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Kenyan abuses show true cost of Chinese investment in Africa

Last week a Chinese consortium held its first-ever careers fair in Kenya: 50 companies, including smartphone giant Huawei, pitched more than 1,000 jobs to the country’s best and brightest. The fair was warmly welcomed by the Kenyan government, whose representative told the gathering that such events would help break down cultural barriers between the countries and enable young Kenyans to find “quality jobs.”

Yet evidence suggests that, for those Kenyans already working for the 400 Chinese companies that have set up shop in the country, the cultural barriers are daunting –and the quality jobs are reserved for their Chinese bosses.

A damning recent article in the New York Times uncovered the abhorrent physical and verbal abuse that many domestic workers suffer at the hands of their Chinese employers, who monopolise managerial roles and view their host country with racially charged contempt. One boss was even filmed saying Kenyans were “like a monkey people”.

This is just the latest in a series of horrific reports. As Kenya’s government continues to seek Beijing’s cash to fund construction projects such as the $4bn Nairobi-Mombasa railway, the lurid accounts pile up: of segregated restaurants and toilets, of Kenyan workers being forced to perform humiliating tasks, such as picking up cigarette butts Chinese workers had left in urinals. Some of the most appalling revelations concern the railway itself, where Chinese bosses have imposed a litany of segregationist measures and barred local specialists from driving the trains—apart from on the inaugural journey when a pair of Kenyan women were handed the controls for a cynical PR opportunity.

The stories paint a squalid picture of modern-day neo-colonialism. Yet instead of condemning Chinese malpractice, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has repeatedly apologised for Beijing, including after the New York Times exposé. The Kenyan government has even tried to blame its own people for the abuse they suffer, claiming that it was Kenyans’ work ethic, rather than China’s archaic worldview, which had to change.

This willingness to defend the indefensible may be shocking, but it’s hardly unusual. Across Africa, governments have grabbed Chinese money in their attempts to fund prestigious infrastructure projects, hoovering up nearly $150 billion since 2000. China has happily sent its own construction workers to build the projects, which range from a railway connecting Ethiopia and Djibouti to an infamous ‘spy school’ built for former Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.

Wherever China’s money and manpower has gone, tales of abuse have followed. In Uganda, a recent graphic video shows a Chinese miner attacking a government official. In Zambia, chemical workers have been found working in slave-like conditions without protection. And in Zimbabwe, diamond miners claim to have been repeatedly sexually assaulted by their Chinese managers.

Despite this repeated mistreatment, many African leaders still kowtow to Beijing, gladly attending summits such as the recent Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and promising to strengthen their ties with Xi Jinping’s government. After so many tales of trauma, why can’t Africa speak out?

One explanation is the fact that China holds key stakes in several African media outlets. Journalists for these outlets claim their stories are dropped if they criticise Xi’s regime, and those who don’t toe the line face dismissal. Academics, meanwhile, say they have been denied the ability to travel abroad if they dare to speak out. With Beijing exercising control over Africa’s mouthpieces, it’s fiendishly difficult for China’s critics to make their voices heard.

Debt traps

The real reason for Africa’s silence is economic, however. China has used the allure of cheap cash to put the continent in a financial straitjacket, burying its leaders under a mountain of loans. Two-thirds of Kenya’s entire bilateral debt is owed to China, for example, and this money is still flowing to Kenya and its neighbours: just last month, Xi committed a further $60 billion to the continent.

Chinese cash is particularly attractive because, unlike the finance offered by Western lenders, it comes with little or no scrutiny – enabling unscrupulous local demagogues, such as disgraced Zambian leader Ian Khama, to siphon off huge amounts for ludicrous vanity projects.

The money still comes with strings attached, however. For one thing, the insistence that project managers hire Chinese contractors on Chinese-funded projects means the domestic population is increasingly marginalised. For another, China’s eagerness to secure its loans with oil and minerals drains Africa of its natural resources. Worst of all, African leaders are cowed into silence, terrified of speaking out about Chinese abuses lest Xi call in the loans.

Recent events in Djibouti, which plays host to China’s only military base overseas, have only intensified the fears that Beijing expects favours in exchange for its loans.

Earlier this year, Djibouti’s government, led by de facto dictator Ismail Omar Guelleh, ejected Dubai-based port operator DP World from its huge terminal at Doraleh, while observers fear it will soon gift the facility to Xi’s government. The reports that Guelleh has earmarked the port for Beijing have raised particular tensions given concerns that Chinese ownership of the port could disrupt supplies for the nearby American installation Camp Lemonnier.

While Guelleh seems impervious to the perils of owing China 75% of his country’s GDP, some of his fellow African leaders are starting to push back against Beijing’s debt diplomacy. Rumours that the Zambian government has mortgaged its national electricity supplier to secure new loans from Beijing have prompted South African politicians to demand President Ramaphosa publish details of a Chinese loan to the country’s own power utility, Eskom. Elsewhere, action has already been taken; the new government in Sierra Leone, whose leader blasted Chinese funding as a “sham” during his election run, has pulled out of a $400 million airport project which was to be bankrolled by Beijing.

Other African countries must follow Sierra Leone’s lead and start rejecting China’s money, before it’s too late. If Beijing’s cash is funding the kind of racism, thuggery and long-term subjugation that Kenya is coping with, the price is surely too high.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes

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