11:00 Titans make Africa their stomping ground
The US diplomatic machine in Africa was thus revved up to ensure a successful rollout of the plan. Recent events, not helped by former ambassador John Bolton’s antics at the United Nations, may cause some to dismiss the efficacy of US diplomacy to achieve anything beyond elite acquiescence. But those who think so would do well to recall America’s long-standing ability to ingratiate itself with supposed “inferiors” when the geopolitics is right.
As everyone knows, having been served with daily reminders for many months now, China too is on a diplomatic offensive across Africa. A crucial component of that diplomacy has to do with military cooperation.
So assuming that these campaigns are no blips on the radar and that both superpowers are equipped to be successful in the diplomatic struggle, what will follow from that in terms of actual practical results on the ground?
How will Beijing react to the United States’ sudden enthusiasm in expanding its military presence in Africa? Will Chinese rulers take the word of America’s pro-administration theorists for it, that this has nothing to do with China per se but is entirely the result of growing US reliance on West Africa’s cleaner (both chemically and politically) petroleum and its security concerns in the Horn of Africa?
Or will China see it as nothing but another manifestation of US paranoia about the implications of China’s rise? Will Beijing read this to mean that the US intends to put another bolt into its speculated framework of “containment”?
It is easy to let the imagination run amok. Imagine a confrontation over Taiwan in 2015. Let’s say that by this time the US has obtained 25% of its oil (the current figure is 15%) from the massive offshore fields in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa, while China has obtained 32.5% (the current figure is 25%) mainly from Sudan, Chad and Angola.
This is an easy extrapolation to make given current developments on the ground. Strategically speaking, Africa will thus be split into two spheres of influence - an American west and a Chinese east. However, it is not this simple, as the US maintains the bulk of its security infrastructure in the east, and China’s recent investments in Nigeria mean it will have significant interests in the west regardless how such zones of influence map out in actuality. But for argument’s sake, let’s stick to a simplistic demarcation of Africa into two geopolitical hemispheres.
Two metaphors immediately spring to mind. The first is the partitioning of Africa by the great European powers before World War I. This is clearly nonsense, as that partitioning had the effect of eliminating competition - at least overtly - among the contending rivals.
The second and seemingly more appropriate analogy must be the Cold War. But what the Cold War teaches us about zones of influence seems dated in the presence of contemporary global politics. Thus were the US to collide with China over Taiwan, North Korea or Central Asia in the coming years, it is unlikely that proxy wars, after the fashion of Angola and Mozambique, would feature in the African context.
It is more likely, as hinted already, that petropolitics by that stage will unfurl a wider, more 21st-century spectrum of rivalry across Africa involving multiple players: multinationals, resource nationalists, ethnic factionalists, private armies and warlords, and international mercenaries, in no clear order of emphasis.
Prudence will suggest that we be immensely cautious, therefore, in making clean-cut projections of likely scenarios as to the nature of the evolving Sino-American competition over African oil. The situation is characterized by various murky security interests, is in constant flux, and is by no means even the cardinal feature in the landscape of Africa’s growing oil importance. We would dismiss the Taiwan simulation, then.
We should be similarly restrained in our bid to piece together disparate trends to obtain a comprehensive picture of how oil relates to global rather than local security concerns for the world powers under discussion. Often oil has been equated to power, but not technology, infrastructure or industrial diversification, although these are equally significant in strategic terms.
For instance, Chinese oil firms’ request to have Beijing station troops in Sudan may have been impelled by calculations that this approach is more cost-effective and reliable than engaging Western private security firms to protect oil installations. It also underlines the fact that just as there are no world-class Chinese accountancy, business-strategy, auditing, management, project-design or legal firms, there are also no Chinese world-class private security companies.
Thus operations in Africa, rather than simply feeding energy consumption, may be important to Chinese firms for defining desirable competencies in the services sector of the world economy using oil - a pleasingly complex industry - as a springboard.
The point being made, therefore, is that while the immediate concern of this article is to delineate the oil interests of China and the US in Africa at present and to anticipate, albeit in broad outline, how the trajectories of such interests may in the future intersect, perhaps violently, it refuses to buy into the cliche that oil equates with naked power and, hence, that Sino-American competition over African oil is merely another tedious instance of crude realpolitik.
The above point deserves underlining, as the trigger of this article is the US decision to consolidate its forces in Africa under a unified command - Africom. The leap therefore from “the US is readying to do battle to safeguard its oil supply in Africa” to “China may stand in the way so a clash is inevitable” seems decently plausible.
It is true that for six years the United States has designated West African oil supplies as constituting a national strategic interest. During this period several US Army Special Forces bases have been erected across deltas, coasts and mangrove swamps in several parts of the African continent, not only in West Africa.
In fact, as the recent spectacle in Somalia reveals, US forces in Africa are concentrated in the Horn of Africa, guided by a nerve center in Djibouti. But their presence in West Africa is growing rapidly. There are now launch-pads in Ghana, Mali and Senegal. Further afield, but in the same vicinity, mini-bases have been situated in Gabon and early-stage maritime control patrol commands anchored off the coast of Nigeria.
The US is already in the advanced stages of establishing a major naval base in the twin-island Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, itself a nascent oil-producer state.
Meanwhile, under the cover of the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, US forces are penetrating further inland than ever before. The predominantly Muslim landlocked countries of the Sahel now constitute a strategic matrix around which are knotted a number of vital oil pipelines and could serve as a bridge between resource-rich West Africa and strategically vital North Africa (remember: Libya still has the largest proven petroleum reserves, despite Nigeria’s production pre-eminence).
It is also quite true that all these cannot be said to be unrelated to the fact that Nigeria, West Africa’s oil powerhouse, which produces three-quarters of the continent’s oil, is already the fifth-largest oil exporter to the US. Indeed, the overall amount and quality of West African crude surpasses Saudi Arabia’s. Nor can it be unrelated that US companies had held almost complete sway over Equatorial Guinea’s oil industry until China arrived on the scene last year with a five-year production-sharing agreement with the country’s government for access to a major offshore block.
But as has already been said, proxy warfare is not the most efficient model for the kind of petro-diplomatic competition unfolding across Africa between the US and China. There are many, far more interesting and enlightening sub-narratives contending for our attention, which may prompt us to hesitate in immediately linking Africom to US energy security by a direct invocation of the competition between US and Chinese firms for rights to exploit new oil finds in Africa.
It is easily conceded that safeguarding the physical supply lines in times of emergency is another matter entirely. But the military component of supply-chain management for geostrategic commodities has often featured less in practice than usually predicted by armchair pundits.
And so while Africom clearly symbolizes the open acknowledgement by the US establishment of Africa’s growing strategic importance, it is reasonable to conclude that it does not alter the dynamic on the ground in any significant way, and China need not exaggerate its impact. In fact, a focus on technology, risk management and how both relate to capital in the oil industry goes further in any analysis of the unfolding situation.
Among the recommendations made by America’s energy-security experts with regards to Africa are the privatization of resource-bearing real estate and the promotion of regional gas grids. The latter can find expression in recent projects such as the West Africa gas pipeline (first broached in the early 1980s), a project that over the 20-year initial phase of its lifetime is expected to “transform the electricity market of West Africa” by conveying abundant Nigerian gas in the turbulent Niger River Delta to consumers in Togo, Benin and Ghana on the West African coast.
The project may, according to its proponents, also stem Nigeria’s wasteful gas-flaring, in which for want of technical capacity natural gas is not separated from liquid crude but simply combusted. Capping of gas-flaring is another recommendation made by American experts with an interest in how US oil policy on the continent evolves. Their concern is of course not solely from care for the environment, but perhaps more about efficiency - to the benefit, naturally, of America’s oil majors. The US firm ChevronTexaco is the leader of the consortium constructing the pipeline, to be partly financed by the World Bank.
Clearly, the US sees its present technical superiority over China as an advantage in the battle for concessions, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This is perhaps why China does not balk at paying billions of dollars for less-than-controlling stakes in giant oilfields, as it recently did in Nigeria when the China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) paid US$2.3 billion for a stake in offshore blocks.
While it is perhaps true, as many analysts suspect, that in this case President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria may have taken several political considerations into account, not the least his displeasure over America’s overt opposition to his bid for a third term in office, in deciding to sideline several Western majors in favor of CNOOC, China cannot continue to rely on expensive political diplomacy (it also agreed to fund a railway project with dubious financial viability around the same time).
More and more, field-leading technology in three-dimensional seismic, satellite-sonar conjunctive techniques, horizontal drilling, and advanced offshore deepwater simulation framing will be vital to demonstrating advantage over rivals, particularly in places like Africa where oil resources are diffuse and likely to be more so in the mid-term future. There is no indication that China isn’t aware of this. Chinese oil firms are investing heavily in research and development, and their technology subsidiaries, such as Sinopec’s Research Institute for Petroleum Processing, are beginning to earn the respect of the community.
What better approach to adopt in expanding capacity in both downstream and upstream processes than to acquire stakes in massive projects that require marked technical sophistication? And given the cutthroat competition in the Middle East and increasingly in Latin America, doesn’t Africa, designated a “swing production region” by experts, offer sound alternative prospects in global capacity deepening for one’s ambitious budding oil multinationals?
But it is exactly this point that renders the notion of a bitter, bare-knuckles fight between the US and China untenable. The globalization of China’s oil industry is ultimately what has sent such companies as CNOOC into Africa. That globalization entails, compels and expresses recognition of the international capital system. Regardless, the sound and fury of geopolitics and international capital will always band together.
If African leaders believe that the most sophisticated energy-development policy they can deliver is to play China against the West (read: the US), then they are sorely mistaken. In the same way that rivalry between Britain and France translated only into healthy competition between Elf and British Petroleum (before their respective mergers even further complicated matters), the current field of multinationals from China and the US, even if it is not so obvious now, are likely to view the situation in Africa as presenting a common/mutual risk-challenge, and therefore to seek areas of collaboration even as they indulge in rigorous competition.
Lest we forget, it is barely three decades ago that Western Europe was consuming 80% of African oil while the United States made do with 20% and China, a net exporter, bought 0%; the global commodities scene changes at remarkable speed.
Take the events of last April for instance. Nigeria’s best-organized and public-relations-savviest Niger Delta-based militant group warned China that by investing in “stolen” resources it was placing its citizens in the “line of fire”. Clearly, it will be foolhardy for Chinese operators such as CNOOC to assume that this is an idle threat just because China is supposedly the current flavor of the month in the presidential palace at Abuja.
The more prudent course of action for them will be to envisage a collective security shield around the delta for all multinationals. In this, and in several prospective scenarios, China’s energy interests will converge with the West sooner than most analysts anticipate. Unless, of course, China retreats from global capitalism, there is little doubt that anything significantly different from the competition that exists within the Western energy-capital complex will emerge between Chinese and Western (read: US) African oil interests.
To that extent, short-term incidents like China’s decision to assist Angola in thwarting the Western agenda of the International Monetary Fund/World Bank for concessionary access to Angola’s oil resources (which have overtaken Saudi Arabia’s as a source of raw material for Chinese refineries) are just that: short-term. In the long term, Angola will have to pay its debts, and Chinese investors will need a good return on their investments, otherwise they will switch to the next hot thing, maybe Canadian or Australian oil shale.
Simply put, Africa’s concern should be about how it builds internal capacity to understand international capital, political risk management and industrial technology, as they relate to the oil industry, so as to leverage all its advantages comprehensively in the global energy markets.
For obvious reasons, it is good that African policymakers spend time divining the implications of Africom, counter-responsive Chinese equivalents, and how these intersect with the energy security of China and the US. But if the intention is to use the resulting knowledge to play China against the US, or vice versa, rather than to maximize Africa’s opportunities to develop a modern, highly efficient energy-security system of its own, then the exercise, like the continent’s active participation in the Cold War of yesteryear, will leave Africa once more swindled out of hope.
With everybody else laughing all the way to the bank.
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Bright B Simons is an adjunct fellow at the Center for Humane Education (Imani). Evans Lartey is director of development at Imani, which is a think-tank based in Accra, dedicated to researching economic trends to glean practical public-policy insights for the benefit of government, business and civil society in Ghana. Franklin Cudjoe is the executive director of Imani.
Source: Wordpress