Neo-Colonialism: New African Union Office Opened in China

Neo-colonialism: /ˌniːəʊkəˈləʊnɪəlɪz(ə)m/ [noun] The use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries.

Beijing funded the AU’s $200m building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and a Chinese state-owned company built it.

It is believed that the donated building was bugged to secretly transmit confidential data of meetings held in the AU headquarters back to China. African Union officials found out that there was a security breach and this had been going on for five years.

 The officials noticed that all the computers in the AU headquarters donated by China were bugged to transmit sensitive data to a server in China.

The AU had to replace the server and host. One would have thought that the AU would take a cue from that incident to see the ploy by China in donating another AU headquarters. But it appears African leaders never learn!

The African Union (AU) has now officially launched its office in China, with the support of the Chinese government ahead of the recently held Forum for Africa-China Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing.

Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, opened the facility with the Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and foreign ministers from other African countries.

The representational office was part of the plans of the African Union and it gained fruition after the Chinese government offered in February 2018 to support in its establishment in Beijing.

“This representation will also support the work of the African Group of Ambassadors in Beijing, to ensure alignment with African Union positions. It should be noted that China had established a Permanent Mission to the African Union, since 2015,” an AU communique released in February explained.

China is the leading development partner in Africa and it’s building infrastructure in all the countries except eSwatini which has opted to have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, China’s rival.

At the FOCAC, Xi Jinping announced eight new initiatives, an additional $60 billion for Africa and a clean up of the debt maturing by this year of its LDCs, highly indebted, landlocked and Small Islands States.

African leaders describe the initiatives as a win-win partnerships.