U.S. Apathy Paved the Way for China in Africa

In April 1997, toward the end of the protracted demise of the United States’ longtime Cold War client Mobutu Sese Seko, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, flew to the capital of what was then called Zaire to try to persuade the besieged dictator to step down.

As I stood outside the drawing room of the palace where Mobutu and Richardson met in the morning, an aide to Richardson sidled up to me and whispered an invitation in my ear. If I, as the New York Times bureau chief for the region, would like to fly with them to the southern city of Lubumbashi to meet Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader whose Rwanda-backed forces were taking over Zaire, I should walk toward Richardson’s parked motorcade and stand there and stand by, not saying a word to anyone.

In the golden sunshine late that same afternoon, I was aboard Richardson’s jet as it approached Lubumbashi low over the surrounding scrubland and landed. The ongoing civil war had long ago interrupted commercial air traffic into Zaire’s second largest city, but Lubumbashi sits in the heart of the mining region of a country so richly endowed in minerals that it has been called a geological scandal, and because of this there was hardly any space to park on the airport’s aprons. In anticipation of Kabila’s victory, which indeed did not lie far into the future, private jets that had flown in the executives of Western mining companies seeking new deals for themselves occupied almost every spot.

A lot can happen in a quarter of a century, though—especially when you’re not paying attention, as has largely been the case with the United States regarding Africa. Back then, there was so much talk about the enormous profits that lay ahead for Western companies in the business of extraction, once the corruption and chaos of the Mobutu era was put in the past, that many people in Zaire (now renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and throughout Central Africa thought the United States had sponsored Kabila’s takeover of the country in order to dominate its mineral wealth into the indefinite future.

Just how utterly differently reality has played out was brought home to me in recent days by an article in the New York Times asking whether the United States could ever compete with China in the economically strategic area of battery production, which will unavoidably serve as the foundation for a transition to electric vehicles and is key to any hope of meeting the Biden administration’s ambitious goals for limiting climate change.

Although Congo’s portfolio of valuable minerals is broader and deeper than that of almost any country, two sentences in particular from the story stood out for me: “China owns most of the cobalt mines in Congo, which has the majority of the world’s supply of this scarce material needed for the most common type of battery. American companies failed to keep up and even sold their mines to Chinese counterparts.”

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This column should not be read as boosterism for mining or any other of the extractive businesses that have traditionally dominated U.S. economic activity in Africa, much less as nostalgia for an era when Western firms were dominant, as was true only recently in Congo. It is hard to find examples in Africa where extraction-centered economic engagement has produced anything resembling sustainable development.

Rather, this retelling of Congo’s recent political history is a cautionary tale that applies to much of sub-Saharan Africa, about the heavy wages that come from an unimaginative foreign policy toward a continent that has long seemed content to rest on humanitarian aid, military cooperation, and lectures about democratic values—which Western countries are the first to ignore when it comes to dealing with cherished client states.

My African assignment for the Times ended in 1998, and after a five-year spell in Japan I found myself in China, where this history picked up again, seeming to follow me in a serendipitous way. Living in Shanghai, I witnessed and reported on some of the first bold steps that China took to place engagement with Africa high on its economic and political foreign policy agenda, and Congo was a centerpiece. From today’s perspective, that looks like an act of tremendous foresight on Beijing’s part.

The top of a piece I wrote from Shanghai in September 2007 hints strongly at major changes not just in foreign economic engagement with Africa but also in geopolitics:

The entire world may not have sat up and taken notice in the last week, and that is probably just fine with China, which has just made a major move into central Africa.

With its agreement to lend $5 billion to Congo, what might have often looked like a grab-bag approach to the African continent by a country with only sporadic involvement there has finally taken on a distinct outline.

It turns out that China, which since the time of Deng Xiaoping has discouraged talk about its rise or its might, has a blueprint for Africa, and with the Congo deal, what we are witnessing is the shift of the Chinese embrace into high gear.

What will $5 billion buy? Quite a lot, should all of the projects in the announced deal materialize. Imagine Western Europe without practicable roads or functioning trains and you will begin to get a sense of Congo and its realities.

For half of the year, when the rains are heavy, the grandly named Route Nationale 1, which follows a path of about 260 kilometers, or 160 miles, between the capital, Kinshasa, and the country’s sole ocean port, Matadi, cannot be said to connect the two cities.

With the deals it was signing, China was not just vacuuming up as much of Congo’s vast mineral supply as it could. It was also making real a new way of engaging with Africa: one that could help the continent remedy some of its enormous historical shortfalls in physical infrastructure in exchange for shoveling huge amounts of metals—cobalt, copper, nickel, and others—out of the ground for embarkation on ships and processing in faraway plants.

Just as this is not an argument for extraction, this column is not about elevating China into some benevolent power, nor for that matter even a particularly original actor. During those days of covering the civil war in Zaire, late in the conflict someone slipped into my hands an impressive, bound briefing book that purported to show elaborate and ambitious plans drawn up by the American Bechtel Corporation, a well-connected civil engineering giant, for the wholesale transformation of the country. Bechtel would shepherd in the construction of roads, dams, airports, and other projects on a massive scale, all of which would be collateralized or paid for by Congo’s mineral wealth.

Other Western companies had circulated similar, if less detailed, programs to transform the country in exchange for access to its wealth. For reasons that have to do with the erratic policies of the Kabila government but also with the United States’ chronic inability to invest much focus on Africa, they all came to naught, and China, with a greater appetite for risk and a longer-term vision about the continent, ran with the ball.

I do not pretend that China has been a panacea for Africa in the years since then. It has not. But Western criticism of China’s Africa policy often comes across as a mixture of envy, chagrin, and bad faith.

There are serious problems with Chinese lending to the continent, especially a deep lack of transparency and dangerous levels of indebtedness for some. But it is untrue that China has practiced anything like outright debt trap diplomacy, as many Western critics have alleged. China would greatly prefer that its borrowers pay its money back, and few things could do more for Beijing’s global image than to see its partners in the so-called developing world thrive.

The biggest problem with China’s engagement with Africa, in fact, is that whether in development finance, infrastructure building or strategic mining, it has little competition. Mobutu’s demise was one of the Cold War’s last acts, and once it was over, the United States and most of the West grew disinterested in Africa, gathered their toys, and went home.

It may be hard to see how the West will build batteries now that it has been largely locked out of places such as Congo as a result of its own disinterest and lack of vision. But if the West wants to have a future in terms of its relations with the world’s fastest growing population center—Africa—it’s going to have to reinvent the way it engages around true competition and tangible deliverables, meaning things that Africans need and want.