During the commemoration of the 2021 Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria Cui Jianchun announced that he was in talks with some of China’s big banks to establish operations in Nigeria. Cui talked up Nigeria and China’s growing links and spoke about the importance of banking and banking systems in the development of both countries. He then spoke about potential conversations with Nigeria’s Central Bank and the Nigerian central government in Abuja about establishing a substantial banking presence in Nigeria.

This new proposal of deeper financial links is a solidification of China-Nigeria relations. In 2018, Nigeria and China signed an initial three-year currency swap agreement that saw Nigeria move some of its foreign reserves to China. The size of the swap deal was put at 15 billion renminbi or 720 billion naira.

The currency swap deal was the beginning of a change in relations between Nigeria and China, and in fact a change in relations between China and the African continent as a whole, where financial deals had long centered on loans for infrastructure and trade. In 2020, Zimbabwe became the fourth African country after South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana to sign a currency swap agreement with China.

In recent times, the African trade landscape has seen a large and monumental shift from colonial trade routes to majority trade with China. China is now sub-Saharan Africa’s most visible and biggest trade partner.

Since the early 2000s, China’s trade with Africa has increased by over 2,000 percent, reaching $200 billion in 2019. China has since announced its $1 billion Belt and Road Africa infrastructure development fund to help build roads and necessary infrastructure to aid trade on the continent. But the African continent has also seen a change in its business landscape. As of 2017, there were reportedly over 10,000 Chinese-owned firms operating across the continent. These Chinese businesses are valued at over $2 trillion.

China has been positioning itself as a growing superpower offering an equal economic partnership different from the West. But its presence in Africa is strategic. While providing loans and investments to African countries in accordance with its non-interference policy, which means these investments have no strings attached, it is able to develop new allies.

Nigeria, at least on paper, has been a leader on the African continent. Thus, this new proposal by China presents an opportunity for China to further integrate itself with the financial system of the continent. But for Nigeria, it is also a chance to lead, perhaps as a financial hub for the continent – something like a pre-Brexit London. For China, the establishment of banks in Nigeria and subsequently on the continent is meant to help achieve its goal of becoming a global reserve currency.

“This is all part of a carefully constructed strategy by China to broaden the acceptance of the yuan as a global reserve currency,” Arthur Dong, a teaching professor of strategy and economics at Georgetown University’s Mc Donough School of Business, told The Diplomat. “China has chosen Nigeria for a specific reason. It’s oil. Nigeria being an OPEC member state records its oil sales in dollars. This move is to persuade the energy sector in Nigeria to accept payments for its oil in yuan.”

Looking at the conversations around climate change, the rest of the world is moving on from the petroleum driven economy. The world, however, is still decades or even a century away from shifting completely away from petroleum and fossil fuels. Meanwhile, China is a big and growing player in the supply of rare earth elements, the very elements that are supposed to take over from petroleum.

For sustained clean energy and growth in the world today, materials like lithium, cobalt, praseodymium, and other resources essential for the production of electric cars, cloud and quantum computing, medical and telecom devices, are crucially important. To this end, China has been making inroads in Nigeria and the rest of Africa.

“Petroleum is not a good growth opportunity. While for the rest of our lifetime, it will remain a commodity, it is far more likely that the points for growth will be in education, healthcare, and agriculture,” Matthew Page, an expert on Nigeria at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained to The Diplomat. “The Chinese financial, banking and trade relationships will be a more serious driver for global importance especially in Africa.”

Through its spending sprees, China has been able to adjust African policy in its favor. After a $40 billion pledge in Chinese investments to Nigeria, the Nigerian government adjusted its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan and ordered its trade mission out of Nigeria’s capital of Abuja. In the U.N., 25 African countries backed Beijing during a recent vote about the Hong Kong national security law.

These spending sprees have also offered China the opportunity to gain concessions and rights to mine in African countries. In 2008, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s national mining company gifted concessions to Chinese miners. In Nigeria, the Chinese government has made solid inroads with the state governments, giving Chinese companies access to mine gold in the country.

A closer look at Africa’s trade balance with China reveals the downside of the current relationship, however. In 2019, Africa’s trade deficit with China was over $17 billion. Due to the nature of African markets, in which exports are dominated by primary goods, countries like Nigeria have a heavy trade imbalance with China. The production value of goods is often not high enough to create local jobs, so they are shipped off to China for processing and then reimported back into the country.

This deficit has basically shifted Africa’s economic dependence from its older colonial partners to China.

At the same time, financial intertwining of this scale will definitely help Nigeria, especially in the short term. This move will allow for Nigeria and Nigerians to tap into Chinese capital beyond government loans and aid for development. Chinese banks and an expansion of the currency swap between both countries will help stabilize Nigeria’s forex market. The establishment of new Chinese banks in Nigeria will provide more jobs and new businesses in the country.

That said, the proposal for Chinese banks is not a magic wand that the government can simply wave in order to change its fortunes. The Nigerian government has in recent times positioned itself as anti-investment and business; it recently froze the bank accounts of a number of fintech companies.

Nigeria does not exactly present as a great investment opportunity at the moment. The quality of the market as well as the government’s many missteps regarding its economic policy makes it volatile.

“The crackdown on fintech companies has done a lot of damage to Nigeria’s status in finance in the world. The potential alliance with China is not sufficient to make Nigeria a major financial fighter beyond what it currently is,” Page said.

But China still sees a valuable opportunity in Nigeria and, by proposing an intertwining of financial futures, is getting more skin in the game.

Meanwhile, China’s economic stability has also been called into question. China’s recent crackdown on its rich and wealthy makes it an unlikely destination for wealth flow. “The U.S. is still the world’s safe haven. It offers a stability that China does not. When things get tough, people and their capital moves to the United States and not to China,” Dong explains.

In other words, China and Nigeria are both fighting uphill battles in their respective races to global and regional dominance.

Meanwhile, China has been in a Cold War-style battle with the U.S. and the West for global dominance. That puts Nigeria and other African countries indirectly in the middle of a power contest between China and the United States.

The gains from a potential intertwining of Nigeria’s financial system with China’s are still years away from being realized. China has shown and proven that it is interested in playing the long game. Dong believes that the United States should not be underestimated in its ability to maintain its status as a world power, but very recently, China has made significant inroads on the African continent, especially with its soft power initiatives.

Still, the problems with Chinese investment and funding on the continent are regular talking points. One charge commonly laid against China is the problem of debt traps on the continent. However, the state of many African economies as well as the lack of political and economic savvy by leaders on the continent points to a much larger problem. As long as those issues, remain unresolved, even if the West increased its investment on the continent, it would still be seen as a debt trap. Future African leaders and generations will have to deal with the potential economic fallout, regardless of who they partner with.

While there are growing sentiments in Nigeria and around the continent that China is turning Africa into an annex, there is a good faith argument to be made for China in Africa. As the latest proposal shows, China has identified Africa as a business opportunity, beating the West’s short-sighted approach to the continent.

FREETOWN, Nov 6 (Reuters) - At least 99 people were killed and more than 100 injured in the capital of Sierra Leone late on Friday when a fuel tanker exploded following a collision, local authorities said.

Emergency crews worked to clear the scene on Saturday in Freetown's eastern suburb of Wellington where a burnt body and the blackened shells of cars and motorbikes blocked the road following the crash, a Reuters reporter said.

The wounded were treated in hospitals and clinics across the capital, deputy health minister Amara Jambai told Reuters.

Victims included people who had flocked to collect fuel leaking from the ruptured vehicle, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of the port city, said in a post on Facebook, although that post was later edited to remove the reference.

"We've got so many casualties, burnt corpses," said Brima Bureh Sesay, head of the National Disaster Management Agency, in a video from the scene shared online. "It's a terrible, terrible accident."

Videos shared online shortly after the explosion showed people running through clouds of thick smoke as large fires lit up the night sky. Reuters was not able immediately to verify the images, but witnesses described the horror.

"We are all in shock. A lady I had just bought bread from died. A lovely woman. I can’t get over this grief," said Abdul Kabia, crying at the crash site surrounded by mangled vehicles.

Hospital overwhelmed

The crash provided a major challenge for Freetown's health service already creaking from years of underfunding. The 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic gutted the country's ranks of medical staff, 250 of whom died, and the system has not recovered.

Connaught Hospital was overwhelmed with the influx of patients, so some of the injured were moved to other locations, including a military hospital, said Swaray Lengor, a programme manager at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

"The situation at the hospital, especially Connaught hospital ... is overwhelming. Inadequate medical consumables and bed capacity," Lengor told Reuters by text message. "NGO partners were requested to support with equipment, medical commodities and food."

The death toll would likely rise, he said.

The World Health Organization said it would send supplies and deploy specialists in burn injuries.

"We will provide more support as needed at this terrible time for the people of Sierra Leone," it said on Twitter.

Accidents with tanker trucks in Sub-Saharan Africa have previously killed scores of people who gathered at the site to collect spilled fuel and were hit by secondary blasts.

In 2019, a tanker explosion in Tanzania killed 85 people, while around 50 people were killed in a similar disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018.

"My profound sympathies with families who have lost loved ones and those who have been maimed as a result," President Julius Maada Bio tweeted. "My government will do everything to support affected families."

BAMAKO, Mali — Many French guests came through the guesthouse where El Bachir Thiam worked as a security guard, a small oasis of greenery in busy Bamako, the capital of the West African country of Mali. They were friendly, usually, and he liked them.

But after he had welcomed them in, shown them to their rooms and reassured them that Bamako was safe, not the hotbed of terrorist activity it might seem from outside, he went back to his phone, where his activist WhatsApp groups were focused on one thing. Getting the French — their businesses, diplomats and thousands of troops — out of Mali.

Over the past few years there has been a sharp rise in criticism of France across its former colonies in Africa, rooted in a feeling that colonialist practices and paternalistic attitudes never really ended, and propelled by a tide of social media posts, radio shows, demonstrations and conversations on the street.

In Senegal, young people attending protests last year accused the president of being a puppet of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is currently vying for a second term. They smashed the windows of French gas stations and set fire to French supermarkets.

In Burkina Faso, as a coup d’état unfolded in January, tailors tore up French flags and pieced the tricolors back together horizontally to make Russian ones.

In Niger last November, after protesters shouting “Down with France!” tried to block a French military convoy, the soldiers opened fire. They killed two people, the Nigerien government said.

Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates. Six decades after most of them gained independence, young people like Mr. Thiam — born long after the colonial French departed — are driving this uprising, tapping into a wealth of online information that older generations, often less educated and literate, never had access to, and trying to use it to promote change. And their elders are paying attention.

“There’s a new awakening in sub-Saharan Africa that the world should know about,” said El Hadj Djitteye, a Malian analyst who recently founded a think tank, the Timbuktu Center for Strategic Studies on the Sahel. “If a foreign minister makes a speech today, there’s a group of young analysts that can look at it and say this paragraph is paternalist, that one is aggressive, this isn’t diplomacy.”

Though the tide of information they consume and share sometimes veers into misinformation, including unfounded rumors about France working with jihadists or stealing gold, much of the criticism in countries with ties to France is aimed at the perceived arrogance of the former colonial master. There have always been critiques of France, particularly in more educated, urban circles in West Africa, but now that almost everyone either owns a cellphone or knows somebody who does, these ideas have spread.

In Mali, where for almost a decade French soldiers who initially came at the invitation of the Malian government have tried and failed to stop the spread of armed Islamist groups, France stands accused of disrespecting Malians not just by activists like Mr. Thiam, but by the country’s highest officials, including the prime minister.

“They want to humiliate us,” said Prime Minister Choguel Maiga in a recent speech which drifted into unfounded conspiracy theory. This kind of rhetoric has helped the military junta that seized power in 2020 retain huge popular support. “We’re not a people that submits.”

This is a stark turnaround from a decade ago. When jihadists took over its northern cities in 2012, Mali appealed to France for military help. And when French soldiers arrived, Malians greeted them as liberating heroes.

Now they are effectively being chased from the country. They are blamed for sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, aimed at trying to get the junta to commit to handing over power — France is assumed to be the group’s puppet master.

The French are blamed for their failure to stop an insurgency that metastasized and spilled over Mali’s borders, destabilizing a vast stretch of arid territory known as the Sahel — even though troops from Mali have also been fighting the insurgents and now stand accused of massacring hundreds of people together with their new partners, Russian mercenaries. The French are blamed, too, for their support of former rebel groups from the north considered by many in Mali’s powerful south to be no different than the jihadists.

The deteriorating security situation was one of the main things Mr. Thiam posted about on social media during his night shifts at the guesthouse. He built up a following of more than 35,000 friends and followers on Facebook at one point.

But he wasn’t just an online warrior: He co-founded an activist group, On A Tout Compris — French for “We’ve Got it All Figured Out” — which organized demonstrations outside the French embassy and targeted French-owned businesses like the petroleum company Total. Soon, he found he was having to duck out of his activist meetings early to get to work on time. Then he left the guesthouse job for full time activism.

His favorite trick was to post videos of himself burning the French flag on Facebook — something that eventually got him banned from the social network, he said. (Facebook said that the burning of flags does not violate their policies, but he could have been banned for another reason). He said he posted pictures of dead French soldiers, labeling them “other terrorists,” just for shock value.

“We knew that was mean, but it was part of our battle plan,” he said.

French soldiers are now packing up in their bases, preparing to leave, while their leaders focus on their relationships with other, friendlier countries like Niger and Ivory Coast, where this month they will hold a training session with local troops, as they have done for years.

For years after African nations got independence, France maintained a web of political and business ties with its former colonies, often in effect propping up corrupt governments or dictators for its own benefit, a system widely known as Françafrique.

When Mr. Macron became president, it initially seemed that things would change. He promised to declassify secret files related to the assassination of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader, killed in a putsch in which many suspect France played a role. He asked Rwanda for forgiveness over France’s role in the genocide.

“I am from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do,” he told students in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, in 2017.

But this rang hollow in January 2020 when he summoned five African leaders to a summit, partly to disavow rising anti-French sentiment in their countries. To many of their citizens back home, Mr. Macron came across as insufferably arrogant.

And in Mali — often, of late, the harbinger for the region, whether in terms of coups or destabilizing Islamist groups — people felt that the arrogance just kept coming — notably, in French ministers’ condemnations of the military junta that overthrew the president, France’s erstwhile ally, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

The relationship between the two countries broke down fast.

After France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, called the junta “illegitimate” and “out of control” in January, its ambassador in Bamako was instructed to leave.

On a recent afternoon at the embassy, the ambassador’s spacious office was hushed, the only sign of him a photograph atop his office chair, where he jokingly propped it on his way out.

Many Malians still bristle at that “illegitimate” label: of course, they say, the junta was not elected. But many feel they have been failed by democracy as France conceives it, and that the junta speaks for them.

“Stop thinking we are inferior,” said Pierre Togo, a former soldier, addressing France as he nursed a mango juice at a Bamako bar on a recent evening. “France is plotting, playing games, and Africans understand that now.”

Across town, at a busy roundabout where vendors sold Malian flags, Lassina Keita, a mechanic, wiped oil-stained hands on his shirt, to which was clipped the source of all his information, a small yellow radio. “It’s better to say thank you, and let them go,” he said of the French.

But while these sentiments are common in the capital, some Malians from the north and center, where the insurgency is raging, see things differently.

In a quiet suburb of Bamako, Ami Walet Idrissa and Bintou Walet Abdou, both 22, chatted in Ami’s house, its rough cinder block walls heating in the sun. They reminisced about their lives back home in Timbuktu, which was taken by Islamist militants, after arms and men flooded into the country in the wake of Libya’s descent into chaos.

“France helped Mali a lot,” said Bintou.

“They’re the ones who chased the jihadists out,” Ami said.

When jihadists took over Timbuktu in 2012, Ami was 13. Her parents had fled, but she stayed behind with her siblings. One day, walking home after bathing in the river, armed men stopped Ami and her brother. Males and females were forbidden from walking together, they said — siblings or not. They whipped them both, she said.

Both women worried about what would happen if the French left, but they never said so in public, even when people equated the French with jihadists, as they often did. Their opinions could invite trouble in Bamako.

Were France’s harshest critics living in areas threatened by extremists or abusive military forces, rather than safely in Bamako, things could be different.

At the leafy guesthouse, one of Mr. Thiam’s former co-workers was amused to hear what his old colleague was up to.

“Send him to Dogon country, let him hear a bit of gunfire,” he said with a smile, referring to an area often attacked by the armed groups that France fought. “He’ll run back yelling ‘Vive la France!’”