…when your backs are to the wall, and when you have neither the money nor the expertise to fix an intractable problem, you can always call on the… Chinese?
South Africa’s newly minted electricity minister followed up a trip to China last week with pronouncements that the Communist Party will provide a solution for the socialist country’s collapsing power grid, which has needed planned blackouts for much of the past year.
This will end up, in typical African fashion, with a lose-lose result — the Chinese will come to realize, as all colonial powers eventually do, that sinking money into Africa is just that: throwing money into a pit, with no tangible reward. And South Africa will end up the same as they are now, maybe worse, with a power system that still doesn’t work, only with a mountain of debt to the Chinese loansharks that they have no chance (or intention) of paying back.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of socialists, on both sides.
As Henry Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war, “It’s a shame they both can’t lose.”
I expect both parties to leave tremendously dissatisfied with the results.
China has the military power to enforce any agreement.
In Africa? Don’t make me laugh.
You’re thinking like a European and assuming that the current population will always be there.
What if the military solution is to kill or drive out the current inhabitants, establish a secure border that encloses the mineral wealth of SA and the oil of Angola, and repopulate with Han Chinese? Europeans did essentially that in North America and the Antipodes. It took a while for the Gringos, but the Chinese have vastly better tech and shipping, but the same pragmatic morality when facing a different culture.
Well yes, except that North America and the Antipodes were largely unpopulated back then. Modern-day South Africa isn’t that.
The solution, from a Chinese perspective, has to be financial — and Africans have repeatedly proved that they don’t give a rat’s ass about that.
North America was only depopulated because the first Europeans brought crowd diseases such as smallpox and measles that ran ahead of the explorers and wiped out entire cities and tribes. It’s not just that these contagions killed up to 99% of the population, they also selected against urban populations and for the country yokels who lived the furthest apart.