| In her article published in Pambazuka News on 26 January 2012 and titled ‘Tragedy of the new AU headquarters’, Chika Ezeanya (an African I presume) reckons that it is an insult to the African Union and to every African that in 2012 a building as symbolic as the AU headquarters is designed, built and maintained by a foreign country – it does not matter which.
My initial reaction as a journalist was to get the information right. First of all, the new AU headquarters was inaugurated on 28 January 2012 by Jia Qinglin, chairman of China’s political advisory body, the People’s Political Consultative Conference, not by President Hu Jintao. Second, the project cost $200 million in total, not $124 million as Chika Ezeanya reports. Third, although the construction of the building which started in 2009 was fully funded by the Chinese government at a cost of $200 million, a team of up to 1,200 Chinese and Ethiopian workers laboured around the clock in two or three shifts to finish it on schedule. [1]
Is this not analogous to the gift of the Statue of Liberty from France to the United States on the occasion of the latter’s independence which was a joint effort, whereby over 120,000 Americans led by Joseph Pulitzer contributed funds for the construction of the pedestal in 1885? Fantalun Michael, the project coordinator is an African himself. So, Fantalun and his team should have an idea of how the building was wired, unless Chika Ezeanya does not trust them too and thinks they are just manipulated Ethiopians. Can the Ethiopians take such an insult?
Perhaps Chika should also tell us what guarantee the Nigerian and Ivorian governments, for instance, have that most of their big national edifices which were designed and built by Western companies are not compromised. The master plan for Nigeria’s Abuja and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) was developed by International Planning Associates (IPA), a consortium of three American firms: Planning Research Corporation; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd; and Archisystems, a division of the Hughes Organization, none of which is Nigerian. More detailed design of the central areas of the capital, particularly its monumental core, was accomplished by Kenzo Tange, a renowned Japanese architect, with his team of city planners at Kenzo Tange and Urtec company. They just handed the symbolic keys to the Nigerian government. [2]
Apart from the fact that a tunnel links the French embassy and the presidential palace in Abidjan, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, in Ivory Coast, was built by Dumez, a French construction company. All the marble was imported from Italy and the 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft) of contemporary stained glass from France. The structure, which cost $300 million, was also criticized due to the comparison between the lavish building and the impoverished surroundings. [3]
If the new AU headquarters project was coordinated by an African, it becomes factually untrue to say that the building was fully designed, built and will be maintained by the Chinese without African input. The only issue that can be raised here is that, except for Ethiopians, no other African experts were involved in the implementation of this project of continental impact.
Chika quotes Fantahun Hailemikael reporting that among the several luxuries of the building is a ‘helicopter landing pad so visiting dignitaries will be flown from the airport’ (let us also mention that there are three conference centres and office space for 700 people). Chika draws the conclusion according to which ‘the dignitaries, of course, will be spared the sight of the slum that much of Addis Ababa is’. Well, since helicopters will not be flown in very high altitude above the city of Addis, the dignitaries will have a much better opportunity to see the slums of Addis from the air. Moreover, what else is there to see in Addis but slums as Chika Ezeanya puts it? It is time we started to campaign for an Africa without slums which all the major African cities boast. I therefore seize this opportunity to pay tribute to Muammar Gaddafi who transformed Libya into the ‘Switzerland of Africa’. Tripoli before the US/NATO invasion was about the only city in Africa that had no shanty towns. The analogy of the ‘Trojan Horse’ used by Chika Ezeanya is out of place because unlike the Greeks who killed the Trojans, the Chinese are not about to kill Africans while they are partying at the new AU headquarters and set fire to Addis. This is an insult if you consider the fact that it is the US and NATO allies who, under the pretext of ‘restoring democracy’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’, are killing Africans for oil, cocoa and minerals in Libya, Ivory Coast, Eastern Congo…. Let the ancient and modern history of donation of buildings and structures from one nation to another be filled with intrigues and subterfuges, conquests, diplomatic scheming, espionage and counter-espionage, economic manipulations, political statements and dominations. But to suggest that the Chinese, like the crafty Odysseus, have devised a plan through the new AU headquarters that ultimately will doom Africans is venal thinking; the likes of Hilary Clinton who warned Africans recently against China’s neocolonialism. The very people who themselves colonised Africa, stole its land, sucked it dry of whatever resources it could lay its hands on, ran the genocidal Trans-Atlantic slave trade and carved up its territories like slices of wedding cake at the Berlin Conference at the close of the nineteenth century are telling us that China is the new coloniser of Africa. [4]
Chika Ezeanya can be as much averse to the new AU headquarters edifice as she likes to be, but evoking the construction of American embassies all over the world as underlying America’s geo-strategic interests and attributing the same intentions to China is conspiracy theory in its worst. Unlike America, China has not invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and building its biggest embassies in the world there beside the abuses in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the booming opium trade in Afghanistan, the rape of Afghan kids by UK soldiers, the urinating on Taliban militants’ corpses by US Marines and other unacceptable abuses. Unlike America, China has not built one of the biggest embassies in Africa, specifically in Kigali, Rwanda, immediately after Kagame’s RPF took power.
So, how come an African like Chika Ezeanya sees the new AU headquarters only as an insult, a discredit or an act of descending to a new low by African leaders when Americans, Greeks, British, Spanish, Portuguese… in short our colonial masters who now borrow money from China and benefit from Chinese investments do not? For Chika Ezeanya’s information, in the US the new 2,050 ft-long bridge that will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay is being built in China. The four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site. [5] In fact, China’s economy is now nearly half as big as the US economy and may surpass US before 2020. [6] The world can no longer afford to ignore China.
During this global financial crisis, China is proving that it is Africa’s friend in need and therefore a true friend indeed. What have we Africans got to show for staying with the West for centuries? We should have ‘looked east’ long time ago. If Angola’s is Africa’s fastest growing economy in Africa now (Angola is now offering to bail out her former colonial master Portugal from her debt crisis), it is thanks to sino-Angolan cooperation. Chika Ezeanya is barking up the wrong tree.
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