Group items tagged

The high level of support for civil society that we witnessed in the 1990s has begun to decline. Over the past five years, donor agencies have begun shifting more towards supporting governments directly, which has led to a reduction in the amount of aid flowing directly to CSOs (civil society organisations).

Some of the CSOs that attended the dialogue with me were actually defunct as donors had booted them of the funding list due to financial misappropriations.

From the perspective of the Chinese government, the role of the civil society is to provide welfare gaps and to fill the holes where state support is diminishing, and not necessarily to become a tool to promote democratisation or to focus on being a government watchdog.

But Hilsum found that this was precisely what worried local anti-corruption campaigners, among them Zainab Bangura of Sierra Leone's National Accountability Group.

The South African trade union federation COSATU has called for restriction of Chinese imports and has urged retailers to stock a minimum of 75% of locally made goods.

t would be wrong to suggest that China’s impact only raises problems, or is merely a re-run of past imperialisms. The fact that Western corporations and government now face competition can give African states more room for manoeuvre, and an alternative to accepting the dictates of the IMF. Naturally, NGOs, human rights campaigners and trade unionists have concentrated on cases where this room for manoeuvre has been exploited by repressive regimes seeking to avoid pressure exerted on Western governments to impose some minimal human rights or environmental conditions. But that does not mean that the ‘Chinese option’ could not also be exploited to widen the room for all African states, not only those abusing human rights. In this respect, China’s willingness to advance a loan to Angola regardless of IMF conditions could prove a beneficial precedent in other cases. And China’s willingness to invest in sectors which Western investors have neglected, such as cotton production in Zambia, should be welcomed even if China sees them as ‘loss-leaders’ for more directly self-interested involvement.

African civil society from researching and advancing a package of measures which could be put forward as a necessary conditional component of Chinese investment packages. These could include training prorammes, technology transfer, the fostering of local management skills, and the reservation of a proportion of Chinese investment and infrastructure projects for local firms and labour.

The two sides noted that achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) remains an urgent and arduous task. The two sides hold that the current international financial crisis has made the realization of the MDGs more difficult, particularly for African countries which face bigger challenges.

The two sides reaffirmed their respect for the principle of universality of human rights, with no prejudice to the cultural and social particularities with regard to perceiving and applying the concept, and with priority on the right to development. The two sides oppose politicization and double standards in the field of human rights.

broaden their economic cooperation, which is currently dominated by trade in goods, so that it becomes multi-pronged to include trade in goods, investment, trade in services, technology and project contracting.

The Chinese Government offered to cancel due debts of interest-free government loans that will mature by the end of 2009 owed by all heavily-indebted poor countries and the LDCs in Africa having diplomatic relations with China.

Noting the important role of technology transfer in enhancing African countries’ capacity-building, China will encourage and promote technology transfer to Africa in various cooperation areas, in particular, the transfer of advanced applicable technologies with a major impact on Africa’s economic and social development, such as technologies for drinking water, agriculture, clean energy and health.

Former NNPC head Shehu Ladan revealed that the CSCEC-led consortium would be operated by China holding 80 per cent of shares, until costs were recovered. Given the opacity of accounting, especially concerning mega-developments, this is likely to become a major fault-line replicating Nigeria's long history with supply and demand-side corruption.

‘The public needs to be informed about when CSCEC expects to complete the recovery of its investment,’ said Nnimmo Bassey, director of Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action movement (ERA) in an interview. ‘The deal as reported appears open-ended. There is no estimated termination date when CSCEC will handover facilities to the NNPC.’

China's preferred Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model accompanying their resource-for-infrastructure system, is often successfully realised in African countries, despite governments being shortchanged when tenders (and loans) are recycled back to China. The Nigerian government will have no shares and make no contributions whether through financing or in the construction and management phase.

Recently, a multi-billion secretive deal between Trafigura, the Swiss-based commodity trader and one of three leading oil traders, also infamous for dumping toxic waste in Africa, signed a deal with the NNPC allegedly valued at $3 billion, swopping 60,000 bpd or 27 per cent of overall NNPC production, for open-ended refined products.

‘Right now, Nigerians are not getting value for their oil anyway,’ said Brautigam. ‘If the government can agree to allow a Chinese company to build and manage these refineries for an extended period of time, they may finally be able to say good-bye to the days of long lines at petrol stations.’