More rail infrastructure in Africa is great news!

For everyone commenting about debt traps, from an African perspective both Western debt and Chinese debt (or any type of debt) favor the creditors but Chinese loans are relatively advantages because

(1) they tend to focus on infrastructure that the respective countries can use to their advantage as opposed to the WB or IMF loans which promote neoliberalism that has never worked in Africa (or really any other place) and push Africa in a position to only be able to provide raw materials and never be able to switch to value added products.

(2) They push other richer countries interested in African to invest more if they want to compete with China. The US for example has made plans to invest in African infrastructure to compete with China:

https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/03/us-plans-build-africas-infrastructure-bring-opportunities-challenges

(3) If the debtor countries default on the loan or want to renegotiate, China (at least so far) doesn’t use its intelligence agencies and military agencies to destabilize your country or force regime change

They’re not going to like it when China tells them it’s payback time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy

Tanzania and Zambia about to join the “going to find out about Chinese colonialism the hard way” club. Corruption is cancer to any society.

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