Pheroze,
I doubt that Zambia and Uganda's debt to China is expanding the latter's military footprint. For an excellent analysis of the Zambian situation read what
chinastrategy.org had to say on 29 October 2021 in their article: "WHAT ZAMBIA'S NEW DEBT REVEAL TELLS US ABOUT THE 'CHINA DEBT TRAP' THEORY.
"Six key takeaways explain what we learned — and did not learn — from the data reveal about Zambia’s debt and the role of Chinese lending.
...Which brings me to the fifth takeaway – China’s lending to Zambia. It is not news that Zambia’s largest national creditor is China. The new data puts China’s total lending at $5.05 billion – equivalent to 30 percent of the total external debt and approximately 20 percent of Zambia’s GDP. However, contrary to the
mainstream narrative and
several past reports, this is no debt trap. Not only do other commercial lenders have more leverage on Zambia, but also close to 80 percent of China’s debt is low-interest, concessional finance from China’s development banks, such as EXIM China, whilst the remaining $948 million is held by a variety of commercial entities, including ICBC and Huawei. Moreover, the data revealed that Zambia’s Chinese lenders are diverse actors with heterogeneous approaches, intents, and goals. As such, they should not be conceptualized as one actor, just like loans from the British government cannot be (and are not) equated with lending from London’s financial sector. It is also relevant that to date China has been Zambia’s largest bilateral disburser of debt relief, with $
259 million in debt cancelled historically and a
recent (undisclosed) deferment of interest payments due to the pandemic.
Sixth and finally, the data reveal also exposed the biggest hidden gap of all in most discussions of debt – whether by Zambia or other borrowers. What is still not well understood by Zambia’s citizens or the international community is perhaps the most important indicator of Zambia’s debt sustainability: What the loans are being spent on. As with the
IMF’s Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA), the data from the Zambian government said nothing about whether the loaned capital has been employed for recurrent or capital expenditures, nor whether it has been directed toward growth-inducing investment or interest repayments."
Zambia is most definitely not China's first colony.
But it is a colony, ruled by the native politician surrogates that the British put in charge of the country at the time of self-rule in 1964. The people colonized are the villagers found within 288 chiefdoms. At independence in 1964, customary land made up 72% of the land area - the 28% being towns, protected areas for wildlife and forests, and settler landholdings. Today that land is reduced to 52% - sold off for industrial agriculture, mining and the like; and 22% of that commandeered for game management areas, originally intended to assist customary people but now used as a rent basket by the state and given out to various privatization schemes who lease out hunting-safari and tourism concessions and enforce their dictates through militarization and the imprisonment for 5 years of a villager found with game meat in his possession.
Nevertheless, the Chinese do continue to provide an illegal market for wildlife products. They started this in the early 1970s when they built the 1,160-mile Tanzam railway linking Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia with Dar es Salaam in Tanzania; cutting through an intact bit of Africa filled with elephant and black rhino. I was in charge of the area for the Game Department west of Mpika when they were constructing the line from 1973 to 1976. In a short time, they opened their doors for supplies of poached ivory and rhino horn - the rhino horn in particular. They helped set off the slaughter: 350,000 elephant reduced to 17,000; the rhino extinct by 1993 - my attempts to save them a failure because of the corruption in my old department. In October 1979 I had accompanied my friends, Bill Faeth and Sandra Longvall - who in 1977 had hunted lion by tracking with me in the Okovango - on what turned out to be the last legal rhino hunt in Zambia.
When living in Dar es Salaam (2012-2016) I read an article by David Smith of the Guardian, entitled
Chinese Ivory Queen’ Charged with Smuggling 706 Elephant Tusks. This was the arrest of Yang Feng Glan, who started work on the Tazara railway back in 1972 and charged with the transport of 706 tusks from Tanzania to the far east. It was likely five times that amount.
Zambia is an internal colony, its colonizers assisted by the donors, the privatizers...and so on. Hunting-safaris fill an uncomfortable slot. This we have to change, not obliterate, by empowering truly Indigenous people.
The whole story is in
God's Country. Volume I: (Plunderers of Eden) and
Volume II: Guardians of Eden.
Ian Manning
www.kaieteurnewsonline.com
