China invests €5.6bn in its scramble for Africa
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A displaced child stands by the side of a poorly paved road with her mother as soldiers pass on a motorcycle near Kingi in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
China's modern-day "Scramble for Africa'' to capture the continent's mineral wealth enters a new phase today.
Chinese companies will begin rebuilding 2,050 miles of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo that were left to decay, after Belgian colonialists pulled out 48 years ago, and further shattered by seven years of war.
The project, tripling Congo's paved-road network, is part of China's largest single investment in Africa -- a €5.6bn infrastructure-for-minerals deal signed in January.
Beijing has also promised to repair 2,000 miles of largely defunct railways, build 32 hospitals and 145 health centres, install two electricity distribution networks, construct two hydroelectric dams and two new airports.
In return, China has won the rights to five copper and cobalt mines in Congo's southern minerals belt -- an area boasting some of the world's richest ore deposits.
The deal confirms Beijing as Congo's largest foreign investor and extends its dominance over swathes of Africa previously allied to the West.
The Europeans are now largely playing catch-up with the Chinese and are unlikely ever to succeed, say analysts in the capital Kinshasa.
One senior European diplomat said: "To engage with the Chinese, you have to move pretty quickly. They are setting themselves up as being unlike other donors, who are seen as too slow and always telling governments what to do.
"There is a sense that the Europeans have been caught a little on the hop.''
Victor Kasongo, Congo's deputy minister of mines, said: "To be honest, China was Plan B. We first approached the Europeans but they said they did not have the muscle to do what we needed. China has stepped into that opening very quickly.''
More than 1,200 miles to the south, Mambwe Katenta (45) stands beside a corrugated earth road, snaking through dense bush.
A mechanic is trying to fix his battered Toyota pick-up, damaged once again by Congo's atrocious roads.
"It is only 30 miles to the city but we cannot reach there with the things we have to sell -- tomatoes, cassava, charcoal. The road is too bad, the trucks are too expensive and we face too many difficulties," he says.
"It has always been this way. But now we hear that the Chinese will come and fix this.''
He will not have long to wait. South of his village, on the other side of Congo's mining capital, Lubumbashi, the Chinese are on their way. At an unheard of speed of half-a-mile each day, the Chinese Railway Engineering Company is rebuilding the road linking Congo's south to Zambia in a pilot project.
It will eventually be part of a 1,000-mile highway to Kisangani, the rainforest capital far to the north, on the Congo river.
Moise Kitumba, the newly-elected governor of Katanga, Congo's richest province, said: "Our former rulers made so many contracts -- but we never saw the colour of that money. We saw nothing being built."
But opposition leader Jean-Lucien Mbusa said the agreement was incoherent and unbalanced. "It forces us to sell our heritage to the detriment of several generations," he said.
Patricia Feeney, from the British-based Rights and Accountability in Development, added: "If you start to unpick the deal, you find the Chinese are setting conditions that are much stricter and which are going to be more difficult to meet."
The Congolese government has been forced to include loan guarantees in the deal. If the mineral deposits are lower than estimated, or more difficult to extract, it will need to borrow more to keep up its repayments.
This threatens International Monetary Fund programmes to scrap Congo's €4.9bn debt to the West.
Mrs Feeney added: "The worst-case scenario is that the Chinese pull out and leave half-built roads or hospitals all over the country."
But Chinese ambassador Wu Zexian said: "No one is ever 100pc sure of what will happen in the future. Congo was ready to offer co-operation with anyone who came here to invest. Any others could have come but they did not ask We just took up the offer which was there." (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Mike Pflanz
