At its summit with the African Union in Luanda this week, the European Union presented itself as a more attractive partner for Africa than China. But China’s relationship with Africa is about more than economics and Beijing is adapting to competition from Europe and the United States.
A new scramble for Africa
In her speech to the EU-African Union summit in the Angolan capital of Luanda this week, Ursula von der Leyen was quick to point out that Africa exports more than twice as much to Europe as to China. And she contrasted the EU’s Global Gateway infrastructure and investment programme with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“It invests in local jobs and local value chains, and this is what makes it unique in the global investment landscape. Other investors might follow a different playbook. They build factories, whether in Africa or in Europe, but staff them with foreign workers. They drill, they mine and they take the profits away. They often leave a legacy of unsustainable debt,” she said.
African countries have about a third of the world’s mineral resources but for decades they have been on the wrong side of unequal deals that have seen Europe, China, the United States and others extract minerals and take them home for processing and use further up the industrial value chain.
Between 2016 and 2022, 73 per cent of greenfield foreign direct investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa went towards extraction, with only a quarter for processing and manufacturing, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As competition for these critical minerals intensifies, African governments are becoming more assertive in demanding a fairer deal that will allow more stages of mineral processing to be conducted locally. The EU is promising partnerships that will secure the supply of critical minerals European industry needs for everything from batteries to military equipment but will base more of the processing and manufacturing in Africa.
The Trump administration has concluded a number of critical minerals deals with African countries in recent months, sometimes linked to security support. A few days before the EU-African Union summit, China unveiled a new Green Minerals Alliance with 19 other countries, promising a better distribution of the benefits of the critical minerals supply chain.
Von der Leyen’s characterisation of China’s investment history in Africa contains some truth but it ignores the fact that Beijing has cultivated relationships with African countries that go beyond economics. Xi Jinping met 54 African leaders in Beijing last year and he has long-standing relationships with many of them, talking to them regularly by phone.
For China, the relationship with Africa is also about promoting its model of development and of global governance. China works closely with African countries in international organisations, presenting itself as another developing country with shared concerns.
Europe not only has to contend with a colonial history in Africa but also with more recent evidence of its indifference to the continent and its people. During the coronavirus pandemic, the EU resisted calls to suspend intellectual property rights so that poorer countries could have access to vaccines and later hectored African states about their lack of support for Ukraine, ignoring the war’s impact on food security in Africa.
As the developed world is waking up to Africa’s economic potential in the 21st century, some smaller European states including Finland, Estonia and the Czech Republic have been stepping up their diplomatic activity there. Ireland is better placed than most countries to establish deeper relationships with African partners based on their growing status as political and economic actors rather than as recipients of development aid.
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