The Center for Global Development has released a 30-page report examining investment of multilateral development banks (MDBs), e.g. World Bank, Africa Development Bank, in Africa during the last seven years. Using the 2015 launching of the World Bank’s “Billions to Trillions” program as a base, the CGD report concludes that Chinese development finance institutions (DFIs) dominate” African infrastructure investments. “Chinese DFIs provided 2.5 times more finance from 2007-2020 than all other bilateral DFIs combined,” the report says. Even after the launch of the “billions to trillions” vision (the West’s answer to the Belt and Road Initiative) in 2015, “total MDB finance for such transactions averaged only $1.4 billion per year from 2016–2020—a small increase from a very low base in earlier years of the period.” The leading MDB during that period was not the World Bank, or America’s International Development Finance Corporation, but the stressed African Development Bank. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/public-private-infrastructure-finance-sub-saharan-africa-no-sign-upward-trends
Clearly having no direct answer to the BRI, the Western response has increasingly turned to a confrontationalist approach. A growing “narrative"—with zero evidence—is the line that China is scheming to “build a naval base on the Atlantic,” somewhere on Africa’s west coast. According to a widely circulated report by military analyst Daniel Volman, the first surfacing of this line was by AFRICOM Gen. Stephen Townsend at a Congressional hearing April 22, 2021, a copy of which is posted on the AFRICOM website. That charge was then included in the Nov. 3 report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” which mentioned Angola, again with no evidence. A month later, the Wall Street Journal was told by “U.S. officials” that China had settled on New Guinea, and the word was out.
Two weeks ago, AFRICOM held a meeting for African Chiefs of Defense (CHOD), the first of its kind since 2017, with 36 friendly CHODs feted for a four-day holiday in Rome Jan. 31-Feb. 3. In a briefing to press afterwards, the normally tight-lipped General Townsend volunteered that one of the topics was China’s “exploitation of our partners” in Africa. He repeated the fact-free allegation, “the Chinese, I think, aspire to have a naval base in that area” the Gulf of Guinea (if he’s not sure, however, he can ask Liz Truss.)
Not wanting to be left out, George Shultz’s Hoover Institution seems to be attempting to inflate its own “Chinagate corruption” meme, holding two seminars under the inflammatory China Sharp Power in Africa banner last month. Featured papers/presentations described alleged offenses such as: Corruption of Chinese contractors in Mauritius and the construction industry in Zambia; environmental infractions in South Sudan’s oil industry; and over-fishing in the Gulf of Guinea.
Meanwhile China has already committed $5 billion for an oil pipeline in Tanzania this year, and committed $1 billion for the transformative Chivhu steel plant in Zimbabwe just before the FOCAC conference in October 2021.
