CHINESE President Xi Jinping has arrived in Zimbabwe for a two-day working visit.
Advertisement
It’s the first trip since 1996 that a Chinese leader has taken to the African nation run by President Robert Mugabe.
The two leaders held talks and oversaw the signing, by their ministers, of 10 co-operation deals covering fields such as infrastructure construction, investment, financing, culture and wildlife protection to shore up Zimbabwe’s economy, which has fallen into dire straits under Mugabe’s watch.
China’s president Xi Jinping has touched down on South African soil to co-chair the 6th Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit. “Last year Zimbabwe and China agreed to be good friends and brothers on an equal footing”, he said. Africa possessed plenty of potentially renewable energy sources such as hydro power, geothermal, biomass, solar and wind energy and these presented huge investment opportunities for China, Denton said.
Its investments on the continent range from Zambian power plants, Egyptian trade deals, cobalt mines in Congo, rail links in East Africa and infrastructure in Equatorial Guinea. “We are exploring new models for financing”, he said.
And so, as Ghulam Asmal, director of Nepad and global partnerships in the Department of worldwide Relations and Cooperation, said at a recent briefing on Focac: “The most challenging aspect of the relationship for Africa was to convince our Chinese partners to create more industrial capacity on the continent, to have more beneficiation, and to make this a development relationship rather than one which is extractive of natural resources”.
According to the Chinese Embassy in Harare, China invested 601 million USA dollars in Zimbabwe in 2013, surpassing Chinese investment in any other African country for the year. “Every year I went to China to say we need more guns and more guns were given until we attained our independence on 18 April 1980”.
With so much financial hardships, many Zimbabweans are hoping that President Xi’s visit isn’t just a symbolic tour but a “serious and sincere” effort to help them change their lives for the better.
Mutual cooperation has entered a new era, Wang said, calling on the two sides to combine China’s advantages in development experience and production with those of Africa in natural and human resources. In addition to China’s mining interests in cash-strapped Zimbabwe, the 12 agreements cover industries such as power and transport, and prevent double taxation for investors, according to the Herald, a state-owned Zimbabwean newspaper.
“China is reaching a mature phase of its investment cycle in Africa”, Francesca Beausang, head of Africa Research at BMI Research said in a note.
Mugabe looked sharp as he welcomed Xi at the Harare International Airport shortly after 10am yesterday.
Advertisement
China has made a string of cheap loans in the past few years to countries in Africa, a continent which supplies oil and raw materials such as copper and uranium to the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy.
