“I’m not sure the US is flexible enough to play the kind of game the Chinese are playing. […] I think that the Chinese have been much more creative and shown much more foresight in what they want to do in Africa. And I don’t think western powers are going to be able to catch up with them,” says Dr. Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, Ugandan independent researcher and political scientist with a special interest in political economics.”
by Petr Baryshnikov via Sputnik
The 2022 US–Africa Leaders Summit, which took place from 13 to 15 December in Washington DC, was the second such event in history. It has been widely seen as part of an American attempt to counter growing Chinese influence in Africa. Sputnik asked various experts to assess Washington’s chances of success.
“It is remarkable that China does not seek to impose its development model or governance system on other countries, but through a flexible Chinese policy that is compatible with the changing conditions […] in Africa, and is based on a development pattern that meets the needs of the continent away from competition or any ideological considerations, in contrast to the American approach in this regard,” he underlines.
“I think the US, of course, would continue to increase its pressure campaign on China and try to recruit African countries to take part in western-sponsored UN resolutions and proposals also in the United Nations, the Human Rights Commission, to try to use the UN system to exert pressure on China. And that is likely to increase both. There’s a concern that African countries are not going to play along,” he notes.
The bottom line is that the aforementioned western initiatives are ‘too little, too late’, even according to some western experts, and that inflation and domestic policies in major western countries will limit the funding that governments will provide, and the private sector in these countries will be very reluctant to invest in an environment of instability,” Saad said.