Business Post Contributor
By Oremade Oyedeji
Djibouti made headline in recent weeks as she lost her final bid for a seat at the security council of the United Nations to Kenya among the two African finalists.
Most analysts saw it as a quantum leap for success for the tiny country from the Horn of Africa to have made it that far. Reading about Djibouti and matching feathers with Kenya for a seat at the United Nations Security Council was really a big deal.
Celebrating Djibouti for their attempt at the United Nations security seat was good but all is not well back home. Djibouti, which celebrated its independence anniversary a few weeks back (June 26), has lost its biggest infrastructure and highest employer, the seaport to China, maybe deceptively, and has set it up as a military base.
There is a military build-up going on there now as the US has also set up a base there to keep the communists in check. Why? Well, amid Global Balance of Trade, the truth is Africa is still a colony.
Aside from the Chinese strategy policy for Africa is said to be a population swap as laid out in an obnoxious instrument, the African population is strangely projected to also decrease by some unknown occurrences.
In readiness for the takeover, the Chinese are snapping up African seaports and airports. Their technique is to grant African countries some toxic loans to build lagging infrastructure and get African leaders to sign a cloak contract, that will permanently transfer the ownership of these ports to the Chinese nation.
China may effectively own the African continent and its resources ahead of the United States of America if this strategy plan works.
The consequence is that Chinese citizens may take over the police and major infrastructure due to failure of repayment as we have experienced in a few African countries, including Djibouti as mentioned earlier in the article.
In Nigeria, the Chinese presence is very obvious and is heavily involved in illegal mining due to our lack of mining infrastructural know-how. Only recently we read that 17 illegal Chinese miners were arrested in Osun State and two in Zamfara State.
Nigeria also needs to avoid unscrupulous loan contracts that are not properly matched to commercially viable infrastructure development.
Personally, a loan is not bad if the infrastructure being financed with it is commercially appraised. For example, the fourth mainland bridge infrastructure financed by multilateral finance African finance cooperation located in Osborne Ikoyi Lagos.
In a recent article published by Punch Newspaper, Atiku Abubakar was quoted as saying that “nothing has shocked me in my entire life in public service as the revelation from Nigeria’s first quarter 2020 financial reports in the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy from the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, which shows alarmingly that whereas Nigeria spent a total sum of N943.12 billion in debt servicing, the federal government’s retained revenue for the same period was only N950.56 billion. This means that Nigeria’s debt to revenue ratio is now 99 per cent”.
Atiku said, no one should be deceived. This is a crisis! Debt servicing does not equate to debt repayment. The reality is that Nigeria is paying only the minimum payment to cover our interest charges. The principal remains untouched and is possibly growing. We are at a precipice. If our revenue figures do not go up and go up quickly, Nigeria risks a situation where our revenue cannot even sustain our debt servicing obligations.
This time in the global calendar is a New World Order. The world order is a sober period; referred to a period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power.
It is primarily associated with the ideological notion of world governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand or address worldwide problems.
Whether that is true or not, one fact is certain about the move for a new destination for money, the deliberate shift of the world economic resources.
According to PwC, global GDP could increase by 14 per cent in 2030 as a result of Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Robotics which is an additional $15.7 trillion. Africa needs to be properly positioned for a full bite of it so that she doesn’t settle for the “leftover”.
