Africa’s increasing global geostrategic importance is recognised by the major powers, hence their scramble to maximise good relations with the continent while diminishing the role of competitors.
Exploiting its clout as the strongest voting bloc in the UN, Africa traditionally followed a non-aligned posture. This position always required careful balancing with its dependence on foreign donors. However, this policy does not suit Russia and China, which need collaborators to outbid the West in their quest for global dominance.
For this reason, the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) was elevated to a comprehensive, strategic all-weather partnership during its latest conference on September 4-6. For SA in particular, joining Focac created a moment of choice: between East and West; between an independent foreign policy and being a Chinese puppet; and between authoritarianism and civilised democracy. President Cyril Ramaphosa, almost post-haste, confirmed in China that SA had chosen to board the Focac bandwagon.
This could be a serious mistake. The reasons are obvious. Due to its depressive political style (like that of the defunct Soviet Union), China seems to have feet of clay, questioning the durability of its benevolence and stability. SA has also practically signed off on its foreign policy of independence, non-alignment and internationalism in favour of subservience to the Chinese behemoth, thus worsening its minnow status in world politics. In addition, non-participant African states might question the strategic wisdom of this unilateral decision and turn their backs on SA.
President Xi Jinping’s unwillingness to liberalise a stagnant economy shows serious signs of failure, questioning particularly the sustainability of its benevolence. According to the Economist magazine, “China’s giant economy faces an equally giant crisis of confidence — and a growing deficit of accurate information is only making things worse ... multilateral firms are taking money out of China at a record pace and foreign China watchers are trimming their forecasts for economic growth.”
Paranoid apparatchik
Xi either fails or refuses to realise that political freedom and economic success go hand in hand, a lesson from the feeble collapse of the Soviet Union. He rules like a dull paranoid communist apparatchik to protect his power. To avoid the present mess in China’s economy he could have learnt from Deng Xiaoping, who liberalised the Chinese economy with great success.
Instead, Xi blandly chose to revert to Mao Zedong’s police state authoritarianism as his model. With visions of grandeur, he devised remedies such as Focac and the Belt & Road Initiative. Such plans are typical of authoritarian and Marxist regimes, usually high on ideology and rhetoric but inefficient guidelines for workable policies.
At the Focac assembly China committed $50bn in financial support to a three-year, 10-point modernisation partnership with Africa. For experts on modernisation this comes across as bland, propagandistic mollycoddling. Since 1960 Africa has received billions of dollars in development aid. In the past 30 years alone $1.2bn was distributed to the continent. Yet, large demographic swathes of Africa remain pre-modern, poor and underdeveloped. Modernisation is a complex interdisciplinary process that can take decades, if not centuries. A three-year miracle is plain wishful thinking.
This does not mean China’s value as a business partner should be underestimated. After all, it is SA’s number one trading partner (albeit with a large balance in China’s favour). But being used as leverage to manipulate the country into a captive alliance configuration, as foreseen at Focac, is another matter entirely. At Focac, Xi proposed that “with its future growth in mind, I propose that bilateral relations between China and all African nations having diplomatic ties with China be elevated to the level of strategic relations and that the overall characterisation of China-African relations be elevated to an all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era”. Typical Chinese neocolonialism!
Yet Ramaphosa promptly and unconditionally endorsed Xi’s partnership proposal ‘‘to bolster and deepen African development and co-operation’’, while dismissing concerns about “debt-trapping, economic dependence and the prioritisation of Chinese interests’.’ But the truth is that in 2018-21 China reduced its financial commitment to Africa by half. The number of committed projects (including infrastructure development) dropped from 50 in 2018 to 10 in 2021. Scholarships for African students dropped from 500,000 in 2018 to 10,000 in 2021.
Of course, siding with China will bring some short-term benefits, such as trade diversification, consumer access to inexpensive goods, and knowledge about economic and infrastructural development. In the long run though, beneficiaries will slide into becoming vassal states of China. The country has a ruthless predatory economy, a power-hungry ruling class, no patience for the niceties of transparency, human rights, democracy, constitutionalism, or sovereign and international law. Particular negatives inherent to closer links include dumping, crowding out of local business, rampant corruption and the introduction of predatory business practices.
Trade
Xi’s aggressive, revisionist foreign policy agenda is well known, aiming to establish Chinese global hegemony and revise the norms and laws of international intercourse. To do so he needs allies, particularly Africa’s 54 members at the UN (27% of the world population). Given the resolutions at the last Focac assembly, China is well positioned to maximise this goal. This implies that SA is en route to becoming a Chinese vassal. In this scenario our mostly out-of-their-depth diplomats would simply be no match for their experienced Chinese counterparts.
Ramaphosa has also not spelt out how other major players on the African scene, particularly the US and EU, will respond. Particularly important in this regard is the future of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which is due for review next year. The worst-case scenario for SA is non-renewal, which would have a devastating effect on the economy: increased unemployment, a decline in economic growth, and severe damage to sectors such as auto assembly and agriculture.
It is likely that in future the US will favour bilateral agreements with individual African countries (such as the recent deal with Kenya) over multilateral agreements such as Agoa. We also expect that the US will tie trade agreements to adherence with its security and world order priorities.
SA would be wise to at least prepare for a second Trump administration, because in such a case it is likely that coercive economic measures such as import tariffs against trade agreement partners that openly side with strategic enemies such as Russia and China will be used.
The dilemma for SA’s foreign policy is that security, global order, economic and trade/economic issues have become intertwined and increasingly complex. It is clear that China and Russia will increase their challenge to US/Western hegemony, while Africa will increasingly be used as a pawn and battle ground in this scenario. SA needs to prepare for this, but it sits on the fence, prevaricating. Despite repeated assurances, most recently by new foreign minister Ronald Lamola, that SA “remains committed” to non-alignment, its policies continue to favour China and Russia.
The best advice we can give SA diplomats is to stay clear of big power competition and actively strive not to be on either side of the divide, East or West. SA must follow a credible policy of pragmatic transactional equidistance to reclaim its status and respectability as a global role player. For this we need to have diplomats of the highest quality and prescience who can practise Machiavellianism with sophistication.
• Olivier, a former SA ambassador to Russia and Kazakhstan, is emeritus professor at the University of Pretoria. Van Wyk is an emeritus professor at Pittsburg State University, Kansas, US.
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