Joe Studwell

One of the big questions going forward will be whether governments manage to exercise bargaining power to have minerals used for manufacturing within Africa.

There are efforts to do this around the seven main minerals that are used in battery production.

It isn't yet clear what that's going to lead to.

But it can obviously make a big difference.

I mean, Jokowi in Indonesia was pretty successful in negotiating with Chinese companies in particular for local manufacturing production if they wanted access to nickel and other minerals that the Indonesians produce.

So we just have to wait and see if African governments can replicate that.

And I think that for me is...

going forward is the biggest unknown in Africa is the extent to which governance will respond to thicker populations, greater growth, greater capacity to raise taxes and therefore expand the capabilities of government.

To what extent will African governments respond to this more benign positive environment and up their game?

And I just don't know.

The only thing that I would say with some confidence is there's going to be phenomenal variation between countries.

I try to stand back from this, and I feel that the Chinese influence in Africa overall has been significantly positive because Chinese banks have lent over $150 billion.

Now, it was not done in a terribly clever way.

I mean, the Chinese themselves will say,

privately at least, that yes, we were bloody stupid with some of the things that we did.

I don't think that they went in with a sort of agenda to get people into debt bondage.

What they wanted to do was lend the money to support the purchase of Chinese goods and services.

Because China is in Africa fundamentally for the same reasons that the Japanese were in Southeast Asia in the 70s and the 80s, and the Koreans were in the Middle East.

in the 80s and the 90s, building infrastructure and selling capital goods and selling consumer goods.

They're there because they've run this economic development policy where you massively overemphasize the role of manufacturing.