A new scramble for Africa?

Talk of renewed scrambling and jostling for a piece of the African continent has been around for a while in the media, academia and policy debates. What exactly is new in the scramble? What is the scramble for? Who are the new actors?  

In the final analysis, it comes down to the last question – the actors. China is the obvious new major actor that has sent tongues wagging, especially in the West.  China’s rise and sprawling influence, powered by its sheer and imposing economic presence, has unsettled traditional Western powers and fuelled a great deal of anxiety precisely because of China’s perceived disruption to the extant balance of power. 

In Europe and the United States, China is a handy bogeyman for politicians particularly those seeking to rally their bases and stir nationalist sentiments. On their part, the Chinese remain patently unbothered, indeed singularly focused on pressing on to the summit of global economic and military power.  With the ground shifting and the balance of power tilting, some strands of the West’s publics have conjured up a populist narrative of victimhood. 

This is incredible considering the centuries of Western domination of the world, often procured violently, and the vicious exploitation done with little regard for human dignity.  Today, it is not unusual to hear Western policymakers and politicians speak out forcefully against China’s alleged extractive and exploitative activities across African. 

To be sure, undoubtedly, the Chinese are doing what the Europeans did for centuries – pursue their interests and secure their strategic goals. There is no other way around the bold assumption that external powers roaming the continent, and struggling to establish a firm stranglehold, are doing so for their own immediate and long-term interests.  When the Chinese built the headquarters of the African Union, it was not for charity. When the US Secretary of State, Mr Antony Blinken, is seen watching the African Cup of Nations football game in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, he is not doing this for some selfless love of Africa.  

It is okay for the West to purport to carry the ‘Whiteman’s burden’ of working to save Africans from the rapacious and supposedly immoral actions of China in its pursuit of economic and geostrategic interests in Africa. But it is squarely on Africans and especially Africans governments and rulers to fight the African cause, to chart an agenda for the continent, protect our strategic interests and advance the needs of the continent. 

Here is the bottomline: by all official measures, statistics and standards, we are the poorest continent of the world. The socioeconomic conditions of most of our people remain utterly appalling. For this, we are despised and disrespected, our due dignity denied because of our poverty. 

While in the 17th and 18th centuries, at the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade, we received the stamp of enslavement as a race, today we Africans carry the badge of impoverishment. We are objectified. Academics make careers studying us. Journalists, human rights crusaders, aid-workers and expatriate-‘experts’ become famous because of our fate. 

The state of poverty drives desperation and disheartening attempts to find a better life elsewhere. Thus, the countless Africans dying or narrowly surviving crossing the Mediterranean and the many young Ugandan women you find in the airport or on flights out of Entebbe heading for 21st century enslavement in the Middle East.

At the recently concluded gathering of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Kampala, about which I said a few things here last week, President Museveni delivered an incisive and blistering speech. 

Except for some falsehoods and distortions, anyone reading Mr Museveni’s speech objectively would find it compelling and persuasive in laying out a scheme of where the world has come from and the itineraries travelled. A key highlight, not surprising, was his scathing indictment of the West. 

That is all fine, except that talk is cheap while action is not. Mr Museveni has to explain why in under three decades, the great Lee Kuan Yew engineered Singapore’s march from a poor to rich country, or how Dong Xiaoping pulled-off fundamental reforms that placed China on the path to global power and prestige? By contrast, Mr Museveni continues to rule over an impoverished people close to 40 years after he captured power. 

The new powers scrambling for a place in Africa, and to secure a pie of the continent’s wealth, doing so as the traditionally dominant Western powers appear to be losing ground, are here to accumulate and grow their national power.  It is not just the Chinese. We have the Turks, Russians, Indians, Saudis and others. Their primary presence in Africa is not to help Africans. No, the task of helping (read developing) Africa and bettering the lot of African people lies squarely with Africans!

Shockingly, for someone with the intellectual sophistication and grasp of geopolitics as Mr Museveni, he continues to hold onto the illusion that foreigners will develop Uganda. He keeps the folly of kissing up to foreign investors. It is one of the epic wonders and mysteries of our times.

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