Is the West Losing Africa to China?

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1:11To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:40David McWilliams: How are you doing there? That was a little bit of a giveaway. The podcast is coming from Johannesburg, Joburg, or Josie as they call it down here. the podcast today is all going to be about economics, the politics, not just of South Africa, but of Southern Africa. And against a background of war in the Middle East, what that war is going to do to the people here, number one. And number two, the evidence I'm getting down here is if you want to come to a part of the world and you want to see the evidence of the waning of America's influence and the evidence of the acceleration of Chinese influence.

2:24David McWilliams: South Africa is the place where all this is playing out. John, how are you, Ed? You'd love it down here. Yeah, I've never been to South Africa. I'd absolutely love to go, to be honest with you. But actually, as anthems go, South African anthem is one of my favourites. That, the Russian national anthem, and of course, the French. They're the best anthems. I thought you were going to say shoulder to shoulder, John. Oh, yeah, well, that comes in and forth, I suppose. Anyway, no, well, I'll tell you an interesting thing about the South African anthem. So the South African anthem is the only anthem in the world that has got five languages and three different keys.

3:02Three different keys, right? Because it's the five languages because it's put together. There's nine official languages in South Africa. Nine, right? We always think it's English, Afrikaans, Zulu or Koza, but there are other languages which are spoken by many many millions of people and of course the different keys is because various different ethnicities sing in different keys their music is different and in fact I want to talk to you about music because it is so steeped in music we're coming from Soweto John today okay and I have just spent the whole day with a number of

3:37David McWilliams: Zulus. Right. So I now know what a Zulu mom is, right? A Zulu mom is the most terrifying sort of mother in South Africa. Apparently she's ambitious, she's pushy, she's the whole thing for her kids. Sounds like an Irish mommy. That's what I was thinking and I was actually talking to a Zulu granny. I've just come out of a house here in Soweto when we were chatting away. A fascinating thing and it's really interesting and we rarely, rarely talk about it is these friends of mine are Zulus from Sueto. So they're born in the township. Yeah. They are born in, under apartheid. They're all educated by Irish priests.

4:21It's a father rice and a father boylan. Right. And what we forget is these men were absolutely heroic. So I'm talking to the granny, right? And she's talking to me about these priests. And she was a nurse. So she was a nurse under the apartheid regime. which meant that they were, you know, what they would call sort of middle-class black folk. So they would have been able to travel, but they had to be out of Johannesburg. They had to be back in the township at nine o 'clock every night. Like a curfew. They had to be off the streets. Complete curfew. They had to be off the streets. I had forgotten what apartheid was like.

4:57So there was a complete curfew of black people off the streets. You had to be back in your township, whether it was Alexandria, whether it was Soweto, or wherever it was, at nine o 'clock. but of course, if you worked in the hospitals, you probably had passed to stay longer or you had gone to emergency services or what have you, right? But again, just this extraordinary thing that the mother was saying, that she has an amazing gratitude to these Irish priests who came out and in the face of apartheid, in the face of oppression,

5:28David McWilliams: actually sat and lived amongst the black people in the townships and got up every day and went to rudimentary schools and educated thousands of these people. And again, it's a, you know, because we are so and have become so anti-clerical over the last 30 years. Yes. That we kind of feel that nothing good came out of these institutions. But in actual fact, if you come here, there's a counter narrative, which is a sort of a narrative that these people really went out of their way to come down here to help. Yeah. And they helped for absolute reasons of Christian conviction about inequality, about poverty, about the meek inheriting the earth, all that sort of stuff.

6:12And what you also find, John, is when you start talking religions to people here, people are much more religious. So I asked them, because a whole bunch of people went by me just yesterday morning, so it was Sunday morning, and they're all wearing these pristine white gear. And I said, who are they? They said they're black Zionists, right? So Black Zionism is a massively expanding evangelical religion here. And the Black Zionists preach in the open. So it's weird. It's not going back to the 19th century, right? Right. But the Black Zionists, and I'm saying, well, why is it? And they said, because it's hope, David.

6:52He said, if you're born in here, if you're born in the ghetto, if you're born in the township, if you're born in the shanty town, and you look around you and all you see is poverty, you see death, you see desperation, you see hunger, you see exploitation. Of course, what you're going to do is you're going to grab onto any message that is a message of hope, that in the next life, there is salvation. In the next life, there is reward. And again, you know, that sort of innate spiritualism that we have lost is very evident here. Yeah, see, I get that. And, you know, but it is interesting, though, that and you've said it before that that kind of correlation of relationship between economics and religion so when the economy is strong religion is kind of weak and vice versa yeah and vice versa and that's what you see here and of course the big preacher men who are coming down are Nigerian preachers and there's a lot of there's a lot of anti-Nigerian feeling there's a lot of

7:50David McWilliams: anti-immigration feeling here right yeah South Africa is the magnet of enormous amounts of of migration from Zimbabwe, from Botswana, from, of course, Angola, from Mozambique, and further north from Africa, from Zambia, from Malawi, all these countries, because Josie or Joburg is the throbbing commercial heart of Southern Africa. So for example, it has 19 % of the people of all of South Africa live in Joburg, but it accounts for 37 % of the tax receipts. So all the commercial activity is here. So it's massive. And of course, you have up the road, you have Pretoria, which is the state capital. And it's a state capital with more embassies than anywhere else in the world except for Washington, which shows you how geostrategic and important South Africa is.

8:42And it kind of has gone off the back burner.

8:44David McWilliams: You know, it was very much present in the 90s to 2000s, Mandela, apartheid's over. And then, of course, you have Jacob Zuma. And of course, then you have, you know, Cyril Ramaphosa. But it's kind of gone off the boil a little bit in terms of our understanding or our proximity or its presence in our world. But when you're here, you realize this is the future, right? But remember, you were saying that on the last podcast, that unemployment in South Africa is somewhere, what, 30 % or something like that. so how come it's still drawing so many immigrants into South Africa it's a really good question and something that struck me because the rest of sub-Saharan Africa John is so much poorer right that even at that 30 percent level of unemployment I mean so for example I'll paint a picture for you so yesterday morning I get up and I'm picked up by these two mates of mine one of whom is a writer one of whom is a radio presenter, both of whom were brought up in Soweto.

9:46David McWilliams: They are the children of the townships. And they say, okay, David, we're going to take you for a drive to give us a feel for the city, right? And the city feels like Gotham. You know Gotham City, right? Because it had its absolute heyday architecturally from 1900 to about 1940, with the diamond boom and then the gold boom and this huge migration into Joburg. The fascinating thing about Joburg is it has no water supply. There's no rivers. That is unusable, isn't it? Yeah, it shouldn't exist. Because cities exist where there is water. It shouldn't exist, right, number one. It exists because in the 1880s, gold was found in the mountains around Joburg.

10:29David McWilliams: And this had the gold boom. And of course, then you have Anglo-American, the massive company. And yesterday, I went in to look at Anglo-Americans' headquarters, which were opened by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1938. And all around the centre of Joburg, what they call the CBD, the Central Commercial District, right? There's this extraordinary art deco, extraordinary art deco architecture built when this place was booming. So it feels like Gotham, right? It feels like, you know, something out of a Marvel comic. Except, except, John, the total centre has been completely denuded of white people. So the whites lived there all the way through until the 1980s, the late 1980s.

11:10David McWilliams: And then they left. And what they left, therefore, was their architecture, their splendid apartment blocks, their splendid big mansions. And who has come into those mansions are Africans. First of all, black South Africans, but increasingly migrants from all over Africa. So yesterday I walked past a deconsecrated synagogue, right? Right in the center, which is deconsecrated and is now like a squatter camp. So people are living in the synagogue. So it is like the Africanisation of central Joburg is extraordinary to see, but it's also a damning indictment of the ANC themselves because the ANC, who have been running this place for 30 years, have allowed this incredible centre of an amazing city to simply atrophy in front of your very eyes.

12:03David McWilliams: And of course, if I hadn't been with two black people, it would have been much more dangerous. They said, don't walk around here on your own, because you're with us. This is our hood. We know people around. You'll be grand. Yeah, yeah. But even they were making the point to me that they would have known people there 10 years ago, but because of mass immigration from all over Africa, that the complexion of central Joburg has changed dramatically. So they said, let's get in the car. Let's go out to their hood, out to Soweto. Yeah, so tell us about Sueto. Like, what was that like? So we were going out to see the granny, right?

12:38So Sueto is probably one of the most famous suburbs of any city, right?

12:45David McWilliams: The image of Sueto looms large in everyone's consciousness. Everyone knows what it is. Everyone knows where Mandela... Obviously, Mandela lived on a street in Sueto. So too did Bishop Desmond Tutu. So they had two Nobel Prize winners on the same street in Sueto. Soweto is the centre of the resistance against apartheid And how big is it? Give us a sense of It's about 2 million people live there So it's like a city within a city And there was only one way in and one way out under apartheid One way in and one way out And there was a police and army barracks on the way in and on the way out And of course what you have now is this Again, it's like a parallel city within a city and because of that you have very very strange and unusual anomalies so for example they have the largest hospital in the continent of africa which is specialized in burns and i said why burns they said because kids get burned in the shanty towns all the time with paraffin heaters So it's really appalling, right?

13:55Jesus, yeah. So what you find is that on the streets, there's sheep, there's goats, there's fellas with paraffin fires, there's fellas, there's all some bad things going on. There's taxis full of people going to Mozambique, going to all over the place, right? But the city itself is huge. And like any city, Soweto is stratified into various different classes. So you have a middle class that bought their own houses in the 1980s under the apartheid regime. They bought their houses. They bought their houses. Americans gave them money because the Americans realized this regime is over. And this is, again, indicative of what the forward thinking of the Americans at the time.

14:38They said, this regime is over. We've got to create a black middle class because once it disappears, it can't be like the decolonialism of, for example, Mozambique, where the Portuguese left. And when they left, there was only two black doctors in the whole of Mozambique. Think about that. Jesus. Right? Yeah, yeah. The whole country. So the Americans said, look, we've got to set up a black middle class to basically manage the transition from whites to blacks. So what they did, one of the many programs that the Americans were involved in was a housing program that American banks lent money to black Africans.

15:14And the black Africans paid back the American banks over a 30-year period, and the American banks bought up the land. So there was quite an amazing sort of forward-thinkiness of the Americans. So in that part of Soweto, you have teachers, you have nurses, you have all sorts of public servants, etc. Side by side with that, you have, in effect, dormitories of male workers who still work illegally in the mines, those of which are still open, and they are the center of crime, corruption, violence. You know, selling all sorts of drugs. Then Pumi, my mate, she was saying, it's not just drugs, David.

15:55You can contract a guy to kill you here. Right. And I said, how much would that cost? She said, about$30. Who have you got in mind, Mike? John, I have a list. I have a little black book. As you know, as you know, I might appear very thick-skinned in public, But deep down, I have a little black book. But anyway, so you're in that area. And it's just fascinating to see a whole parallel structure. And of course, you have a big black middle class there. But because of all the migration, you have the most impoverished shanty towns. You have the corrugated roofs. You have people living in tin shacks.

16:38Hundreds of thousands of people, John. Hundreds of thousands of people. and as my mates were saying to me, they were just saying, can you imagine what it's like in the sun, in the heat here, in the summer? Yeah. When the corrugated iron roofs of the tin shacks just heat up. And then they said, can you imagine what it's like in the winter? Yeah. When there's no heating at all.

16:58David McWilliams: So what you have is side by side with an aspirational, upwardly mobile, black middle class, you also have the desperation of the people who keep coming from the countryside, whether it's the South African countryside and the countries around. So Sueto is, obviously it's massive, but it's expanding as we speak. And the so-called middle-class side of things, is that kind of planned, like a planned town and the rest is just shantytown chaos? No, it's all chaotic. So it's been built since the 1950s in iteration after iteration after iteration. But what you really get the feeling from, the destitution that is evident when you're driving around is incredibly shocking for a European.

17:54David McWilliams: And you forget that, you know, whereas lots of South Africa is rugby players and soccer players and the World Cup and big highways and the how to train, a fast train to the airport, all those things things but when you go into the townships and you go into the shanty town in the townships which are very distinct from the townships themselves because they're the very poor part yeah you realize just how much a mountain and how high the mountain is to climb for these people and of course the idea was that the ANC have been in power now for 30 years so what have they achieved yeah and it's interesting this is when we went for lunch so we go for lunch and something by the way if you're in south africa there's a restaurant called 1947 right in the middle of sueto well worth going to well worth going to it's and it's not a tourist place because i went with two locals and what's good about it we sit down i'll tell you what's good about it it's the sociological and anthropological observation always acutely john aware of what's going on.

19:01He gets the radar up.

19:03David McWilliams: Yeah, so we sit down for lunch, right? Again, African traditional food now wouldn't be your own, you know, you have to just kind of, just go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cover it in chilli, as much chilli sauce as possible and get it down your neck. Yeah, and as much beer, as much beer to swallow you down, right? Oh, that's lovely. But you've got to be polite, right? Yeah. So, but I'm being polite and I'm trying not to chew. But what I notice all around me, John, is there's a preponderance of women, young girls at tables, less men than women. So I ask, why is that? And they say because of black economic empowerment, the BEE, which they talk about all the time here, which is the way in which was jaundiced, obviously clearly away from whites onto blacks, but mainly and biased towards black women, young black women.

19:55So the ANC's idea is if they could liberate young black women,

19:59David McWilliams: if young black women can have jobs they'll probably be more likely to be more educated, they'll have less kids so there won't be that pressure on the society so this was kind of very much social planning so that's the first thing you see, right? So the black women in Sueto according to my mates, have more money than black young men which is good and bad it's good because it liberates women in a society where there's a lot of violence and all that, but it's bad because then you think, well what do the young lads do? and that's all the gangs and the dealing with drugs and all that sort of stuff but then the other thing was then there's another bunch of women who were very glamorous really glamorous like their hair's all done they've the longest nails they've BBLs all over the place they're the most glamorous looking young ones you've ever seen and I say to them who are these?

20:48David McWilliams: and they say they're the slay queens the slay queens the slay queens and this gives you an indication of corruption so the slay queens right you know that that expression slay in slang it's slay yeah it means if you're slay you're slaying it you're killing it yeah top of the class yeah yeah yeah so the slay queens are killing it these are the girls who are probably between about 20 and 30 maybe 20 and 35 and they are all dolled up to the nines right now really i mean you're talking like louis vuitton the whole thing right so i said so what's the story and they said well slay queens are a subgenre of influencers in South Africa.

21:28And they're written about all in South Africa.

21:30David McWilliams: And they are the lovers are usually the girlfriends of middle aged fellas who have loads of money, who are what they call tendrepreneurs. And I didn't know what a tenderpreneur was. And they say, this is the corruption. So the ANC is very corrupt. And the classic way of having a corruption is that the the ANC said, we're going to build a bridge. So we put that at tender. So the tender, the tenderpreneur is the person who gets the tender. And of course, the gig for getting the tender is you slip the ANC guy a backhander. Yeah. And you get the gig. Old school corruption, right? But the tenderpreneurs are a massive part of the upwardly mobile middle class here.

22:15And they tend to also, because they're very bling and because it's very show-offy, because I was saying, you know, I was laughing, It's quite bling culture. They said, quite bling? Weird, the bling is not the bling, right? So those men, they're middle-aged men. They're our lads, have these sleigh queens as girlfriends that they take out shopping and all this sort of thing. So they're the sugar daddies. So I was saying, well, why are all the sleigh queens out and they're tods? There's like eight girls on their own. And they said, because it's Sunday. I said, I mean, it's Sunday.

22:43David McWilliams: They said, all the sugar daddies go home and pretend to be religious on a Sunday and go to lunch with the family and talk to the granny and pretend to be the big man at home, right? So the sleigh queens are on their tots. Wow. So it's all this kind of really interesting, but they were saying that this is, again, part of the economic, political background noise. But of course, the result of all this, John, is a society where the economy is only growing at 1%, but the high-end posh shops and branding places and whatever are flying because there is a significant amount of people who are basically milking the system here.

23:26David McWilliams: And the net result of that, of course, are places like the center of Joburg. It's an area called Yeovil, which was very, very posh in the 70s, have gone to rack and ruin. And of course, because there's so much corruption in public procurement and in building roads and building libraries and building, of course, housing and the water system, et cetera, et cetera. Because the tendrepreneurs are taking all the money. What you have is this sort of parallel life down at the bottom. So these are the things, John, that I was learning at lunch yesterday in Sueto. So a lot of the whites have moved out of Joburg altogether or are they out to the suburbs or have they moved city?

24:09So a lot of the whites have moved out of central Joburg, right?

24:11David McWilliams: But they've moved into big parts of Joburg, places like Rosebank, Melrose, Santon. All these gated communities. Well, it's interesting. Yesterday, I went from Soweto to a place called Santon. So Soweto, you have these incredibly impoverished people. You drive about 20 minutes, John. Yeah. And you're in this square mile that is the richest square mile in the continent of Africa. Wow. Right? Jesus, yeah. So the contrast is phenomenal. Yeah. The contrast is phenomenal. So the white people have largely left parts of Joburg, but they then have retreated to other parts of Joburg, which are, as you say, gated communities with lots of security.

24:53David McWilliams: And again, lots of people, as you should see some of the houses because they've built sort of home cinemas and party rooms in the houses because they don't go out that much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then, of course, in Sampton, where I was, I drove down a street where there is the most opulent building is the Chinese embassy. Right. And the place where Chinese public servants are housed, which is incredibly opulent. And do you know who's their next-door neighbour? Cyril Ramaphosa, the president. Ah. Okay. Let me just ask you about that, Mac, then. So you started off by talking about China, the decline of the American influence in South Africa and Southern Africa, and the rise of influence of China.

25:39So talk to me about that, the geopolitical element of South Africa. But before you do that, let's do this.

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27:14So, Mac, you're describing Johannesburg, which just like faded glory, it sounds like. It sounds like an awful place, but fascinating at the same time. No, but that's the thing, John. It's not awful. If your standards are Mount Merion, it's awful. Right. Okay. Okay. Point taken. Point taken. But if you're saying, look, you know, this is the way the world looks, you know, there's 8 billion people in the world. This is where they live. Yeah. This is what megacities look like. This is what they feel like. They're chaotic and they're poor and there's people in the make and everyone's hustling. And, you know, in a way, you need to see these cities to understand what's going on in the world.

27:57because these are what London must have felt like in, you know, 1790 or what Paris must have felt like in 1800. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. So we've cleaned up all our cities and we've garnered the wealth and changed them, but these sort of mega, mega cities,

28:16David McWilliams: whether they're in Africa or whether they're in Asia or whether they're in Latin America, these are the places, These are the nodes of dynamism, political, cultural, musical, eventually economical over the course of the next 50 years. Yeah, yeah. And in a way, sometimes doing a podcast like this, I wouldn't say it requires you to, but if you get the opportunity to go down to these places, embrace them. You know, open up your eyes and say, so yes, you were right. I mean, it's kind of terrifying if your perception of what the city should be is a clean, white city, as it was in the apartheid time.

28:59And it's kind of terrifying if you're living behind gated communities and you're worried about crime. But again, the crime rates have fallen in Johannesburg, right? But they were very, very high. But what I'm saying is, this is what the future feels like. And I suppose this is what lots of Europeans are naturally very afraid of. Yeah. Because nobody wants to swap what we have for what is here. That's the absolute first bottom line. And dynamism and energy can be rather positive substitutes for chaos, for exploitation, and for danger. So I'm aware of that. And I would never like to romanticize or eulogize or in any way undermine what's going on.

29:44But I think from an economic perspective, from a global perspective, it's fascinating to see. And also, it's not even to see, John, to feel and to smell the place. The place is smelled different. Yeah, well, that's always fascinating. So tell me then about the kind of the geopolitical element of South Africa. You know, as we said before, the rise of China's influence and the decline of the American influence. What's going on there? Explain that. Yeah. So, you know what the South Africans are most worried about if America were to pull out of here? What? Is the end of KFC. They are the biggest consumers of Kentucky fried chicken in the world.

30:27In the world, perhaps. No way, really. So we're laughing about this. So basically what you have, you've got two or three, very briefly, John, you have three strands of things going on, right? The struggle for independence in Africa came through two main channels. One was the independence movement articulated by the ANC, which basically accepted the colonial boundaries and colonial countries that were set up by the colonists, by Europeans, by Brits and French in the main. and the independence movement after the Second World War, which was most exemplified, let's say, by the ANC, but also by movements in Kenya, movements in Zambia, movements in Zimbabwe, all in Nigeria, they were all based on accepting the boundaries that had been stipulated by the Europeans, even though those boundaries were ethnically all over the shop, right?

31:20Yeah. Because you'd put Muslims with Christians, you'd put different tribes with different tribes, different languages, all that sort of stuff. So that was one way. And that's the perception that prevailed. But there was another school of thought, which is called pan-Africanism. Pan-Africanism was a school of thought, which said that all Africans have a similar destiny. They have a similar history, they have a similar present, they have a similar destiny. And in order for Africa to be free, and in order for Africa to achieve its potential, which it has never done, what you need is in effect a United States of Africa.

31:57So there's 55 countries in Africa. So Pan-Africanism was this idea that they would actually come together like an EU, like a United States of Africa. But culturally, they're so incredibly different, so diverse. You know, from Arabic Africa all the way to the West Africans and East Africans are totally different. There's hundreds of languages.

32:20David McWilliams: There's hundreds of languages but what pan-Africanism was all about was that there is a common culture and a common history and a common destiny and it was an idea yeah and it was very very attractive for a lot of black emancipation thinkers they also felt that the ANC type movements merely aped European movements and they didn't come intrinsically from African philosophy African culture so you had lots communism in the ANC, which in effect was made up by a German fellow, Karl Marx, a white German fellow who probably never met a black fella, right? So their view is that there's a very famous book in the canon of Pan-Africanism by a guy called Cantor Woodson and it's called The Miseducation of the Negro.

33:09David McWilliams: And I was told to read this last night. And what it's about is that the black elite turned their back on their own culture, an aped white culture, so they wanted to go to Harvard, they wanted to go to Trinity College, they wanted to go, they were basically to be part of the black elite, you in effect turned your back on Africa and you became a person who was educated by and therefore influenced by white thinking. So pan-Africanism is still very much part of a hopeful movement here and I find it really fascinating. But then of course you have the third strand of this which is that africa has underperformed economically and socially and financially for years and there's various different ways obviously the first way you could say is colonialism but you can even go deeper and say the geography of africa right yeah the way in which so for example africans the at the coast of africa is very very beautiful if you want to go on a beach holiday, but really bad if you want to actually find a safe harbour to actually port in, to trade in.

34:15Right.

34:16David McWilliams: So both West Africa and East Africa are very, very difficult places to navigate. Now, what that meant is historically, there was very little trade between the various parts of Africa. And the way in which Europeans traded with each other was through rivers. So the Danube, the Rhine, all those things, that they linked places and they set natural boundaries. The problem with African rivers is although they are incredibly significant and they're huge, they are actually very difficult to navigate because you're getting waterfalls every couple of miles. Yeah, yeah. So they are not, they didn't allow the Africans, the same as Europeans traded with each other and ideas and money and all that sort of stuff.

34:54David McWilliams: And then, of course, the third big thing, as you've said, John, is that the Sahara is effectively a prison. The Sahara is like a wall across the north of Africa. Yeah, yeah. So all that trade and ideas and money and economics and philosophy basically stopped at the Sahara because it was very difficult to negotiate your way of course. So in a way, Sud-Saharan Africa has been completely isolated from the type of processes that Europe benefited from. The rivers, the trade, the navigational open oceans. And of course, what you forget again is Sub-Saharan Africa is hemmed in by two enormous oceans.

35:37You have the Atlantic and of course you have the Indian Ocean. So there's a lot of, I think, philosophical and ideological and historical and geographical reasons for African underperformance.

35:50David McWilliams: But there was always a perception that they were dependent on and could depend on the United States, for example. and Europe to a lesser degree after colonialism. But of course, the United States has certainly under the last two regimes, particularly the last two Trump administrations, has turned its back on them. It called them shithole nations. It claimed that the Afrikaners, the Amerikaners, as they're called, were the most oppressed people ever. Remember that last year, John? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turned its back on the G20, which was, And of course, there was the humiliation of Ramaphosa in the White House.

36:29David McWilliams: So all this stuff is going on at the same time as the Chinese, John, are figuring out Africa is full of one thing that they need, which is resources. Yes. Every single thing that the Chinese need is under the ground here. Everything. And the Chinese have gradually but progressively done deals with the Africans. it's what one American commentator said, when Americans come to Africa, they get a lecture. The Africans get a lecture. When the Chinese come, they get a bridge, right? You know, so China is now by far and away the biggest trading partner of Africa. By far and away. An investor, I suppose, as well.

37:10David McWilliams: Much bigger than Europe and a massive, massive investor because what they basically want, the Chinese want a supply line from Africa to Asia. And through that supply line, they will build the infrastructure. They will swap the technology. But what they will do is they will take out of the ground everything they need. And I'll just give you an example of what the Chinese want, right? Yeah. So those rivers we spoke about, they're not good for trading, but they're amazing for hydroelectric energy. Yes. Okay. So what you have is because the rivers are so steep. So the gradient of the rivers is extraordinary.

37:53So they're ideal for renewable energy.

37:55David McWilliams: And the Chinese have seen this. They said, hold on a second, Africa could be the powerhouse for renewable energy. And so what they've done is they've funded all sorts of green power generation, distribution, and they've manufactured all the equipment to do this. And so if you think so, Uganda, Zambia, and Ethiopia are full of water. and of course they are in the Chinese line of sight. Yeah. Number one but also John what the Chinese really want are rare earths right. So Africa is thought to have half the world's thing called carbonatites John. I know you and I are not great in geology but this is rock formations rock formations in the earth's crust created by carbonate rich magma.

38:43David McWilliams: So if you're looking for rare earth materials, you look in these areas, these regions first, okay? And this is where you're going to find metals that are used in MRI scanners, lasers, lenses, pacemakers, mobile phones, rechargeable batteries, wind turbines, and many of the other staples of 21st century economics. Right. Kenya, South Africa, Malawi and Madagascar are amongst the countries that will benefit most. And again, you go back to this idea that the Chinese want what's under the ground here, and they're prepared to pay for it. The Americans are behind the curve in that. And then, of course, you have the extraordinary population story.

39:25David McWilliams: Very briefly, John, today, there are roughly 1.5 billion Africans. It's estimated by 2050, there's going to be 2.5 billion Africans, meaning that one in four people on earth will be African. Three countries alone are going to account for some 30 % of all this growth. Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt in North Africa. Nigeria is projected by 2050. It's going to have a bigger population than the United States of America. Wow. That is what we're talking about. That is what we're talking about here, right? And that is why the Chinese realize that this is the future for them. If they can sell stuff to the Europeans, remember we just did the thing on Timu.

40:13David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they can sell stuff to us, BYD cars, batteries, everything, they need to source those materials somewhere else. And the place they're going to source those materials are in Africa. And they've got long-term contracts with the Africans. And of course, I'm sure that all these aren't lovely sweetheart deals where everyone's happy. I'm sure the Chinese are doing very hard deals with the Africans. But the reason they can is because the Africans aren't getting deals done with Europeans or Americans anymore. So we've abandoned them and they've switched to China. So China also needs to create the consumer market there.

40:55and in order to do that they need to invest in raising people's living standards and income completely so all boats will arise so in a funny kind of way China could also help solve the number of immigrants coming from Africa to Europe because they won't have a need to come here if they have a good standard of living and investment and jobs and all that kind of stuff

41:22David McWilliams: yeah no i think you're probably right although i do think that the disparity in living standards is so enormous like i was trying to figure out myself when i was walking in that shanty town yesterday and i was just on my own and i was looking at little kids playing football like little little baby kids you know five six years old playing football mother mothers with with infants in their arms and i was thinking to myself why have they left what has precipitated this massive surge in migration from the South African hinterland to the shanty towns at a time when, at least in certain metrics, education, access to water, etc., life in the villages was getting better.

42:07David McWilliams: But of course, it's things like mobile phones, John, that show people that there is a life. So if you imagine, if you were living in rural Africa for a long, long time, you never saw the city. You had no idea what it was. It was so far away from you. You had no idea of consumerism. You had really no idea of consumer products. Now the most common item of clothing in the shanty towns is a Man United shirt, right? For young kids. No, it's true. I mean, they're very bad taste in football, in fairness. Well, I was going to say, yeah. I was going to point it out to you. But where are they seeing that?

42:41David McWilliams: So you've got this saturation, every single shanty town every little shack has got a satellite dish yes right yeah and so they're being saturated by consumer products by expectations of a life that's better than where they came from many many many have mobile phones so what they're seeing is an extraordinary access to a world which is beyond their ken and the same thing is happening for europe they're seeing europe and they're thinking Wow, look over there. So I think that you could be right in the sense that the Chinese investment in Africa could coax more people, poor people to stay where they are.

43:26David McWilliams: But I mean, the story of Irish people, as we know, is a story of migration. You go to where you think the opportunity is better. and I suppose that's why not only are America and the European Union I think being completely reckless in the way in which they think about Africa because you know unless and until an African family think it's better to stay at home or they assess the risk of traveling and the risk of migration they say you know what it's still better to stay here than give a trafficker however many thousand dollars they do to try and get across the Mediterranean until such a time as that equation is flipped on its head.

44:11Yeah.

44:12David McWilliams: And it's better to stay in Africa. You're going to get much more problems. And of course, you compound this with things like the war in Iran. So every taxi driver here says straight away the price of petrol has gone up. Straight away, the amount of money in their back pocket has gone down because they're spending more on petrol. What you notice is no public transport here. So Africans spend a hugely disproportionate amount of their income on travel every day in little minibuses. And because the townships are miles away from where they work, because there's no work in the township, they are commuting for hours.

44:51So if the price of petrol goes up, their living standards automatically fall.

44:55David McWilliams: Much more so and much quicker than people in the West because people in the West are not that dependent on cars because we have subsidized public transport. All those things you can forget, basic things. So, I mean, my major takeaway, John, having spent time now with the Zulu nation is, one, don't mess with the Zulus, okay? That's the number one thing, right? They're of a different breed, and I've been given a whole host of books to read by my mates about Zulu culture, Zulu unwillingness to accept white rule, Zulu unwillingness to accept Muslim slave traders in East Africa, all this sort of stuff.

45:35David McWilliams: So I'm going to be boring the tits off you, John, with Zulu stuff, right? But my second takeaway is that this is what the 21st century looks like, whether we like it or not. And this is what reality is for a disproportionate amount of humanity. And that is something that we've got to get our heads around. And finally, I think that the Chinese have figured out that they are in a symbiotic relationship with Africa, that they need Africa as much as Africa needs them. And they have decided to back the Africans. And all the while, we seem to be making fundamental mistakes about what Africa wants, what Africa can give us, and our relationship with the Africans over the coming generation.

46:28David McWilliams: So that's about it, Johnny Boy. The next podcast will be from Europe, I suspect. It will be from Ireland. And you'll be on your jolliers. So I will see you for ages. Yes, we'll always be online, Mac. We'll always be online. So ladies and gentlemen, dear listener, John is going on an odyssey to Australia beginning tomorrow morning. I believe and if you see a rather confused looking man with a glass of red wine in his hand in various vineyards around southern Australia you'll know it's John Davis yes just top me up and away we go

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