U.S., Chinese and Russian officials tour Africa as charm offensive gathers pace

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, recent Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have all launched into African tours throughout the past month.

Yellen met with South African officials including President Cyril Ramaphosa last week, just days after the country’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor stood alongside Lavrov and vowed to strengthen bilateral relations between Pretoria and Moscow.

Yellen’s three-country African tour, which also included stops in Senegal and Zambia, was presented as an effort to construct trade and investment ties with the continent, accompanied by discussions about sustainable energy and food security initiatives and debt relief.

Yellen noted last week that Africa would “shape the longer term of the worldwide economy,” signaling the U.S. motivation to re-engage with the continent of 1.4 billion people, but she also said Friday that she had discussed adherence to Russian sanctions in each of the three countries visited.

Earlier within the week, Pandor refused to reiterate any calls for Russia to withdraw troops from Ukraine, and took a subtle swipe at Western attempts to influence other countries’ alternative of allies. South Africa was one in every of 17 African nations to abstain from the U.N. vote in March to sentence Russia’s war of aggression.

Perhaps more controversially, South Africa last week announced a joint military exercise with Russia and China next month, coinciding with the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, which drew concern from the White House.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also toured sub-Saharan Africa last yr, while U.S. President Joe Biden held a U.S.-Africa Summit in December, perceived as an effort to recoup among the economic and trade influence Washington has lost to China over the past decade or more. Blinken also stopped off in Egypt on Monday on the primary leg of a planned tour of the Middle East amid a renewed spate of Israel-Palestinian violence.

Diplomatic analysts told CNBC last week that the flurry of diplomatic activity shouldn’t be seen as a “scramble for Africa,” but somewhat an illustration that the continent’s economic and geopolitical bargaining power means it now firmly occupies a seat on the table.

African governments resist taking sides

Within the backdrop of Yellen’s trip is Washington’s concern about its waning influence on a continent that has increasingly pivoted toward bilateral relations with global powers that don’t exert pressure to adopt certain geopolitical positions.

As such, China has massively expanded its economic presence on the continent lately, while Russia has been capable of construct military and diplomatic influence in certain regions, particularly those beset by civil conflict or insurgency.

Chinese involvement on the continent began in earnest with Beijing’s backing of liberation movements difficult colonial rule, with business engagements intensifying from the late Nineties and culminating within the formalizing of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013.

The Biden administration’s U.S. sub-Saharan Africa strategy was published in August 2022, and frames China’s view of Africa as “a crucial arena to challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow business and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken U.S. relations with African peoples and governments.”

Prior to President Biden’s U.S.-African Leaders Summit in December, Thomas P. Sheehy, distinguished fellow at america Institute of Peace (USIP), highlighted that over the many years for the reason that Cold War, China’s presence and influence in almost every African nation has increased significantly, while U.S. influence has “flatlined.”

“China is Africa’s largest two-way trading partner, hitting $254 billion in 2021, exceeding by an element of 4 U.S.-Africa trade. China is the most important provider of foreign direct investment, supporting lots of of 1000’s of African jobs. That is roughly double the extent of U.S. foreign direct investment,” Sheehy said.

Nonetheless, he highlighted that the majority African leaders remember with concern the U.S.-Soviet proxy wars conducted on the continent in the course of the Cold War, and are subsequently reluctant to grow to be a part of a world power struggle. As such, many African nations desire a powerful relationship with each the U.S. and China, and U.S. diplomacy will probably be simpler when not framed as an “us-or-them” proposition.

The administration’s strategy paper alleges that Russia views Africa as “a permissive environment for parastatals and personal military firms, often fomenting instability for strategic and financial profit.”

This refers primarily to non-public military contractors equivalent to Russia’s notorious Wagner Group, which has been increasingly lively in politically unstable nations equivalent to Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan and the Central African Republic.

“Russia uses its security and economic ties, in addition to disinformation, to undercut Africans’ principled opposition to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine and related human rights abuses,” the paper adds.

Eleonora Tafuro, senior research fellow on the Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia Centre at Italy’s Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), told CNBC last week that there was an increasing realization amongst Western powers that African nations have “their very own agency” and it’s as much as them to come to a decision whether relationships with China, Russia or Turkey, as an illustration, are of their interests.

“It’s totally easy to fall into comparisons with the Cold War and talking a few scramble for Africa, but I feel it’s actually true that the U.S. particularly is attempting to make up for certain disengagement,” Tafuro said.

“Africa isn’t a region that the U.S. desires to be or needs to be absent from if it desires to keep being a superpower, so I feel there may be this realization in Washington that it must be present or a minimum of it has to present the impression that it’s present — after all it’s present in economic and security terms, especially with some African partners, however it has to indicate it.”

The increasing appeal of China’s apparent separation of trade and investment from geopolitical requirements was evident in South Africa’s refusal to be “bullied” into adopting a position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a sentiment shared across much of the continent.

China and Russia constructing influence

Alex Vines, managing director of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, said in a report last week that China had positioned itself as a contrast to Western governments in its African investments.

“It characterizes its loans as mutually helpful cooperation between developing countries, promising to not interfere in the interior politics of those it loans to,” Vines said.

“On this respect it presents itself in contrast to Western countries, who’re accused by China and a few African governments of boastful, democratic posturing — often by former colonial powers that looted African resources in the course of the 18th and nineteenth centuries.”

Some Western politicians have voiced fears that China’s loan financing in Africa amount to “debt trap diplomacy,” through which unmanageable debts are racked up in order to permit Beijing to request access for resources as collateral.

China staunchly denies this, and Vines highlighted that while some African nations with extensive Chinese loans — equivalent to Kenya and Zambia — are suffering spiraling debt burdens, their situations “can’t be entirely blamed on Chinese loans.”

“Meanwhile, other African countries have created realistic, manageable debt arrangements with China without the tremendous risk and uncertainties that characterised some major BRI projects,” he highlighted.

Vines also noted that the deluge of loans made in the course of the initial boom of the Belt and Road initiative poses an issue for China, as it could struggle to gather repayments while maintaining its image as a friend of developing nations.

What’s more, the BRI projects were “largely uncoordinated and unplanned,” he said, with competing Chinese lenders offering credit to African nations, difficult the notion of a coherent centralized “debt trap” policy from Beijing.

“Nonetheless, the concept China may use debt strategically, to expand its influence within the African content and secure access to resources, can’t be completely dismissed,” Vines said.

“China is an emerging superpower in strategic competition with the U.S. Constructing stronger economic relationships in Africa can be a logical step in its aspirations to be a world power.”

Mahama: Western arms to Ukraine ‘probably thing’

In a Q&A session in London on Friday, former Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama noted the resistance amongst African nations to be drawn into the conflict by Western powers.

“Europe and NATO, I might say, have been occupied with the Ukraine-Russia war, and several other times again we’re called on to decide on which side we’re on,” he told an audience at Chatham House.

“When Tigray and Ethiopia are fighting, we do not ask you ‘who do you support?’ When two African countries are fighting, we do not ask anybody on this planet ‘who do you support?’ We attempt to intervene and resolve it. I feel that the priority needs to be methods to resolve the conflict.”

Although he called for the conflict to be addressed via international bodies equivalent to the U.N., Mahama did go some method to condemning Russia’s invasion, a step many governments on the continent have been reluctant to take.

“In fact, I do not believe that it is correct for one country to make an incursion into one other because if we condone that then you definately do not know where it will end, so after Ukraine, who else?” Mahama said.

In contrast to South African Foreign Minister Pandor’s loaded remarks on how Western arms supply to Ukraine had modified South Africa’s position, Mahama — who served as president of Ghana from 2012 to 2017 — looked as if it would view the intervention as mandatory.

“NATO and the West will proceed to pour in arms to assist Ukraine to carry its own, which probably is thing, to defend themselves, but this war isn’t winnable. If eventually it’ll be solved by dialogue, why would you eat up more human lives before we sit and talk?” he said.

Ghana was one in every of 28 African nations to vote in favor of the U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s invasion, and Mahama noted that Accra retains strong ties with the U.K., U.S. and France close to military training and anti-terror support.