China announces $60 billion for Africa development

Managing director of Emerging Markets & Africa, Martyn Davies, said Chinese policy banks have been the single largest lenders to African states.

China will provide $60 billion funding support for Africa’s development, Chinese President Xi Jinping said today.

The summit would outline new blueprints to inject vitality in China-Africa cooperation that signals hand-in-hand progress, win-win cooperation and common development.

“To promote capacity cooperation, transferring high-quality surplus capacity to Africa, to accelerate industrialization and agricultural modernization in Africa will be one of the highlights of this summit”. But until now, China has sought to rely on its soft power in relations with Africa-persuasion and attraction as opposed to the coercion of hard power. The Summit is set to be a memorable event aimed at furthering cooperation a union between China and Africa.

“We’ve been able to show to China that their investments here have had a good outcome”, he said, adding that the Chinese company, Hisense, which mostly makes TVs, had told him that its plant in South Africa was its second best performer in the world, outside China itself.

Briefing the meeting on the outcome of the Beijing Summit, Mr. Wang said the Chinese government offered $31.52 billion of credit lines to African countries in the past three years, exceeding its $20 billion commitment made at the 2013 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation meeting in Beijing.

Gaborone- The 6th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) that was held in Johannesburg this past week from December 4-5 has raised expectations about the strengthening of ties between the two partners.

On the face of it, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Africa this week with pockets full of cash.

The theme flight is meant to publicize the upcoming “Johannesburg Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation”.

Another official said South Africa particularly welcomed China agreeing for the first time to beneficiate African minerals at source.

China’s love affair with Africa has been tested this year as slower economic growth in the Asian giant pushed down prices for the oil, copper and iron ore that countries such as Angola, Zambia and South Africa rely on to drive their own economies.

In the economic and trade sector, statistics show that in 2014, two-way trade exceeded 221.9 billion USA dollars and China’s investment stock in Africa surpassed 30 billion dollars, a 22- and 60-fold increase respectively over the figures in 2000. “A country which never was our coloniser… he is doing to us what we expected those who colonised us yesterday to do”, said Mugabe. How can this benefit African countries as well as China?

“Here is a man representing a country that was once called poor”.

Teetering on the brink of economic crisis, Zimbabwe desperately needs foreign help, and Mugabe’s government appeared keen to portray the Chinese visit as, in part at least, the turnaround the country has been waiting for.