LIKE the rest of Africa grandly taken in by Chinese loans and grants, Nigeria has kept up a dizzying appetite for external borrowing from the Asian economic powerhouse. At the rate it is going, and considering that it already owes over $3bn to China and is negotiating a further $3.5bn from the same source, Nigeria’s indebtedness to China may create future problems for its domestic and external political and economic relations. Loans are after all not just about economics alone. China has asserted that it is different from the probing and censorious Western democracies whose patrician airs grate badly on the nerves of developing countries, and that it has little wish to meddle in the internal affairs of African countries. In reality, however, as some southern African countries like Zambia and Tanzania have discovered, China has some strange and insidious methods of throttling its debtors.
There is no free lunch anywhere. If China gives loans, it will emplace strictures and future national goals in those credits to maximise benefits for the Chinese people. At the recently concluded summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), China announced a further $60bn financing for infrastructural projects and aids in Africa. Some $15bn of the loans, China further explained, would be grants or interest-free or concessional. African leaders were ecstatic that at last they were getting help from a country that is peculiarly uninterested in their political systems or their moral integrity, or fussy about accountability and transparency. Nigeria, like the rest of Africa, is now enthusiastically looking eastward. That new direction agrees with their worldview, economic opacity, and low drive for economic independence.
Zambia and Tanzania are examples of the difficulties dependent countries experience in the drive for Chinese funds. Their copper and gold mines, in which China has invested heavily, have exhibited poor financial and operational standards, difficult management-labour relations sometimes ending in violence and complicity by the governments of the host countries, and appalling legal lacunas. China is now heavily involved in the Nigerian economy, and sadly, the government gives little room for reflection or debate as to the propriety of the loans and investments, or where boundaries must be drawn, as Malaysia recently and sensibly did. With a National Assembly unsettled by controversy and integrity deficit, it is not clear that a thorough oversight can be done on those loans and investments to avoid the pitfalls both Zambia and Tanzania, for example, have experienced.
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is good. But in Nigeria where the regulatory environment is notoriously slack, and where foreigners are treated with excessive indulgence, care must be taken to avoid pushing the country into another debt trap and insidious colonialism. The fears are deep and genuine, not only for Nigeria, but also for the rest of Africa. Few questions are asked, and because African leaders have become less perceptive or intellectually astute than the independence/founding leaders, it is not clear altogether that enough care would be taken to avoid mortgaging the future.
Even worse is the fact that African leaders are as insensitive and superficial as they are easily flattered and undiscriminating. In 2011, destitute of national and continental pride, they accepted a donation of a brand new $200m headquarters in Addis Ababa built by China. It is the only continent and power bloc that threw out the pride of a whole people to accept such indecorous donation. China-Africa trade has reached over $165bn. It is significant and valuable; but the devil is in the detail. China built up and modernise its economy beginning with Deng Xiaoping. It has managed to produce a slew of brilliant and patriotic leaders to consolidate their economic miracle and transformation. What is needed in Africa is not the mindless dependence on loans and grants from China or any other country for that matter, but an assembly of great, successive and imaginative leaders imbued with the strength of character, brilliance and vision to plot a continental economic miracle and transformation. Neither Nigeria nor any other African country has demonstrated such qualities.
Meanwhile, it is time the legislature and other knowledgeable Nigerian leaders and economists began joining issues with the government. It must not be given the free rein to beguile the country into another debt trap or economic and power arrangements that bode ill for future generations. Coming out of a debt trap to the West, and having managed to wean the continent off the political and inconsistent staple of the industrialised democracies, it would be galling indeed to replace one master with another, or enter into a fresh slavery as pernicious as the ones being enacted by the youths of the continent in search of green pastures. Instead of being beholden to the Asian Tigers, why can African leaders not produce African Tigers? Let them instead strive for equality; let them create political systems that can rival any in the world; let them, if they can, exhibit patriotic and self-confident glow. Enough of the grovelling and humiliation.