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West continues to help China win new friends in Africa
By MUKHISA KITUYI
Posted Saturday, November 5 2011 at 20:00
This past week, the US Senate Foreign Relations African Affairs subcommittee held a session on Chinas role in Africa and its implications for US policy.
The committee chairman, Senator Chris Coons, set the tempo of the meeting with his observation that while China overwhelmingly invested in prestigious infrastructure projects, US was concentrating on the less visible projects like fighting malaria and HIV/Aids.
We may be winning the war on disease while losing the battle for hearts and minds in Africa, he said. For some time now, the West has been wondering how to stem the rising profile of China in Africa and the related decline of Western influence.
The news that China has overtaken the US as the single largest trading partner of Africa over the past two years does not help matters either.
The usual banter about China embracing repressive regimes and Western emphasis on open society ever yielding diminishing friends recurred at every turn.
The West continues to be confounded by why governments they help around Africa continue to tilt towards China. How the African intelligentsia, overwhelmingly educated in the West and major consumers of Western cultural products like movies, music and lifestyles appear to have their heads turned to a China whose language and habits are profoundly alien to them.
Many good arguments about strategy have been made. But one little matter appears to elude the eye of Western analysts. Africa craves a respect China offers that the West does not.
Most Africans appreciate Western technology and ingenuity. Yet a perverse expectation that Africans will be friends on the basis of gifts and mutual embrace of Western habits is ill-advised.
The Sino-Africa conference on trade and development is the masterpiece of Chinese trade diplomacy with Africa.
For this parley, China brings together the largest gathering of African presidents to meet the top leaders of China and discuss the premier frontiers of aid and investment for the coming years.
Each head of state has a brief photo session with the hosts, and country-specific programmes are announced. Every leader feels appreciated.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) is a law setting out a basket of preferential market access for African exports to the US.