrastructure is significant so that will be an alternate but most view Africa as a as a risky place to do business one is the payment risk that if you do the work you don't get paid there's the risk of the government might change and a new government comes and nationalize it or there might be social unrest and stuff like that and so because of the risk perception in Africa there is a premium and that makes the project significantly more expensive it appears currently in terms of risk appetite that there are very few who have the same terms of risk appetite as the Chinese do so that makes it very very difficult in terms of being able to raise it outside so one of the things we have is if you were to remove China as a financier of Africa and infrastructure as a financier in in Africa there is no automatic replacement for that right now yes thank you how do you think the development and stability stability in Africa future and how how do you see the China's role in this so suspend disbelief yeah just dream with me for a minute the belt and Road initiative establishes the old Silk Road and then there's a maritime well that's the belt and then there's a maritime Road if it works we're looking at a future in which it would take a week for goods from China and to arrive at African ports a week at least in East Africa imagine that currently it takes anywhere between six to nine months for that to happen imagine that happening within a week when I was Minister one of the projects that we worked on was this project from if you know anything if you know anything about the the continent imagine from Dakar yeah well I don't know but from the car you come down to Guinea Bissau the Gambia the Gambia guinea-bissau Guinea Conakry Liberia Abidjan Ghana Togo Benin Nigeria so this is a highway is supposed to be a six-lane highway that takes you from the car and ends in Lagos but there's also a road that's supposed to cross the continent from Lagos to Mombasa right so I want you to imagine a future in which there is it now takes a week for goods produced as far away as China to arrive as an African port in in East Africa and within three days or so that that is in West Africa that is the possibility of what could happen in terms of and the role so what I see I think is also important to understand the kind of future that Africa faces they are supposed to be a net increase of 800 million Africans entering the workforce by 2050 the World Bank projects that only a quarter of them would be able to find jobs were these people go into work what are they going to eat if we do not grow our economy if we do not grow our economy in a way that's able to absorb them that's gonna be a huge problem so whatever Africa African countries do whatever Africa does in terms of this economic future is gonna have very heavy Chinese Franklin prints on them China is gonna be a very big part of Africa future for the foreseeable future and the thing is how can we make that relationship for sale equitable how can we make that relationship you know china says win-win and then the chinese likes to sit like to say that and win-win china wins a lot more right i mean but at least you don't lose you know and i think how can we make it less likely that the african country loses in this win-win situation so yeah I'm Lauren I'm an MP PA Harris I was living in Kenya this summer and when I got there they had recently disbanded a little china town with in Nairobi because they didn't let Africans in that area they also ejected Chinese like construction worker for making comments about President or hooroo so my monkeys yes yes so when you mentioned African countries trying to be equitable to the Chinese government how do you see people on the smaller scale playing a role in that and is that something that African leaders are particularly worried about it the more localized levels sure sure so thank you for coming I really enjoyed that can you talk about the political and economic development that's happened since China has come in the countries that they've been most involved in Kirk what's that what that has looked like beyond just infrastructure construction sure and mine is a little unrelated but so going back to your earlier point about debt do ministers of Public Works like yourself and others across the continent look at examples like like the port of I think Hambantota in in Sri Lanka the Gwadar in Pakistan the free trade zone in Djibouti like expensive Chinese product projects that there is a risk that they might take over if the debt of the country that they build them and gets too high like do they worry that China may you know get debt to a particular point and take over projects like it's done in Prior examples right so yeah well anything is so supposedly there the numbers out there say there are 200,000 Africans living in in in China and and that is a huge problem the reaction of the average Chinese citizen regular people to what Africans in China has been outright racist in a lot of instances right and some of that has actually played out in Chinese projects on the continent in terms of that racist outlook and behavior toward African and I think a lot of with the expulsion of that worker in Kenya I think a lot of African governments are doing a paying attention to this but I think there's a difference between the racism that one sees from regular Chinese citizens to what Africa toward Africans and racism in terms of official Chinese policy toward Africa I think that the Chinese the Chinese government has been very very respectful in terms of how its dealt with its African counterparts but that is a huge thing that needs to be addressed especially in terms of how individual Chinese respond to to Africans and African but that racism keeps coming up the second one was you know graduate school okay so when I was growing up the picture of poverty the picture of extreme poverty was of Ethiopia right it was a famine in Ethiopia and there was this picture growing up as kids we saw it it was like a is a white man's hand and he's he's wearing a watch and he's holding what was said to be like an Ethiopian child or who but he can fit the entire person in his in his hand he's holding them and that picture of Ethiopia you know and then growing up if you like oh why are you wasting food you know there's people in Ethiopia you know who who need the food and stuff like that but Ethiopia is if there's any country in Africa that's closest to the actualization of the East Asian model is Ethiopia today we're ET opere had and because of that Ethiopia has been growing at a pace that's higher than most African countries when the grande dam is finished Ethiopia's entire power problem would be over and be able to sell power to his neighbors now that doesn't mean all of if you're a people's problems have gone away but because of the the significance and in terms of the size of Chinese investment what is in agriculture what is in housing what is in an industrial zone that Ethiopia is now actually manufactured some of the stuff that shows up on the shelves here and in the West is manufactured at special economic zones in Ethiopia and so we've seen the benefits of that and because China had invested so much in Ethiopia but Ethiopia as you know it's landlocked and didn't have access to the port then China built the rail from Ethiopia to Djibouti so that you can be able to have access to be able to leave so we've seen some of that however between a year 2000 and 2016 on average African economies grew by about four point seven percent a year significant increase in capital but that has not necessarily turned out in terms of quality of life of Africa's improve of that investment and largely because most of the investment that goes into Africa is extractivist you're investing in taking our oil or taking our minerals and it's mainly taking out natural resources and returning with finished products and the way global economy works is your participation in a value chain is where you get value and because we're not adding value to anything it has an actually work so that model definitely has to change Sri Lanka every time I talk about this young guy comes up right looks like this is what I say in return between 2000 and this year China has actually waived restructured or rescheduled dead 87 times Hambantota was the first time we has seen a debt equity swap with Chuck with China so if I were to weigh the evidence eighty seven times one if I'm an African policy maker what direction do you think are leaning I'll go to 87 times she had a question that the lady here had a question thank you for your excellent talk my question is how do you envision technology playing on the African continent now in the future especially for growing their economies 2018 2018 so the largest deployment of robots in the United States it's getting so cheap it's getting so easy that even small and medium-sized companies are able to deploy them and that has an impact because like I told you from the beginning capital went to where labor was cheap but if you can get robots to be able to do it we're beginning to see that some of the manufacturing I left in United States that left Europe returning because you can get robots to do that now what it means is that there was always the hope that when the United States became industrialized manufacturing moved to places like China and then after China becomes after labour becomes expensive in China moved to like Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia and then eventually it will move to Africa the fear now is that by the time it reaches Africa that manufacturing mass manufacturing using labor will not exist but 60% of what is left of the world's arable lands are in Africa what can we do with that land right so there are now apps that are better able to do nutrient maps of the soil so that if you were going to plants you don't just plant potatoes in a place where wouldn't grow so that's a possibility of how technology can be useful and everywhere else in the world we've seen the benefits of the Green Revolution of using a sign of using science in agriculture in most of Africa Agrico that agriculture is still rain-fed there are no inputs and so if we can start to use technology if we can to use science behind our agriculture I believe that is the path out of poverty for most African countries agriculture so that I think combining an Agrotech combining tech with agriculture provides the best possible outlet in terms of so I want to ask a question about Ethiopia going back to Ethiopia so Ethiopia is one of the most heavily censored for the Internet in the world and they're so tight with China I was wondering does the economic investment that happens from China and Ethiopia ever affect the way the government you know controls its citizens access to the Internet yeah it used to be and I became and he's amazing right I mean so I couldn't exhaustively talk about all the problems in terms of the relationship but it wasn't just Ethiopia now in Uganda and in Zambia there have been instances where the state basically turned off the internet the ability to do that has come from China in terms of getting the state the capacity to be able to do that so that when there's a big social movement or something like that the state actually steps in to be able to control that so however in the long term do I see that having an impact I don't think so and here's why and again I remember all of this stuff is my own opinion most African countries regardless of how small or combination of multiple ethnicities every government you see in power in power in Africa means that there's a coalition of different regions and different ethnic groups combining to be able to do it because of that and we're not like China when 90% of the population is Han Chinese right for us a small country like Liberia was 215 different ethnic groups so because of that no one ethnic group is big enough to be able to dominate the country or to be able to win the elections so for us the most viable path to transition in terms of power has to be through some form of voting and because of that it makes it very difficult for that to become gnorm on the continent I may just be naive let me take hi um thank you so much um now getting back to sort of the contrast between Western and Chinese development models so you spoke a lot about European countries and companies when you're talking about Western development but I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the American side of things beyond just the blatant disrespect Losey sure I need a pen hi my name is Jared I'm a first year student in the public policy at Harris and so my question was sort of related in that um around the time of independence for a lot of African countries and following independence there were a lot of African students who went to schools in the UK the u.s. France etc and so my question is along the line of maintaining the infrastructure developments that are happening now you mentioned that a lot of African students are going to schools in China so what can be done like what can African governments do to ensure that the education that they're receiving in China is able to allow them to continue to maintain the infrastructure developments that are happening in Africa and okay I have another question to your point you mentioned that there is economic growth but perhaps people's lives aren't changing or you're not seeing significant changes there do you think there's there has been a move towards greater inequality or some people extracting more Chinese investments okay maintenance my greatest achievement as Minister but the one thing I can look back on and tell my kids someday and my grandkids about how successful I was was the passage of the road fund Act and in in Liberia and the road fund Act was basically that it meant that that we put a levy on every gallon of fuel that was bought that went into a road maintenance fund because one of the things that I noticed that this is not the first time there's been huge infrastructure built in Africa but there were a lot of white elephants built in Africa in the 1970s a big infrastructure projects that without maintenance just went nowhere and having lived cuz I went to school here on the ground in graduate school and I know that there is a levee that goes into maintenance the problem with the u.s. one is that it hasn't changed since the 90s so it's significantly it's not important but so we avoided a u.s. mistake and adjusted our so that it would rise with time but the point was that if we don't have maintenance that is predictable and regular all of this infrastructure is gonna go anyway and I'm just saying the experience as it was in Liberia I don't know if other African countries are seeing it that way and it's been responding to it that way we know for example in Zambia that some of the infrastructure that was built by the Chinese long before they have even started repaying the loans those infrastructure failing right not because of the quality was simply because this lack of routine and periodic maintenance so that's that's a huge thing and I think there's something that's worth looking into in terms of the u.s. model of I didn't talk about aid I mainly talked about investment and where is it and lending so for example the US government in its structure doesn't have a mechanism for the US government to lend directly to another government right the US government agencies can lend directly to businesses in those governments but if the u.s. just doesn't do that anymore so China on the other hand doesn't necessarily lend to businesses China is mainly g2g government to government in terms of being able to do that but there are very wonderful things about US aid policy and one of them is the Millennium Challenge corporation MCC MCC is an excellent way and in terms of the size of the MCC engagement is almost as big as anything that the Chinese have done and for the US is all grant the first MCC compact went to Tanzania was almost 800 million dollars so MCC grants are really big and what MCC does is that the country has to qualify for five years on 10 of 20 development indicators and those indicators are not dictated by the US government there are things from you know freedom of speech from how you're ranked by Freedom House is about fiscal policy in terms of how the IMF ranks you you know it's about access to justice in terms so those are the indicators and if a country does and one of them is the control of corruption if a country does good on them for five years the country then gets to negotiate a compact with the US we did one in Liberia was for 256 million to build a hydropower plant and in Liberia so there are significantly important things about US aid I was just more focused on investment then I was a made oh and then any inequality is rising everywhere where inequality is rising everywhere here in this country again like I said in the end capital one labor lost capitalist way boom way more mobile than the labor but I think in places that were already unequal the inequality is even more stark southern Africa especially South Africa is one of the most unequal countries is actually the most unequal country in the world and southern Africa is one of the most unequal regions in the world but part of that is historical right because of apartheid most of the resources were in the hands of whites and not in the hands of blacks and stuff like that and so yeah and I think corruption remains a very big issue all right I mean a lot of African countries in the Panama papers all of that money could have been used to improve the lives of people living on the continent but most of that money has been taken out and being useful for people are using that money privately but I don't under question of corruption and then again you have to take this with a grain of salt right because I used to be a minister but in negotiating our compact with the US that something has to be done first is called a constraints analysis and the constraints analysis is basically a growth diagnostic and it tries attempts to answer the question of what is the binding constraint to economic growth within the country is very very rigorous it was developed by Dani Rodrik and some other professor at Harvard anyways so the u.s. pays for this it's not done by like their instance done by we hire someone else to be able to do it and at the end of it for Liberia what was the answer like what is the binding constraint to economic growth in this little country was it corruption was corruption is a big problem was it the incompetence of the government that the inability of had we didn't have the capacity to be able to do it was a bureaucratic red tape was it lack of access to financing like you know all of these issues were interrogated and you know what it was you can guess I mean it was lack of affordable and reliable electricity and lack of functioning roads was it it didn't say that all of those things were not a problem I didn't say that corruption was not a problem it was but the binding constraint to economic growth in the country was infrastructure it was power and roads now if your development policy in the country is about putting money into ending corruption when the group Diagnostics says that is building infrastructure that would lift the country out like it's nonsense isn't it I mean so this this is the question corruption is an issue and we should definitely tackle corruption wherever it occurs right but if we do a diagnostic of the country and it tells us that these are the areas in which if you tackle this problem the economics in the country would improve to continue to spend money in areas that because it looks good because you can write a report and that's what comes out doesn't seem to me into it to make sense yes I find a question thank you what you just said is most interesting but I have read that in areas where in Africa where China has built factories or roads or other construction that local people are denied employment which doesn't make people happy we've heard do you think this is true and our 10 governments do anything about this if they want to yeah so this comes up so Humberto that comes out there is the you know Chinese pushing wheelbarrows come out you know they bring everybody from cook to any research has shown that that is not accurate the research has shown that in instances where you actually see a lot more Chinese workers is because there is a place like a time limit on a project the project has to be completed within a certain time for for example if you have an African government as going into an election and the president wants to be able to show hey I built this look at this you know and then to give the Chinese company an impossible schedule they're gonna bring in people to be able to do that but I was just again I'll give you an example of something I personally experienced I just got an email the other day from an aspect worker who's working in Liberia and she was travelling in the southeast and sent an email and said hey the road has been built here has basically been built by librarians with one or two Chinese supervisors that has been my experience more than 86% of the workers on all of the projects that we had done even projects that were won by the Chinese was done by librarians in a lot of instances in terms of the supervisory roles you have way more Chinese than you have Nationals induce in those roles but I don't think maybe it was an issue in the early aughts in the late 90s when the Chinese first arrived in Africa but by and large that problem has actually gone away I think Africa faces a very difficult future I talked about the rise in the population Nigeria is supposed to exceed the u.s. in terms of the size of its population Nisha is expected to see his population triple 26 of the 28 countries who expect to see the population double or in Africa so that's that I talked about how 53 percent of our people depend on farming and most of that farming is rain-fed so climate change is going to affect us the 10 countries that are in the Sahel already suffering from it and then it's become militarized because of what happened in Libya now most of that jihadist stuff is spreading across the Sahel so we have that right and then Africa needs to create the continent needs to create at least 18 million jobs every year from now to 2035 we're not anywhere close to that so what happens the future of this continent so Africa nice partners Africa is not in a position where you can choose between the US and China or choose between Europe and China and Africa there's enough on the continent that fits everybody that everybody can be a part of and every time that the US has actually withdrawn nature abhors a vacuum somebody something is going to be it's going to fill that vacuum so it is my hope one of the things that I've tried to do is to try to present what I believe is a clear-eyed view of what the experience has been on a continent in terms of China's presence there I highlighted the benefits that have accrue to African societies and African economies because of the Chinese presence but I've also highlighted some of the problems that have emerged because of China's presence on the continent how we're able to minimize the latter and increase the former is to challenge the African policymakers face thank you [Applause]

Channel: Paulson Institute

Views: 541,609

Rating: 4.8194447 out of 5

Keywords: Gyude Moore, Paulson Institute, China, Africa, Africa-China Relations, US-China Relations, Liberia, Public Works, Public Infrastructure, Center for Global Development, Political Science, International Relations, University of Chicago, Harris School

Id: P5uzxV8ub9k

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Torontobblit]

It goes to show that most of the people there were not open minded i.e. not willing to examine the evidence presented to them by an actual African who held important gov't positions and then reconsider their pre conceived beliefs based on new verifiable information. Instead, they mostly clung to their biases and were looking for any sort of information to reinforce their existing prejudices rather than discard tired old canards that were at best based on anecdotal evidence.

It goes to show and pretty much confirms to me that most westerners are going to have a very difficult time adjusting to this new paradigm shift that's happening in front of their very eyes. They firmly believe in the superiority of their methodologies, politics, governance, business immoral practices, and just the corrosive belief of their unbridled superiority over everyone else. That's a sickness that's going to be very difficult to find a cure for and one that us Asians and non western countries must grapple with head on.

[u/HermitSage]

Saw this one, thanks for the link he says some good stuff. Could be way more critical of America but I realize he has to come off as soft to his western audience.

The questions were all "can you please tell me Chinabad tho you haven't really said it enough to my liking!?!?!"

[u/Osroes-the-300th]

I really hate it when I see Westerners and Indians telling Africans and Asians on the internet that they are being colonized and deb trapped by China and they always do it in a very condescending manner.

[u/UntitledObstacle]

Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist, also puts refutes the western narratives about China relations African countries.