Africa

🇧🇫 Burkina Faso’s military government announced last Thursday that it would revive its bilateral relations with North Korea. Ouagadougou severed ties with Pyongyang in 2017, banning imports from the country, to conform with United Nations sanctions. Burkina Faso’s military junta, which seized power last year, said it would benefit from military equipment from North Korea and planned to engage with Pyongyang in mining, health, agriculture, and research.

🇰🇪 Kenya’s President William Ruto and opposition leader Raila Odinga yesterday agreed to hold talks, ending twice-weekly anti-government protests. Ruto committed to pursuing a parliamentary avenue to address grievances raised by the opposition while maintaining that discussions would not touch on last year’s election which Odinga claimed was flawed.

🇿🇦 South Africa will not break its bilateral ties with Russia even as it faces pressure to do so from other countries, its foreign minister Naledi Pandor said ahead of talks last week.  The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for what it said were war crimes related to the alleged abduction of children from Ukraine. Putin is set to attend a BRICS summit in South Africa in August.

The wage increase agreed by South African public sector unions and the government. The two-year deal follows five months of strikes. The increase could benefit around 1.3 million workers covered by the unions. South Africa’s public sector wage bill makes up around a third of total government expenditure.

U.S. diplomacy in Africa focuses on avoiding China comparisons

THE NEWS

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris capped the most frenetic period of Washington diplomacy with Africa for nearly a decade with a three-nation tour — but the main takeaway was about China.

Harris, whose trip ended on Friday, was the latest of nearly 30 U.S. officials who visited 18 African countries in the first quarter of the year, a Semafor Africa tally shows. The visits followed President Joe Biden’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December, the first since 2014, during which the 49 African leaders who attended were told the White House would make $55 billion in investments over the next three years.

In Ghana, at the start of her tour, Harris set the tone by saying “the conversation was not about China” as much as it was about the relationship between the U.S. and African countries.

YINKA’S VIEW

The White House doesn’t want these visits to be framed simply as a counterweight to China’s influence on the continent, but they’re not going to have much luck breaking that narrative even as African leaders made clear it was becoming tiresome.

“There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activities on the continent but there’s no such obsession here,” Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in response to a question at a press conference with Harris alongside him, gamefully trying to smile through the awkwardness of the moment.

Even when China wasn’t mentioned it was still being talked about. Take Harris’ visit to Zambia, which was the first African country during the pandemic to default on its debt, in 2020. The southern African country is currently negotiating a debt restructuring program with international creditors. There’s just one problem: China. Beijing, whose state institutions and private companies hold a combined $4 billion of Zambia’s debt, is refusing to take a haircut unless multilaterals like the World Bank do so too — something they have traditionally never done.

Harris didn’t mention China by name during a press conference with Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema last week, but her reference wasn’t subtle either. “I will reiterate a call we’ve made many times, for all official bilateral creditors to provide a meaningful debt reduction for Zambia,” the vice president said.

But, like Ghana’s president, Hichilema wasn’t interested in being cast as the grass in the old aphorism about two elephants fighting. “When I’m in Washington, I’m not against Beijing and equally when I’m in Beijing, I’m not against Washington.”

This is why there’s little chance of African countries choosing to forge an alliance exclusively with either nation.

Long-time U.S.-Africa analysts in Washington D.C. we spoke with in recent days are now speculating on the most-likely African stop-offs for Biden during a long-expected tour later this year. The White House is yet to share his plans.

THE VIEW FROM ABUJA

Western narratives about China’s impact across Africa are increasingly being challenged by senior African government officials. Nigeria’s Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, in a speech last week, pointed out that African countries were “unapologetic” about their close ties with Beijing. “China shows up where and when the West will not or are reluctant. And many African countries are of the view that the beware of the Chinese Trojan loans advice from the West is wise but probably self-serving,” he said. “Africa needs the loans and infrastructure and China offers them. In any case, the history of loans from Western institutions is not great.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

The U.S. has had a “long standing relationship with Africa” which means it is “a misconception for anyone to say that now the U.S. is trying to dislodge China from the continent,” said Dr. Caroline Wandiri Mwea, an international relations researcher at Kenyatta University in Kenya. Mwea said China’s attempts to be the leading partner in Africa are being undermined by the mounting debt burden owed to the Chinese by several countries.

NOTABLE

• U.S. officials who have visited Africa this year include Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and First Lady Jill Biden. However, fears remain that Biden may not “follow through” on his commitments to the continent or he could be replaced by a hostile Republican administration after the next U.S. election.

Kenya’s tech ecosystem, nicknamed Silicon Savannah, has been at the vanguard of Africa’s tech revolution over the past two decades. A new report titled “Understanding the Kenyan Startup Ecosystem” digs into the numbers behind the rise. It notes that the space is dominated by fintech startups which accounted for 30% of all funding between 2019 to June 2022. One in five Kenyan founders graduated from a university in Africa — on average six years before they started their company — and a third of Kenyan startups has a female co-founder. The report finds Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa are the preferred countries for expansion from Kenya.

Tomiwa Aladekomo is the CEO of Lagos-based BigCabal Media, the parent company of TechCabal, a leading African tech news publication, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last week.

• The western view of African history rests on the idea that European explorers discovered parts of the continent. But new research argues that Africans discovered much of Europe and invited Europeans to Africa. Isaac Samuel, an African history researcher writing in New Lines Magazine, says this “contradicts discourses...that exaggerate the role played by the ‘daring’ European explorers.” Samuel notes that Queen Amanirenas of the Kingdom of Kush initiated diplomatic ties with Rome in 20 B.C.E. which started a pattern in relations with Europe.
• China dominates the processing of lithium for use in electric vehicle batteries and is investing heavily in African mines in countries such as Zimbabwe and Angola to ensure a reliable supply of the metal, reports the Financial Times. “The first wave of Chinese investments has taken place and that has led to a rude awakening for western companies,” says one mining executive in Angola. He says the region will be “globally significant” for other metals critical to the energy transition such as tin and tantalum.

How do you make a documentary about rural Kenyans receiving $22 a month as part of an American NGO’s 12-year experiment on universal basic income? For Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko and his collaborator Lauren DeFilippo, the trick is in not treating the recipients as data sets but in capturing intimate stories that reflect their agency. Soko’s ‘Free Money’ tracked GiveDirectly’s experiment in Kogutu, Kenya, and premiered in Toronto last year. While the results of the free money which started in 2017 are years away, visual documentation of the recipients’ lives — provided it doesn’t influence their behavior — could help future decision makers take a stand on universal basic income, one way or another.

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— Yinka, Alexis, Alexander, and Muchira