Sure, there’s a vigorous debate over just how many hundreds of billions of dollars the West has sent to Africa in the form of “aid” over the past half-century since colonial independence.  Some estimates put it in the trillions, while the OECD and others claim it’s merely in the 800 billion dollar range.  Regardless, the sums are huge.

That said, the amount of money is not what’s in question, the more pressing issue is what has all this “aid” actually accomplished?

The “aid” business

Each year NGOs, state actors and multi-lateral organizations like the UN pour ever greater sums of money into African states and rarely, if ever, are they actually held to account for the effectiveness of these costly programs.  Despite ever growing aid and development budgets, many of the key poverty indicators across Africa remain stubbornly high.

Aid industry critic and NYU professor William Easterly argues that the aid business itself is partially to blame for the problems.  The high level of professional incompetence on the part of too many young and inexperienced aid “experts” mixed with the economic distortions that result from the billions of aid dollars that flow through these countries often combine to form a toxic mix with debilitating consequences.

Enter the Chinese

Ten years after the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit that marked Beijing’s renewed enthusiasm for African engagement, the surge of Chinese investment, migration and influence across the continent is unmistakable. Like the West, the Chinese are pouring billions of dollars into Africa.  However, that money is largely going to support an aggressive agenda to acquire natural resources with complex cash and infrastructure deals.

Beijing’s so-called “No Strings Attached” trade-based approach has sparked the ire of Western governments and the aid industry who largely dismiss the Chinese as neo-mercantalists, even neo-colonials. That indignation, though, is prompting a growing number of analysts to raise their eyebrows.  Fellow African Boots.com blogger and Beijing-based policy analyst Bradley Gardner highlighted in a recent article, “Aid, Trade & Some Indignation,” the inherent contradiction of EU/US states generously subsidizing their agricultural sectors that ultimately deprive developing world farmers of selling their goods at fair market value; subsequently impoverishing these states only to make them more dependent on Western aid.

The recent shooting of Zambian mine workers by Chinese supervisors and the well-documented corruption that accompanies many of China’s massive natural resource deals are indicative that Beijing’s African foreign policy is troubled in equally challenging ways.  However, the Chinese rejection of the Western aid model and the emphasis on trade deserves our attention.  After all, in a shorter period of time, China pulled more people out of subsistence poverty than any other society in human history — with only minimal international assistance.

The idea for this new podcast series was born from the constant frustration of talking with Western “development experts,” diplomats and aid workers in Africa. In every instance, Westerners were either strikingly ignorant of Chinese engagement there or summarily dismissed the Chinese presence in Africa as “counter productive” because China is not a democratic country. There was little nuance to their opinions about the Chinese in Africa and it reflected a broader ignorance within the aid community as a whole about non-Western methods of development.

The exploration of China’s involvement in Africa requires a much more thorough and inquisitive analysis than what is currently available from either the traditional media or from within the development community itself. Each week, this podcast will reach out to bloggers, aid workers, scholars and business leaders in the hope of filling this void.

“[The Chinese] are used to working hands-on in a way that many people in the same industries in the United States are no longer used to doing and to be blunt, they just kick our ass. You walk down the street of Kinshasa, you see Chinese people working side by side with Africans in a way that you just don’t see Europeans and Americans do.” – Ben Olander, smallpower.org

In this first episode of the “China in Africa Podcast” I stayed close to home and sat down for a discussion with my own brother, Ben Olander. Ben spent the past seven years working in Central and West Africa for a variety of international NGOs and later started up his own media company in Kinshasa, “smallpower.” During his time in both Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ben witnessed firsthand the dramatic rise of the Chinese presence amid an increasingly bureaucratic, ineffective and, sometimes even corrupt, U.S. funded development effort. Ben shares his perspective on both the Chinese and American approaches to aid in this edition of the “China in Africa Podcast.”

The Chinese Rise as the U.S. Flounders in Africa

During the brief time that I lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, two things shocked me more than anything else. First, the sheer scale of the Chinese presence was breathtaking. Over the four years that I had been traveling back and forth to the DRC, the speed with which the Chinese ramped up their operations in the DRC was impressive by any measure. Most visibly, Chinese construction teams are ripping up the city from one side to the other to build desperately needed roads. Off the streets and in the capital’s vast neighborhoods, the Chinese are also having an equally transformative effect, albeit far less visible. Tens of thousands of Chinese laborers have immigrated to cities like Kinshasa where they are now setting up bakeries, convenience stores and other businesses. Unlike their Western counterparts, these Chinese immigrants live, work and eat among the Kinois.  While Chinese of varying socio-economic levels seemed to easily adapt to the DRC’s sometimes harsh living environment, the Americans there universally made no effort whatsoever.  Instead, they live an extravagant lifestyle that no doubt exceeds their standard of living in the United States.   U.S. aid and development officials live in gated compounds, with armed security guards and fully insulated from the population at every move.  They never walked anywhere, opting instead for expensive SUVs (typically worth in excess of $90,000) and only interacted with locals who worked in their offices.  The contrast between the Chinese and American worldviews in Kinshasa could not have been more stark.  From what I understand through research and contacts, the situation is the same across Africa. To find out more about the different mindsets of the U.S. and Chinese operating in Africa, I asked Ben to share some of his recent experiences and observations:

The Importance of National Interest

Ben (far left) with his smallpower team after working with Hillary Clinton during her 2009 visit to the DRC

It is important to consider that foreign aid always fits within a larger context of a country’s national interests.  For China, that national interest is driven by a number of factors ranging from its growing need for natural resources to opening new markets for Chinese exports.  In many ways, China’s current national interest priorities, particularly in Africa, closely resemble a traditional mercantilist policy. In the case of the United States, that national interest has evolved considerably over the past five decades.  Today, a quarter of the USAID budget is allocated to military related assistance, clearly highlighting Washington’s priorities in the international development space.  Moreover, Ben points out even for non-military related activities, USAID’s agenda is determined not by the needs of the people it is designed to serve, rather the political currents in Washington: “Most of the money is bilateral and still ties in to national interest and domestic interests. So, if you take the United States funding for example, most of the direction that money is spent and the concerns that people have are actually domestic American debates being played out overseas rather than a true examination of what each circumstance in each country needs.” While public opinion is becoming increasingly important in China, it does not have any perceptible influence on the country’s foreign aid or overseas development strategies as is so common in the West, according to Ben: “China not being a democracy, they do not have to play to the court of public opinion in the same way with their money being spent or their energies being directed towards trade and development in Africa and in the United States it’s a political football.”

The Skills Gap

Another key area of difference between the U.S. and China’s approach to development, aid and investment in Africa, according to Ben, centers on the widening skills gap between the Americans and the Chinese.  Half a century ago, American engineers of all flavors could be found in Africa and elsewhere designing similar infrastructure projects as what the Chinese are doing today.   The United States no longer generates enough engineering talents for its domestic market much less to deploy to developing countries.  Instead, the United States exports legions of consultants and so-called “development experts” who seemingly do little more than write reports, attend meetings and work from the air conditioned comfort of their secure office compounds.  The Chinese, in contrast, have a seemingly endless supply of highly trained engineers who are now deployed across Africa to build communication, road and electrical networks: “Our skill sets no longer line up with the needs of the people that we are working with. The real reason why the Chinese have been effective is that the Chinese are sending people that will get their hands dirty, not just consultants to sit in chauffeured driven SUVs, air conditioning blasting, go from one office to another office, never actually working with the people they are supposed to be reaching.”

“We are so obsessed with consultants and spreadsheets that we actually forget how to do the work.” – Ben Olander, smallpower.org

In light of the wide skills gap between American and Chinese expatriates in places like the DRC and other African countries, it offers a bit of context for why it is so easy for Western aid and relief staff to dismiss China’s investment and development initiatives.  There is a notion that is pervasive in the development community that whatever “the Chinese do doesn’t have value because they are not a democratic society. It’s this unspoken thing. There’s a little asterisk next to everything China has accomplished in Africa because they are not a democratic country.”

So it’s in this context that I raise the issue that I consider to be the proverbial elephant in the room. If you accept that a global battle of ideas is currently underway among three competing ideologies: religious extremism (the Middle East, North Africa, the Persian Gulf and arguably even in the United States itself), the so-called Western democracy agenda promoted by the U.S. and Europe and then what’s referred to as the “Beijing Consensus.” This “Beijing Consensus” at its core is an ideology modeled after China’s own 30-year economic success that emphasizes social/economic issues over civil/political rights. China is exporting that philosophy across the developing world, especially in Africa, where governments are being lured with billions of dollars in low interest loans, debt forgiveness and massive infrastructure projects in exchange for access to natural resources. The Chinese bring to Africa their own development experience from working in comparably disadvantaged environments. Specifically, the Chinese have developed low-water agricultural expertise, enhanced irrigation techniques and an unrivaled efficiency for building infrastructure projects. Yet none of this — and I mean NONE — matters to the Western development staff that I have met so far. The Chinese, in their minds, are “communist dictators” who don’t value “democracy” and “transparency.” Just like that, the conversation ends. They have no patience to talk about anything the Chinese are doing other than fueling corruption, importing poorly made products and exporting dictatorship. What I find so interesting about these discussions with supposed “professional development specialists” is how remarkably unsophisticated they are about alternative models from non-Western countries. There is a confidence in the American/Western method that borders on evangelical.

The real tragedy here is that none of what I am observing here in the DRC among Western aid officials is new. Experts having been sounding the alarm over this blind spot for years. Prominent Sino-African relations scholar Professor Deborah Brautigam raised the issue in 1998 when she too singled out western aid agencies for their nativism. “Ignorance about China’s development aid program [in Africa] is even more complete among development analysts,” she wrote. Professor Brautigam explains some of the reasons for this ignorance, attributing it to the language barrier, China’s former diplomatic isolation and “the Chinese work style which emphasizes productive labor over report writing” (source: Deborah Brautigam, Chinese Aid and African Development, 1998). While the Western development agencies bury themselves in reports, spreadsheets and analysis, the Chinese are out there seven days a week building roads, dams, bridges, hospitals and more. Simply put, traditional Chinese pragmatism is getting things done while the Western model dithers and dithers and dithers with endless paperwork. After dozens of conversations with Congolese on this subject, it is abundantly clear that either the Western development officials either don’t see or don’t care that they are in fact losing the ideological battle for hearts and minds. The Congolese can see firsthand the immediate impact of Chinese development. They can feel it, touch it and understand it. The same cannot be said for American and European aid where the complex world of spreadsheets, templates and development models is lost on the very people they are trying to help.

The Chinese live in a practical world, a world the Congolese can identify with. Westerners may have once been as pragmatic and practical, but no more. The mere fact that these aid officials can’t even discuss it illustrates how serious the problem is.