The New Economy speaks with Tom Burgis author of The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth to find out more about Africa’s future.

The New Economy: China is, of course, buying up a lot of Africa and it’s been slated for corrupt practices and so is this a step backwards for Africa?

Tom Burgis: China has come in, just at the moment when there were some tentative moves towards greater transparency in the oil and mining industries. Some of the Western companies have been stung by corruption scandals, although they’re getting their act together a little bit and China has come in, reintroduced opaque deals struck in smoky rooms and has captured vast amounts of resource flows – mortgaged – and, basically, allowed Angola and others – Gabon – to mortgage a lot of future oil and mineral production in exchange for soft loans under undisclosed terms.

There are, obviously, massive risks to that. Similarly though – and this is what came across in the discussions I’ve had with Chinese officials and investors in Africa – you could see this another way. You could see it, as are some of the Chinese officials, particularly, the Chinese Ambassador to Niger who I interviewed in the book. They make a pretty eloquent argument, which is that for decades of imperial rule and centuries of exploitation western countries have pillaged Africa and left very little behind. There’s the odd railway here and there, but, largely, it’s just some holes in the ground and the terrible legacy of slavery and commercial exploitation.

The Chinese have turned up and given a different offer which is, yeah sure, we want this stuff that’s in the ground; we want the oil; we want the copper, but we’re going to build serious roads and we’re going to be build you a refinery like – the one in Niger went, which Exxon and Total said were not commercially viable – we’re going to build hydroelectric dams; we’re going to build infrastructure on a scale that the old exploiters could never have conceived.

That is the message, encapsulated by the Chinese Ambassador in Niger who said, basically, the problem in Niger is that they’ve been exporting Uranium for many, many years, principally, to France which runs on African Uranium, pretty much, and Central Asian Uranium and the governments’ receipts from Uranium are slightly below the governments’ receipts from the export of onions and the Chinese proposition is…you’re getting fleeced; we’ll give you a different deal.

A lot of people have bought into that. Some people are wary. People, like, Lamido Sanusi, who is now the emir of Kano, Nigeria and who was, until recently, a very highly regarded Central Bank governor in Nigeria. His argument is, basically, that the deal with China replicates the old colonial bargain, which is…we will import a load of manufactured crap, which you will buy and we will export the raw materials we need for our own economic boom.

And the final thought on China – and this is the one that concerns me most, I think – is that the pitch from China is, basically, here are the nuts and bolts that replicate our economic miracle; here are the roads; here is the infrastructure you need to have this kind of industrialisation and growth. The difficulty with that is – that’s explained by a big China consultant, in a book, called Martin Davis and the idea is that if you build it they will come, right. The idea is, if we build up these roads, then factories will open; people will have more manufacturing; more mass employment and that is a route out of poverty for a lot of the African States we are talking about.

The difficult with that argument is, is that really the way it works? Isn’t it that you get people starting to manufacture things and, then, that creates the demand for the infrastructure and that creates the demand for infrastructure, because you know there’s somebody at the end of that road who wants to buy it. It seems a little bit like putting the cart before the horse, especially, when, at the same time, there’s building all the roads. The tiniest amount, certainly until recently, for natural resources and commodities pushing the prices for them up, which is entrapping African economies even deeper in this resource curse, and which is the opposite of that kind of manufacturing development.

So there is that paradox at the heart of the Chinese bargain and seeing how African States can marshall the Chinese relationship, especially, given the troubles of recent weeks in the Chinese economy and the troubles that seem to be coming. That’s the big test ahead for those African leaders of good faith and integrity, who are trying to work out how they can emulate China.