China helping African consolidation

Think tank chief says chinese economy is making continent's leaders think in a more integrated way

James Shikwati believes China is now helping realize Africa's founding fathers' vision of the continent after independence.

The 43-year-old director of the Nairobi-based think tank Inter Region Economic Network says China's involvement in Africa is leading to the sort of unification of the whole continent that was the aim of the post-colonial leaders of the 1950s and 1960s.

"I see the Chinese coming as a godsent opportunity to now consolidate one continent as one country. It goes back to the vision of the founding fathers of Africa at the time of independence," he says.

"We have the opportunity to create from Cairo to Cape Town a free trade area worth $1 trillion."

Shikwati was speaking in his somewhat cramped offices piled full of books and documents at Nyaku House in the Hurlingham area of Nairobi over the noise of a tropical storm outside.

A long-standing critic of Western aid in Africa, the self-taught economist was voted by the World Economic Forum in 2008 as one of 250 Young Global Leaders. Two years earlier, he was ranked by one of Kenya's leading media groups as one of the top 100 most influential Kenyans.

He dismisses critics of China's role in Africa and says the world's second-largest economy is making African leaders think in a more integrated way.

He cites the setting up of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) under whose banner Chinese leaders meet with leaders of African states - the fifth ministerial meeting was held in Beijing in July 2012.

He also stresses the importance of China's investment in Africa and the building of infrastructure in helping create a more cohesive African whole.

"The Chinese have come. They have built the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, they have built infrastructure that is now cutting across African countries and they are already steering a momentum for a possible one African state," he says.

Shikwati believes Africa's economic problems stem from the Berlin Conference of 1885 when the major European powers divided up the continent between themselves.

They created numerous artificial states that paid no regard to racial or tribal sensitivities, he says.

"It was a question of 'I am going to take this. You can have that'. We used to have 100,000 tribes or kingdoms in Africa before the Westerners came. Then the British and the French moved in and tried to consolidate all these tribes into 54 nations," he says.

He insists those who accuse China of pursuing a new type of colonialism in Africa completely miss the point.

"The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation has a three-year strategic plan. It is about bringing all these heads of state around the table to work together. Everything is discussed and written down clearly. We say, 'Okay, we would like to have 10,000 kilometers of highway, 5,000 hospitals'. It is a discussed thing," he says.

"You can't be said to be a colonialist if you are going to be negotiating with the guy you want to colonize. That is the difference. The West took it upon itself in Berlin to decide what to do in Africa. They didn't ask us."

Shikwati says the only significant downside of the Chinese negotiating with African leaders is that the African leaders of today are not authentically African and are themselves a product of the West, since many of them are educated abroad and steeped in the culture of their former colonial powers.

"They (the Chinese) are meeting Africans who are mirror images of the West. Okay, they are sitting around the table but are they Africans in a real sense?" he says.

Shikwati, who has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Guardian as well as numerous African publications, was brought up in Kakamega, a village in the west part of Kenya.

He was born in a banana plantation, where his mother happened to be at the time.