‘China has a grand, strategic plan. We don’t’: how Djibouti became a microcosm of Beijing’s growing foothold in Africa

China has financed ports, railways, airports and naval bases, as well as servers that house most or all of the internet for Somalia, Yemen and Ethiopia

But critics fear African countries could be left in ‘debt-traps’, and risk those assets being taken back by China. Beijing now holds over 70 per cent of Djibouti’s GDP in debt

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Africa's first modern electrified railway, the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway built by Chinese firms, opened in 2016. Photo: Xinhua

The Washington Post

Published: 4:16am, 31 Dec 2019Updated: 5:15am, 31 Dec 2019

Above ground in the tiny but strategically located country of Djibouti, signs of China’s presence are everywhere.

Chinese entities have financed and built Africa’s biggest port, a railway to Ethiopia and the country’s first overseas naval base here. Under the sea, they are building a cable that will send data across a region, from Kenya to Yemen. The cable will connect to an internet hub housing servers mostly run by China’s state-owned telecommunications companies.

Beijing’s extensive investments in Djibouti are a microcosm of how China has rapidly gained a strategic foothold across the continent. Western countries, including Africa’s former colonisers, for decades have used hefty aid packages to leverage trade and security deals, but Chinese-financed projects have brought huge infrastructural development in less than a generation.

The construction is fuelled mostly by lending from China’s state-run banks. Spindles of Chinese paved roads have unfurled across the continent, along with huge bridges, airports, dams and power plants as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 152-country Belt and Road Initiative.

Djibouti is one node in an economic chain that stretches across the northern rim of the Indian Ocean ... They have a grand, strategic plan. We don’t.

David Shinn

Overall, Chinese companies invested twice as much money between 2014 and 2018 in African countries as American companies, spending US$72.2 billion, according to Ernst & Young.

“The Chinese are thinking far into the long-term in Djibouti and Africa in general,” said David Shinn, a former US ambassador to Ethiopia who was also the State Department’s desk officer for Djibouti as far back as the late 1960s.