2023-08-19 23:18:46
From APS Special Envoy Ousmane Ibrahima Dia
Johannesburg, Aug 19 (APS) – Former Senegalese Foreign Minister Cheikh Tidiane Gadio on Saturday in Johannesburg at the BRICS media forum highlighted the impacts of Chinese President Xi Jing Ping’s innovative policies in the partnership between Beijing and the African continent.
Speaking before some 200 participants – media leaders, journalists, experts, ministers, businessman, etc. -, Mr. Gadio recalled in a communication entitled ”Africa facing the challenges of innovative partnerships”, that “The unprecedented transformation of relations between China and Africa has taken a turn and a phenomenal scale that the futurists and geo-strategists of the 80s and 90s simply did not see coming”.
According to him, ”while many analysts, thinkers and observers of the future reflected on the role and place of Africa in shaping the first century of the new millennium, China was initiating a profound paradigmatic rupture in the way of conceiving economic, political, diplomatic, social and cultural relations with Africa.
For Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, “China, an emerging world power at the end of the last century, had probably felt and perceived, more than all the other partners, old and new, that Africa was going to prove its centrality in the geopolitics of a world in total recomposition, and thereby becoming the preferred target of all geostrategies of positioning and positive, fruitful partnerships or business as usual”.
Xi Jing Ping, ”a visionary leader”
He returned to former Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade’s decision to renew ”relationships of friendship and cooperation” with China ”by redressing the historical error of the senseless severance of diplomatic relations, but also by proposing to Africa the revival of Pan-Africanism and the theory of large ensembles”.
As President Wade “completed his contribution to this historic cycle in 2012”, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio notes that “China entrusted its destiny in 2013 to a new leader, President X Jinping, (…) a visionary leader who has accelerated the pace of economic transformations in his country and which has imposed a reconfiguration of the entire planetary geopolitics (…)”.
According to him, ”(…) President XI proposed important innovations in the way of cooperation” and expressed ”a desire to build an innovative partnership between China, his country and Africa”.
“The facts and figures are there indisputable even if excessive naivety should not be the tree that hides the forest”, underlined Mr. Gadio, considering that “there are necessarily problems in any partnership even winning -winner who is also not immune to errors and shortcomings that will always have to be courageously identified and quickly corrected”.
He quoted one of his successors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amadou Ba, who declared in 2019 to the magazine Jeune Afrique, that “10,000 km of roads, 6,000 km of railways, 30 ports, 20 airports, and 80 power stations have been made over the past decade by Chinese firms across the continent.
China has become “the continent’s first trading partner, one of its most important financial partners, as well as its main construction manager”, Gadio said, quoting the continental magazine.
According to him, “the desire expressed through President Xi’s policies to support the industrialization of Africa so that +it can transform its production on the spot and thus create jobs and the wealth it needs+ is remarkable and unprecedented in partnerships with Africa”.
Also an innovation in his eyes, “the desire expressed by China to facilitate access to its market for African exports, particularly agricultural ones”.
According to Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, ”Beijing even wants to help the continent to develop its assets by acquiring endogenous capacities for processing its basic products and also to gain access to industrialization”.
He believes that this desire of President XI ”comes at the right time to somewhat attenuate the criticism once morest the massive importation of Chinese products which is causing the decline of the embryo of the African industrial sector, particularly textiles in the few countries where he has been able to develop like the bankruptcies observed in Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria for example”.
Still according to Mr. Gadio, ”the record of cooperation between Africa and China is overall very remarkable for the importance of the financial resources committed by the Chinese side”.
‘‘The positive effect of the new paradigm of China-Africa innovative partnership’
The People’s Republic of China “has contributed more than 20% to Africa’s economic growth for many years”, he noted, noting that with “this record trade with Africa and the unprecedented rate of 254 billion dollars recorded in 2021, China-Africa trade maintains double-digit growth and increased by 23% in the 1st quarter of 2022”.
He recalled that China’s investment concentration sectors are important for the continent’s socio-economic development. Mr. Gadio cited the mining and oil sectors, the construction of infrastructure and the development of the telecommunications sector.
He also touched on ”another sector which has not received much publicity”, namely ”the training of African Defense and Security Forces at major Chinese military academies. ”’.
“Yet this is an essential contribution at a time when the continent is under attack from several negative forces (from violent extremist terrorists to mercenaries) (…)”, he noted.
He also believes that “the other positive effect brought by the new paradigm of the innovative China-Africa partnership launched by President XI is the positive reaction of other traditional partners of Africa such as the United States and Europe”. .
The former minister notes that ”all have recently announced unprecedented figures in the field of trade and investment for their new cooperation with Africa”.
“China will have at least stimulated this enthusiasm for massive investments in Africa and this competition as long as it remains healthy and without too many ulterior motives will only be of benefit to Africa,” said Cheikh Tidiane Gadio.
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