China's debt relief for Africa
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
China has been one of the biggest financiers of infrastructure projects in Africa, but many African economies have been hit hard by the Covid 19 pandemic. So will China prove to be a generous and understanding creditor? Can it even afford to be?
In the edition of the programme we hear from Zhengli Huang, a freelance researcher in Nairobi, on what’s likely to happen to Chinese-financed projects in Africa. Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, looks at what sort of debt relief China can realistically offer; and Ben Cavender, managing director of the China Market Research Group in Shanghai, talks about whether China could cope with the economic hit of many countries suddenly defaulting on their debt repayments.
Presented by Manuela Saragosa. Produced by Joshua Thorpe.
(Picture: Woman serving Chinese tea in a traditional tea ceremony; Credit: Creative-Family/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Zaragoza. |
| 0:07.2 | In this edition, as the international community offers debt relief to Africa, just how generous |
| 0:12.8 | will China one of the continent's biggest financiers be? |
| 0:16.4 | They're trying to be part of the team. They're trying to do the right thing. |
| 0:19.7 | But at the same time, |
| 0:21.2 | I think what China is very wary of is being put in a position where other nations ask China to do more. |
| 0:27.0 | Or will China use its loans and investment in Africa as a political lever? |
| 0:32.4 | I think the high degree of opakness in Chinese lending, the lack of transparency, can lead to all sorts |
| 0:40.7 | of conspiracy theories about what might happen. |
| 0:43.8 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.2 | We say, if you want to get rich, build roads first. So said a top-ranking Chinese official to the Financial Times newspaper a couple of years ago. And China has certainly followed through. According to a recent Deloitte report, it's now the single largest financier of infrastructure projects in Africa. Beijing has provided funding for one in every five projects there, |
| 1:13.9 | and construction for one in three. |
| 1:16.3 | Projects like the Nairobi-Mombasa train line in Kenya opened in 2017. |
| 1:21.7 | Here's what Kenyans using the line said about China's involvement at the time. |
| 1:25.7 | The passengers please arrange a luggage on of Iraq in a neat manner. |
| 1:29.4 | They have turned the Kenya to be something else. |
| 1:33.6 | So I think the government is doing a good job. |
| 1:36.5 | Chinese, they are doing best to turn Africa into another world. |
| 1:44.5 | I think some of the institutions that we've been stakingly as Kenyans |
| 1:48.0 | taken time to build, there's a possibility that this would go. |
| 1:53.5 | We need some sort of transparency because we own Kenya. |
| 1:57.3 | As Kenyans, we own Kenya. |
... |
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