South Africa, the self styled 'Rainbow Nation' has a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but its for Chinese investors. Its they who pull the strings in most of sub saharan africa these days.
What makes this subservience to Chinese investment all the odder, is that the Chinese take all the mineral resources back to China, they use their own companies to extract and transport the resources, and they use Chinese companies with their supervisors to do any infrastructure work (leaving africans to do the dangerous shovelling jobs), and in short make Africa 'pay for the aid' to a far higher degree than Western aid donors ever do.
Also the amounts the Chinese 'pledge' in trade credits is far less than the West, and yet the African states will tow the political line for them, while taking Western aid for granted, and ignoring any democratic governance rules we would want followed.
If the Chinese wanted Mugabe out, the South African government would do it, and not bat an eyelid ...
As we have just seen with the shameful blocking of the award of a travel visa to the Dalai Lama, and the open attack on this decision by Desmond Tutu. If its still a rainbow nation, its a very tawdry little rainbow ....
What makes this subservience to Chinese investment all the odder, is that the Chinese take all the mineral resources back to China, they use their own companies to extract and transport the resources, and they use Chinese companies with their supervisors to do any infrastructure work (leaving africans to do the dangerous shovelling jobs), and in short make Africa 'pay for the aid' to a far higher degree than Western aid donors ever do.
Also the amounts the Chinese 'pledge' in trade credits is far less than the West, and yet the African states will tow the political line for them, while taking Western aid for granted, and ignoring any democratic governance rules we would want followed.
If the Chinese wanted Mugabe out, the South African government would do it, and not bat an eyelid ...
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