Zambia

Zambia’s future with China

 Posted by at 1:07 pm  In the News  No Responses »
Oct 042011
 

On 20 September 2011, the Zambian people elected Michael Sata as their president, marking a milestone in the country’s relationship with China. Sata is opposed to the influence that China has in Zambia, while his opponent, the incumbent Rupiah Banda, has presided over an unprecedented expansion of Chinese interests in the African country, and is even suspected of accepting funding from China for his 2011 election campaign.

President Sata’s populist campaign took a strong anti-China stance. The people of Zambia are disenchanted by the role the Chinese have been playing in the country, with many feeling that Chinese expatriates are coming into the country and taking jobs that Zambians could be doing. Mr Sata has already made his feelings known to the Chinese Ambassador, ”We welcome your investment but as we welcome your investment, your investment should benefit Zambians and not the Chinese,” he said in a official statement.

It will be interesting to watch relations between China and Zambia over the next few months, as well as the evolution of Chinese foreign policy elsewhere, because this is also not the only case where China grip on Africa appears to have loosened. In Libya, oil contracts made under Gadaffi are being reassessed, and there is every indication that China could lose out there as well.

 Tagged with: , ,

Chinese investors in Zambia told to play by the rules

 Posted by at 12:54 pm  In the News  No Responses »
Oct 042011
 

The recent presidential elections in Zambia saw the emergence of a familiar face, Michael Sata, who was sworn in as the country’s new president after three failed attempts. This change in fortune for the former British Rail worker was largely down to his much-publicised stance on Chinese investment in Zambia, as he looks to put an end to the ease with which Chinese investors have torn through the country’s resources – particularly copper – over the last few years.

As the Telegraph’s Southern African correspondent Aislinn Laing put it, the former Zambian President Rupiah Banda “made life as easy as possible for the Chinese,” introducing policies that cut the windfall tax on mine earnings and other investor-friendly legislation. Sata’s anti-Chinese rhetoric, though less pronounced than in previous years, reflected the mood within the Zambian population, particularly the largely unemployed youth.

There are few places where its [China’s] presence is felt more than Zambia, where Chinese investment in agriculture and the country’s bountiful copper mines exceeded $1bn in 2010…The Chinese claim they have created as many as 150,000 new jobs and point to investments in infrastructure as proof they are giving back…But there have also been accusations that Chinese businessmen in Zambia act with impunity – and treat local workers badly with poor pay and working conditions. Anger boiled over into protests last year when two Chinese managers shot and injured 13 workers at a coal mine…With two thirds of Zambia’s population still living on less than $2 a day, dismay is growing at his [Banda’s] perceived failure to make the relationship work for his countrymen…Mr. Sata, although toning down his anti-Chinese rants for this election … has pledged to reinstate the windfall tax to combat the problem…The affect that pledge has had in some of the country’s poorest slums was evident yesterday, where crowds of youths rampaged through the streets ripping down posters of Mr. Banda and chanting for change.

Change is indeed what the Zambian population got, as the election, a supposed ‘referendum on China,’ saw Sata receive 43% of the votes, with Banda receiving 36%. Sata, as expected, has immediately begun his attempts to reduce Chinese exploitation of his copper-rich country. He announced that China would have to play by the rules, through employing more Zambian workers and limiting the number of people the Chinese investors bring to Zambia.

This leaves the door open to continued Chinese investment in Zambia, and with Sata in charge, the African country might be able to strike a more balanced deal with Chinese companies, and better use the promise of Chinese investment to improve the lives of its people.

 Tagged with: , , ,

The Zambian Shootings in the Chinese Media

 Posted by at 1:27 pm  In the News, The Beijing Consensus, Translations  1 Response »
Dec 062010
 

The two Chinese workers arrested for attempted murder

There was an interesting story in New Century Weekly (新世纪周刊) a few weeks back that is worth a look (available here in Chinese). It is a lengthy investigative piece by journalists Chen Zhu and Zhang Boling on the shooting of local workers at a Chinese-owned coal mine in southern Zambia, following protests over working conditions and lack of pay. Eleven were injured after two Chinese supervisors, apparently fearing for their lives, opened fire with shotguns. The supervisors (pictured) were later arrested on charges of attempted murder but have since been released on bail. The incident has led to protests outside the Chinese Embassy in the Zambian capital of Lusaka and has again put Zambia’s relations with China under the spotlight. Tensions will likely be further exacerbated if the trial is perceived to be a whitewash, as some have predicted. The case has also received some coverage in the international media.

The New Century Weekly article traces the origins of the shooting to long-standing problems in the management of the mine. At the centre of the story is the mine owner, Xu Jianxue, a Jiangxi native who first went to Zambia in the early 1990s as a translator for a Chinese company. He ended up staying after the project ended, establishing a construction company that went on to win a series of big infrastructure contracts from the Zambian government. Business was so successful that Xu invited his four brothers to join him in 2000. When Zambia began selling mineral rights in 2003, Xu secured a number of concessions near the southern town of Sinazongwe. Despite the difficulties investors have traditionally had in the area, he has apparently been able to turn over a healthy profit for his venture, Collum Coal Mining Industries.

Xu is described vividly in the article as a believer in “Mao Zedong thought” and as sporting a Mao-style haircut. He is cast as a throwback to an earlier China, reliant on guanxi and bribes to secure business and ignorant of modern management practices. Xu and his brothers are said to live very comfortably in Lusaka, leaving the day-to-day running of the mines in the hands of friends and relatives who have followed them to Zambia from Jiangxi. These men, the authors claim, are mostly uneducated labourers with no language skills, who find themselves suddenly thrust into senior positions on their arrival. They live in a gated compound and have little understanding of local culture. There are 70 Chinese managers working at the mine, who are responsible for around 600 local workers.

The authors claim that the root of the problem is that the workers are employed on temporary contracts, which means they do not receive the food, housing and medical benefits stipulated by Zambian labour laws.  Workers are also, according to one Chinese source quoted in the article, subjected to occasional physical beatings. These conditions have generated a series of clashes between labour and management, of which the shooting is only the most recent and severe. There have been repeated strikes and the local government threatened to close the mine in 2006 until eventually being dissuaded, probably through a combination of bribery and pressure from the central government.

The article is interesting not only for the information it unearths, but for the tone it deploys. Criticisms of Chinese companies operating in Africa are commonplace in the western media but not in China, at least not in a publication as prominent as New Century Weekly. No doubt part of the reason lies in the fact that Collum Coal Mining is not formally a Chinese entity; it is registered in Zambia and has no parent company in China. This perhaps permits a greater degree of licentiousness than might normally be the case. Indeed, Xu’s company is contrasted in the article with the supposedly more responsible behaviour of Chinese state-owned and private enterprises, both of which are subject to tighter supervision and regulation by the Ministry of Commerce. Disparaging quotes from staff at China’s Embassy in Zambia make clear they are frustrated by the free-wheeling behaviour of Chinese entrepreneurs like Xu, whose pursuit of profit risks tarnishing China’s image in Africa.

The final point to make is that the article again highlights the dangers of thinking in terms of a monolithic “China Inc.” in Africa. There are a wide range of Chinese actors operating on the continent, from individual entrepreneurs to huge state-owned oil companies, each of whose interests may run contrary to those of others. Struggling to manage these different forces is the Chinese government, whose ability to offer strategic direction is itself hampered by the existence of competing bureaucratic objectives between departments. The latest incident in Zambia shows that the story of “China-in-Africa” is as much about the freeing-up of market forces in China and the subsequent loss of central government control as anything else.

 Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Economist Dambisa Moyo: Aid Fuels Disfunction in Africa

 Posted by at 7:02 pm  China vs. the West, The Beijing Consensus  7 Responses »
Nov 052010
 
Dambisa Moyo

Dambisa Moyo, speaking at the FCCC Event in Beijing, November 1, 2010.

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist from Zambia who specializes in macroeconomics and global affairs.  A former consultant for the World Bank, Moyo worked for Goldman Sachs in London for nearly a decade before authoring the controversial — but Oprah-endorsed — bestseller, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo holds an archipelago of degrees from world-renowned institutions: a Ph.D. in Economics from Oxford, an M.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, an MBA from American University in D.C., and a B.S. in Chemistry from her native Zambia.

Dead Aid incriminates international aid as having made the largest contribution to the disfunction of the continent’s economy by increasing government corruption. Her solution? Unequivocal. Completely phase out reliance on aid — a goal we all have in common, she states — look to the international bond markets to finance public sector investments, to foreign direct investment to finance private sector growth, and to micro-financing for local development.

She recently addressed a group of Beijing-based journalists. Below are a few highlights.

Moyo’s most emphatic point was about the exacerbated effect aid has had on the numerous African kleptocracies:

“Aid has allowed governments to abdicate their responsibilities of providing public goods for their people. It severs a fundamental link between a ruling government and its people. If the government does not rely on it’s people, then the people also do not rely on their government, and instead they rely on the international community who, for their own motivations, continues to give aid to Africa even though there has been a lack of delivery in the reduction of poverty and any amount of economic growth over the last few decades. The whole continent is hooked on a drug that is unsustainable.”

“There is a desperate need for African governments to be more involved — this needs to take a significant priority — and they moreover need to be the leaders in delivering economic growth. It’s not good enough for people [foreigners] to be concerned with Africa, if the leaders themselves are not concerned with Africa. There is no country on earth that has achieved long term growth and reduced poverty by relying on aid to the extent that African countries rely on aid today. We’re not children; we need to be treated as the adults that we are.”

On China’s presence in Africa, “The Chinese have done more for Africa’s infrastructure and economic growth in the last five years than America has done in the last 50. One of the greatest things they have to offer, at least on the surface, is that they are negotiating business on equal footing; the positive effect this has on governments that are often treated with condescension cannot be underestimated.”

Moyo at one point during the talk referenced the infamous 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey that asked Africans in ten countries to compare the influences of China and the U.S. in their own countries. In nine of the ten countries, by margins that ranged from 60-91%, African respondents said Chinese influence was good. “It suggests to me that people feel this new model seems to be working, where Africans are treated as equal partners.”

 Tagged with: , , , , , ,

A catalogue of China’s labour abuses in Africa

 Posted by at 6:16 pm  China vs. the West, In the News, The Beijing Consensus  1 Response »
Nov 022010
 

China – a Blessing Or Africa’s Curse?, an article published by Uganda’s Sunday Monitor, catalogues a range of labour and other abuses for which Chinese companies, both state and privately owned, have been responsible. Examples range from the recent incident at a Chinese owned mine in Zambia, during which 13 miners were injured, to the China Henan Group (Chico) requiring workers in Mozambique to wear a badge with the word escravo (slave) written on it, in what was apparently a case if mistranslation. “Unwittingly,” the article continues, “those badges have turned prophetic of the nature of labour relations between Chinese enterprises in Africa and their employees. From Mali to Madagascar, Kenya to Zambia, workers’ restiveness abounds.”

Reporting like this is regularly written off as the whining of jealous Westerners, unhappy that China is now so influential in places once the sole preserve of former colonists. In a recent interview, Li Anshan, a professor at Peking University’s School of International Studies and head of its Centre for African Studies, said that Western criticism of China’s involvement in Africa is largely rooted in fear, fear which he said is “a consequence of deep-rooted colonialism; they [Westerners, referring in this case specifically to France] feel something that belongs to them is being taken by China.” Not so in this case. China – a Blessing Or Africa’s Curse? was written by Janet Otieno, Jonstone Ole Turana, Saudah Mayanja and Caesar Abangiraha, all of whom are correspondents for the Sunday Monitor.

 Tagged with: , , ,

China in Africa Podcast: Aid vs. Trade

 Posted by at 9:30 am  Chinese in Africa  4 Responses »
Oct 282010
 

China in Africa Podcast: Aid, Trade and Indignation by ChinaTalkingPoints

There’s a vigorous debate over just how many hundreds of billions of dollars the West has sent to Africa in the form of “aid” over the past half-century since colonial independence. Some estimates suggest a total of trillions, while the OECD and others claim it’s merely in the 800 billion dollar range. Regardless, the sums are huge. That said, the amount of money is not what’s in question, the more pressing issue is what has all this “aid” actually accomplished?

The “Aid” Business

Each year NGOs, state actors and multilateral organizations like the UN pour ever greater sums of money into African states and rarely, if ever, are they actually held to account for the effectiveness of these costly programs. Despite ever growing aid and development budgets, many of the key poverty indicators across Africa remain stubbornly high.

Aid industry critic and NYU professor William Easterly argues that the aid business itself is partially to blame. The high level of professional incompetence on the part of too many young and inexperienced aid “experts” mixed with the economic distortions that result from the billions of aid dollars that flow through these countries often combine to form a toxic mix with debilitating consequences.

Enter the Chinese

Ten years after the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit that marked Beijing’s renewed enthusiasm for African engagement, the surge of Chinese investment, migration and influence across the continent is unmistakable. Like the West, the Chinese are pouring billions of dollars into Africa. But that money is largely used to support an aggressive agenda to acquire natural resources with complex cash and infrastructure deals.

Beijing’s so-called “No Strings Attached” trade-based approach has sparked the ire of Western governments and the aid industry who largely dismiss the Chinese as neo-mercantalists, even neo-colonials. That indignation, though, is prompting a growing number of analysts to raise their eyebrows. Fellow African Boots blogger and Beijing-based policy analyst Bradley Gardner highlighted in a recent article, “Aid, Trade & Some Indignation,” the inherent contradiction of EU and US states generously subsidizing their agricultural sectors, because this ultimately prevents developing world farmers from selling their goods at a fair market value and subsequently impoverishes these states, making them more dependent on Western aid.

The recent shooting of Zambian mine workers by Chinese supervisors and the well-documented corruption that accompanies many of China’s massive natural resource deals are indicative that Beijing’s African foreign policy is troubled in equally challenging ways. However, the Chinese rejection of the Western aid model and the emphasis on trade deserves our attention.  After all, in a short period of time, China has pulled more people out of subsistence poverty than any other society in human history – with only minimal international assistance.

 Tagged with: , , , ,

Zambian mine shooting: horrible, criminal, but not political

 Posted by at 9:30 am  In the News  No Responses »
Oct 202010
 

Why does this keep happening in Zambia?:

Police have charged two Chinese mine managers there with attempted murder after live rounds were used last week to quell protests over pay and conditions at a coal mine south of the capital, Lusaka. Eleven miners were wounded in the incident, two of them are apparently in very bad shape.

A similar incident in 2005 when five Zambians were shot and wounded during riots over pay at another Chinese owned mine, raised a political storm. It fed in to campaigning by opposition activists, who accused the Chinese of operating like latter day colonialists, leaving few benefits to the country as a whole in return for the resources they are taking out.

Michael Sata, the populist opposition leader who only narrowly lost the last elections, has been quick to draw on the latest incident, suggesting that the Chinese are untouchable, because they are funding the ruling party ahead of fresh polls next year. The arrest of the two Chinese men involved in this latest shooting appears to have scotched that.

Zambia as much as anywhere has tested Beijing’s policy of non interference in Africa’s domestic affairs, given the close ties it enjoys with the current government, the scale of its mining investment in the country and the threat to those interests posed by an opposition that is overtly hostile.

. . .

Imagine if managers from a western multinational – say an ExxonMobil or an Anglo American – were responsible. The hue and cry would be loud. Chinese mistreatment of African workers gets considerably less attention.

I don’t want to be seen as acting as an apologist for what seems pretty clearly to be a criminal act, but I felt like the last statement deserved a thought out response. What actually would happen if ExxonMobil or Anglo American managers were to shoot some workers at a foreign mine? Here’s my guess:

1. ExxonMobil or Anglo American would try to minimize the public relations damage by first distancing themselves from the managers involved, while presenting the protest as a dangerous situation which the manager was unable to handle.

2. Few newspapers would point to it as proof that the corporations home countries have colonial ambitions in these countries, but would instead point the blame squarely at the managers or the corporations.

3. It is fairly likely that it wouldn’t be reported on at all. If you doubt that, I would do a quick survey of how many people know what the Rössing Uranium Mine is. Or how many people think that this story, means that Australia has colonial plans in Indonesia.

Part of the reason why this story has played out as a “Chinese are evil” story is largely China’s doing. It’s easy to put the blame on a country for a corporations actions if the corporation has state support (though in this case its a private corporation). Similarly its easier to attack criminals if the criminals do nothing to defend themselves. But the point is that newspapers generally need a bit more evidence to extend culpability for isolated criminal acts to entire countries. Chinese companies are often poorly run, and African governments need to be a lot more careful picking their partners* (and the Chinese government needs to be a lot more careful about who they give implicit support to), but it would take a long chain of causation to attach the actions of these two men with the policies of “China.” And its a chain which I recommend the average pundit tred carefully on.

* Iain Manley pointed out to me in the writing of this post that mining in China is pretty much the world’s most dangerous job. The point is particularly applicable because state-owned companies have much better safety records in China, and much better governance records in Africa (according to an official at Standard Bank I spoke to). This mine, and the Chambishi mine both have poor governance records stretching back half a decade

 Tagged with: , , ,
Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha