China’s President Xi Jinping has said at the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit that China will extend 60 billion dollars of financing to Africa in the form of government assistance as well as investment and financing by financial institutions and companies.
President Xi said this will include 15 billion dollars interest free loans and concessional loans; 20 billion dollars of credit lines, the setting up of 10 billion dollars special funds for development financing and a 5 billion dollars special fund for financing imports from Africa. “We encourage Chinese companies to make at least 10 billion dollars of investment in Africa in the next three years,” he said.
FOCAC has 52 African state members, the AU Commission and the Peoples Republic of China as partners, and the cooperation has been worked out in trade, technology, media, diplomacy, agriculture, culture and people-to-people exchanges.
For those of Africa’s least developed countries, who are heavily indebted and poor countries, landlocked developing countries and small islands that have diplomatic relations with China, President Xi said they would be supported by 2018.
The devil, as always, is in the details, details which are beyond the scope of this article.
From there on, it gets interesting. The genesis of loans, grants and all the in-betweens has left a trail of failures and high indebtedness on the necks of each and every Gambian, by extension every Afrikkan. Now, the question becomes this:
What can be different about this financial package to guarantee the smart application of borrowed money?