Belt & Road Initiative: Chinese Partnership or Neo-Colonialism?

>> Speaker 1: Dr. Frazer, thank you for your lecture. It was very interesting, fascinating. So my question, we know from the history that Soviet Union has always proudly called itself as a leader of anti colonial movement, and it was the main official reason of soviet actions, soviet policy towards African countries during Cold War era.

But what is your opinion? How do you think? Were that relations of Soviet Union with African countries equal, or it was form of empire building?

>> Jendayi Frazer: I think that the Soviet Union was interested in Africa primarily ideologically, so you could call that empire building, I guess. It was interesting in the spread of its form of governance, communism, right because this is the end of the World War II.

And all of a sudden, former allied partners, i.e the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union is supporting communist parties in Europe, the United States is very concerned about that. European countries are very concerned about that. And so they just take that rivalry to other continents, right?

They don't ever have a hot war in Africa, I mean, in Europe and they absolutely don't ever confront each other militarily in Africa, they use proxies to confront each other. And so in some sense, Russia had to build up its nuclear arsenal very quickly at the end of world War II, didn't have one.

The United States was far ahead, it had to build up very quickly. So it was also looking for uranium, as I said in the Congo, we beat them out there. So I think it was more ideological. Today, it's even worse because it's very opportunistic and it is extremely destabilizing on the continent.

They're literally supporting military regimes, and they're doing it to get minerals. They're in the Central Africa republic, they're in Mali, they're in Burkina Faso. They're going where there are significant minerals, and they're just trying to take those minerals out. And it's not even clear that that is not necessarily just going into the hands of Putin's cronies, right?

And definitely a lot of the gold now is believed to be being used to help fuel the war against Ukraine. So they can break sanctions and they can illicitly take out significant resources from Africa, and they're also getting paid. They're not just taking it out in mineral resources, but they're also getting paid.

China does a lot of take minerals and we'll build you infrastructure swaps, that's one of the ways, in addition to giving loans, is they also trade off infrastructure for development. Which I think that was, no, maybe that might have been discussed in the Howard French piece as well.

So Russia has been a negative force in Africa for a very long time because there's nothing positive that they're doing, right? Their main export to Africa has been arms. They've only invested on the continent, their foreign direct investment is about 15%, right? It's so low, it's really, Africa's just been a place for them to sell arms in the past and now a place where they're supporting military regimes and destabilization to get the minerals out.

How do I ask? You guys will give the mic? Yes, please. Yes.

>> Speaker 2: I was wondering a bit about, you talked about the US security assistance helping fight the global war on terror. I was wondering a bit about how that affected our relationship with African countries, especially thinking about Niger, how with Niger and Mali, they've both kind of turned to rejecting US and French as well, security assistance, possibly in favor of Russia with Niger.

But just how effective is our work there perceived? How much these countries appreciate it first, have other feelings about it. Thank you.

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yeah, that's a good question. And it's very much debated within the African studies and Africa policy and constituency groups. First, let me just say that mainly the disinformation campaigns that the Russians are fueling are against France, not actually the United States, although a little bit the United States, but they wouldn't get very far with the populations being anti the US.

As I said, there's a reservoir of goodwill towards the United States. Part of that goodwill is what we represent in terms of democracy and freedom. How can you be against that? Partly is because we have a lot of civil society groups working in these countries, faith based groups and others who were doing that hard work of helping people with their lives, student groups and others.

And so there's a tremendous amount of deep reservoir of goodwill for the United States, so it wouldn't be that effective. Where they try to get us is they say that we're neo colonial, right? But what they're definitely getting France is that they're saying France was a colonizer, right?

To these countries. France, they say, continue to take the, are taking minerals out without giving back anything, which France is taking minerals out, but that's exactly what they want to do, too. And that's what they're doing, so, I mean, where's the difference there? And they also say that France has been very arrogant towards Africa.

And that's where I said that there's this continuing pattern of how the colonizer and colonized view each other and have interacted and that can be negative on both sides, sort of arrogance on one side and a sort of dependency mentality on the other side. And so they're really hammering France.

But the second part of your question is how effective has been the counterterrorism approach? That's really hard to say. What we do know for a fact is that you cannot fight a war from the air with drones, right? And the second thing we know is that if the forces on the ground, i.e the partner nations, aren't disciplined, aren't well resourced, and we do a lot of training.

We've spent a lot of time, our special forces and then contractors do a lot of training of these forces. But if they're not well equipped, resourced or properly trained, then it's going to be very difficult because it's a whack a mole, because you saw the size of the land mass, right?

It's huge. These countries are huge. And so that's part of it. And then the most important thing that the constituency groups would like to say is that you have to deal with the root causes, right? If you don't get governance right, if the economies don't work, then it doesn't matter because there's a ready recruitment base, particularly on disaffected men.

But when you see the crowds during a coup in Africa, you have to say, where's the silent majority? Cuz everyone knows you can buy a crowd, it's very easy. A t-shirt will do, a meal will do. You can get a crowd out there. All of a sudden, Russian flags show up, right?

It's quite easy to have people, and the people who first demonstrated in Niger in support of the democratically elected president were beaten by the military. So they're not coming back out, right? But that's where you would want to see American public diplomacy being more active and engaged and in the fight on what the narrative is on the continent.

But what I fear is that we're going to walk away, right? So our great friend, the democracy that we're holding up, it gets a little tough and we're going to walk away, right? Because what's our interests, right? That's what will be said. But what we're doing is we're walking away from our own credibility.

Now, we've done that before in even bigger places.

>> Speaker 3: Thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to hear you speak. I was wondering if you could expand a little more on your notion of establishing reliability and trust. Obviously, we've seen that we're pouring in humanitarian aid and we're establishing that connection there but still China's beating us to the table.

And kind of wondering if we should be trying to beat them at their own game or if we should stay in our own lane and resort to our own forms of reliability and trust and just kind of what that might look like. Some examples would be wonderful. Thank you.

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yeah, thank you very much. I think that we have to stick to our values, right? I think that that's extremely important. So we should never allow them to beat us on the game of the importance of good governance, transparency, accountability, those strong values are absolutely critical. So I don't want to play their game, which is a leadership game in which they basically say, we are the model of how you get there.

With authoritarianism you can make decisions very quick and very fast. You can decide what's going to happen, where you should place the development, and then you can at some point, or maybe never, get to citizen accountability to citizens. So that one, I think, is extremely important. I do think that we overdo it, though.

So we like to credit ourselves, and it's important credit to say that we're going to only do infrastructure in the most transparent of fashions and only when we have significant studies and feasibilities and environmental studies and other studies and other studies and other studies. And so we do so many studies that we actually do not actually invest, right?

And I think that that's a big problem. The other thing is that we do have to answer to our parliament, right? We have to answer to Congress. They're this, they have the money, right? And so if you're not willing, and we're in a tight budget scenario. And so what are the ways in which you can incentivize instead of just continuing to, and this is where we definitely need to change, promising new initiatives at 1.5 billion, 10 billion, 9 billion and the money's never there, right?

And you're double counting and you're not really actually delivering anything. We have to stop that, right? It would be better not to make those types of announcements then to make them to feel good, to get through the summit, and then nothing actually happens, and it just leads to deeper resentment.

And so keep our values, stop our phony announcements. Unless we're serious about getting the money, we're going to do the political will to go up to the hill and really make the case for getting the money. And, yeah, create, bring our, the Biden administration had talked about COVID climate, something else, what it didn't have on there was commerce, right?

Bring our companies into the game, right? Help them to become competitive across the continent. That's what China's doing very well, and we should follow their lead. Of course, it's their state owned companies for the most part, but China definitely facilitates their companies getting those contracts in a very negative fashion.

But we should be in there engaged as well, and that involves our commercial services at our embassies being properly staffed.

>> Speaker 4: Thank you so much for your talk. I'm really interested if you can talk a little bit about the European role in Africa, perhaps the return of the bending bronzes or reparations, and a little bit about how perhaps that can alter the calculus into whether Europe is trying to redefine their relationship with Africa and whether the US has a role to play, perhaps, in supporting this new-

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yes, Europe is definitely trying to redefine its relationship with Africa. They've had a number of Europe Africa summits of late, and they very much would like to pretend to be on the field, right? I mean, so they're doing a lot of rhetoric as well, they're talking quite a lot.

They do do a lot of assistance as a European Union. They definitely do provide significant assistance and support. As I said, they are also involved in conflict mediation, which is extremely important. But, they're part of the G7 that's making all these announcements that, every G7 there's another announcement.

Even the initiatives get renamed because nothing has happened to them in the last, so I think that they need to become more engaged. Europe's biggest challenge, in many ways, in Africa's migration, they're scared of all those people coming across the ocean. But in fact, most immigration from Africa into Europe, or I should say most global immigration, is not coming from Africa.

It's mainly coming from the Middle east and a lot of Libya after, our actions in Libya when we took out Gaddafi. So it's a lot from Libya, but it's not actually, in terms of global terms, coming from Africa, despite, the view. And I always say to the Europeans, to my friends in Europe, you guys need these young Africans, right?

You got a negative population growth, right? You actually need some people who are going to come here and do some of this work, right? And, find a livelihood here and, be welcomed here as citizens. And, they're global citizens in many ways. And so fix your immigration mentality, right?

Because it's a mentality, that's all it is. It's a fear of somehow losing their identity. So Europe can be, Europe could step up its game as well and it's talking about it. One of the very positive things that the UK is doing right now is actually capturing and returning illicit financial flows coming out of Africa, right?

Which I think is extremely important. It would be helpful if Dubai did the same, right? If UAE did the same, right? Because all of that gold is going through the UAE, right? I mean, they're just laundering African gold right now. So I think that the UK and putting a focus on actually capturing and returning, so that's your question about, reparations is, yeah, find a way to get that money back to the continent for development purposes.

>> Speaker 5: I had a question about the graph that you had earlier about which model of development Africans prefer.

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yeah.

>> Speaker 5: And I was more concerned about the overwhelming desire for the second place position China held-

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yes.

>> Speaker 5: In that graph. I'm wondering what sorts of Chinese governance appeals to the people in Africa and whether their cultural interest in Africa has had that effect?

>> Jendayi Frazer: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, first of all, it's just the overwhelming amount of development, right? In terms of, so more than likely, this is reflecting elite opinion on the development, right? Because a lot of communities aren't as enamored with it because of environmental degradation. If you go to South Sudan and look at the oil, Chinese oil there, so that's part of it.

The Chinese also learn the languages, the local languages, right? They sort of integrate themselves much deeper into society. And I think that that's very much appreciated among the population and within the communities as well. It's viewed as a form of respect. So I think that that's important. The third is that, as I said before, China has bought up many of the broadcasting and newspapers and even local, local language radio stations.

And so they're constantly pushing out that they have raised up more people out of poverty than any country in the history of the world, right? And so they're pushing that message. And so people feel that, well, China knows how to get people out of poverty. And I think you read in Howard French, he talked about Dambisa Moyo saying, as western aid went up, poverty also went up, right?

So the western aid model doesn't work, but China knows how to do this. China knows how to do agriculture. China knows how to do infrastructure fast, not with a million different studies. And so I think that is also part of the appeal that the Chinese have. Where they're not appealing is that there's that same kind of racist, as I said, was colonial mentality where the bosses have to be Chinese managers, right?

The workers are just the workers. And if there's any abuse, and I'm sure it's rare, but if there's any abuse, it goes viral on the Internet of a Chinese manager beating an African worker. And so that's the opposite, right? There's also a perception that even while they learn a language and show respect, Africans are lazy.

You read that quote in one of them, right? There's that sense of, well, they also come here trying to treat us like second class citizens of our own country. Yes, thank you.

>> Jendayi Frazer: Thank you.