The Progressive Nationalist: Industrial Development – China and Africa IGC Public Discussion at the LSE: What Was Said

"You can learn from anyone, even your enemy" - Ovid, Roman Poet.

The Comrades at LSE. Industrial Development - Africa and China. LSE June 2016.

If a conference, lecture, or discussion has Africa in the title, my Comrades and I will spare the time (and no expense) to attend. It being a long accepted principle among ourselves that you can never have too much information/knowledge on a subject you care about. We have no other true home but on the African continent and, wherever we may find ourselves to be at present, is in but a transient home.

Whenever I think about the duty that the African, wherever he or she may be, owes to the continent, my mind always goes back to my reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (HoD). The dedication to exploiting Africa that Mr Kurtz and his cohorts in the “Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” had, in HoD, is the same dedication the African – wherever he/she may be – must have in contributing to Africa’s becoming primus inter pares of the continents.

Of course, I do not say this in the spirit of Pan-Africanism, because I think Pan-Africanism is a very unwieldy and wishy washy concept. The units of analysis that interest me are the African countries (separately) and, the African – wherever he or she may be – must look to contribute to his or her country’s developmental success, which will, in turn, automatically translate to Africa’s developmental success. I do not have to say anything more on this idea as even a child can understand it in the form I have presented it here.

The Economist who discovered/articulated the concept of scarcity should be awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics every year: such a simple concept, yet it explains a lot. There are so many conferences and discussions with Africa in the title that there is just not enough time to attend them although the will is there. That is scarcity 101 for you right there! It is for this reason that my Comrades and I have had to do something that is the complete antithesis of our constitution: discriminate. It’s un-African to discriminate but we have been forced to choose to go to only the conferences and discussions at the highest ranked institutions and where the highest ranked public speakers are in attendance. It’s a pandering to elitism that I am usually very much against, but you can’t win them all.

With these considerations in mind, we attended the International Growth Centre’s June 2016 public lecture series at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The one we chose was as above stated: Industrial Development – China and Africa. The question to answer in these discussions has always been; can Africa copy the China model and develop in leaps and bounds as China has done in the past 15 years? Forget not that, as recent as 1999, Chinese people were dying in shipping containers while escaping poverty in China as Africans are doing in the Mediterranean Sea at the moment. It is this question of the China model we wanted to get some clues to. Make no mistake, there are no definitive answers in these discussions about complex affairs such as these. You only get some nuggets of information, some clues, and some hypotheses. The best you can hope for is that these nuggets will come in handy at some appropriate time.

I have rambled on, let me get to the point of this blog entry, which is: what was said at the Industrial Development – China and Africa Public Discussion. A lot was said and some of the things completely escaped me because you can only understand the things that can be processed by your frame of reference. I went wanting to know why Zimbabwe and Mozambique haven’t “strong armed” China into developing the Port at Beira and the road and rail link to Harare into an international standard facility. Beira is very near to Harare, just 284 miles,compared to Durban’s 830 miles and Walvis Bay’s 1127 miles. I got my answer to that question, but it will need a whole separate blog entry to discuss that answer.

The one thing that made me really sit up and listen was when one Economist touted the possibility that Africa could now become China’s sweat shop as China was the world’s sweat shop in its development. It is now possible, and necessary, for China to outsource its manufacturing to Africa as its present affluence means that it is no longer cost effective to manufacture goods in China. The same economist went on to say that Ethiopia could have 318 000 jobs created as a result of this outsourcing, these are mouth-watering numbers compared to the just 114 000 people Ethiopia currently employs in its manufacturing sector. The trick for the African governments is to be aware of this possibility, then create conditions that allow for the manufactured goods to be transported across borders without much delay. The benefit to the African governments is that they will have an employed population (tax base) and the knowledge and skills transfer that comes with such a venture. In time, and with affluence, these African countries will also look to make places like Europe their sweat shops once it is no longer cost effective to manufacture goods in the African countries. Of course, a China expert also talked about the problems of the China model, but that is a discussion for a whole separate blog entry and a different day.