China keeps promising Africa coronavirus vaccines. But where are they?

Last updated Jan 10, 2021

Now, with unfavorable belief towards China solidifying in Western democracies due to trade wars and human rights concerns, African allies — which have vital ballot rights at significant global bodies — have probably end up being a a lot more important bloc for China to keep side with its so-called vaccine diplomacy.

And while a cold chain vaccine air bridge from Shenzhen, in southern China, to Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, has actually been developed, and producing abilities are being established to make Chinese shots in Cairo, Wang’s journey made it no clearer when Africans can anticipate to get a Chinese vaccine — or on what terms.

“The promises concerning vaccines in Africa have been really fake. There has been no timetable, only promises,” stated W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Advancement and previous Liberian minister of public works. “Today, I am not aware of any African country that’s taking delivery of Chinese vaccines.”

The Chinese Ministry for Foreign Affairs did not respond to CNN’s ask for talk about Beijing’s strategies to present vaccines in Africa, however state media has actually declined claims that vaccines will be utilized as a “bargaining chip to expand political influence.”

A power home and a continent in requirement

Wang’s whistle-stop trip of Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Tanzania and the Seychelles continued a three-decade custom of China’s leading diplomat making his very first global journey each year to Africa.

That custom signals Africa’s diplomatic significance to China, with drops in locations like the Seychelles, a sparsely inhabited island chain, showing no country is irrelevant to Beijing, and serves to humiliate Western nations which normally disregard the continent however frequently see it as within their natural orbit of impact.

The Africa-first procedure was developed in 1991, on a basis of shared underdog brotherhood, however China has actually basically altered ever since. A lot so that Wang’s claims, in a video interview ahead of his journey, that China and Africa had actually a “shared identity of the developing world,” which had both suffered “weal and woe,” didn’t tally with the 2 areas’ current history — and extremely various experiences of the pandemic.

In 2020, as the world’s second-largest economy, China announced it ended abject poverty, successfully contained a virus that has floored the globe’s biggest superpower, the United States, and developed some of the first coronavirus vaccines.

Across Africa, countries didn’t report the huge caseloads seen in India or the United States — as of Thursday, the continent had actually reported fewer than 70,000 deaths, compared to the 150,000 in India and more than twice that in the US.

The nations Wang visited have particularly low reported numbers, potentially hampered by low testing. But they felt the economic impacts of the virus deeply. Many tumbled into recession and faced a mounting debt crisis, which saw Zambia become the first African nation to default on its debt in a decade. About a quarter of Zambia’s $12 billion external debt was owed to China, which refused to provide debt relief.

Compounding the debt issue is another potentially worrying, and somewhat ironic, trend for African leaders: credit lines from China that once seemed almost free-flowing have been throttled in recent years, amid increasing criticism of reckless lending. According to the China Africa Research Initiative, Chinese loans to Africa dropped from $29.4 billion in 2016 to $8.9 billion in 2018.

Wang’s visit also came on the back of the sharpest racial tensions between Africa and China in decades, after alleged coronavirus-related discrimination against African nationals in the city of Guangzhou sparked widespread anger across the continent last April. An extraordinary video was subsequently posted on Twitter of the Chinese ambassador to Nigeria being scolded by a Nigerian politician over the mistreatment of Africans.

Africans in Guangzhou are on edge, after many are left homeless amid rising xenophobia as China fights a second wave of coronavirus

Yet there was little chance of Wang being challenged on any of these points.

In Nigeria, Wang held closed-door meetings and signed a vague agreement to establish an intergovernmental committee. In the DRC, he postponed the repayment of interest-free loans from China that matured at the end of 2020, although it was not clear what the value of these were. While in Tanzania, China and local officials launched a vaccine training college, in Botswana Wang committed to deepening bilateral ties, and in the Seychelles he discussed importing more fish from the nation devastated by a collapse in tourism.

Moore, the former Liberian minister, said African countries needed to exercise more agency in the procurement of vaccines, taking the charge on placing orders. If countries are expecting the vaccines to be delivered for free, either directly from China or through the World Health Organization’s COVAX scheme to provide vaccines to those in the greatest need, which Beijing is a signatory to, they will have “no leverage” in bargaining over the delivery timetable, he said.

The COVAX scheme has only pledged to work to secure enough doses to protect 20% of Africa’s population in the initial phase, meaning nations will have to look at alternative options, such as Russia’s Sputnik vaccine.

The director of African Centers for Disease Control (CDC), John Nkengasong, predicts the continent will need 1.5 billion doses of vaccine to inoculate 60% of the population — the level needed to achieve herd immunity. Procuring the vaccines and establishing delivery systems could cost up to $10 billion, according to the Africa CDC.

A health silk and road

On a bright blue-sky day last December, senior African diplomats, Chinese construction workers and officials, wearing masks, gathered to celebrate breaking ground on a grand new building in the Ethiopian capital.

The headquarters of Africa CDC, an organization conceived in the wake of the 2014 Ebola crisis, will be at the heart of the continent’s healthcare planning in coming years — and has been subject to intense political wrangling between the US and China.

Ethiopian Health Minister Lia Tadesse and Liu Yuxi, head of the Chinese Mission to the African Union, and other guests attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the China-aided Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in December 2020.

Launched in 2017, the organization originally received funding from the US, China, and the World Bank, among other donors, with Washington taking a leading role, including by paying the African CDC director’s salary in its early years.

But when China announced in 2018 that it would build the $80 million CDC headquarters in Addis Ababa, Washington was outraged. “The Chinese want to build the CDC to eventually steal the data from all the other centers,” an unnamed Trump administration official told the Financial Times in February. “If the Chinese build the headquarters, the US will have nothing to do with Africa CDC.” Recent reports that the Chinese hacked and bugged the African Union building they also built in Addis Ababa give the US claims more credence.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to CNN’s questions on the matter of spying on government buildings it has constructed in Africa.

A rendering of the African CDC headquarters in Addis Ababa.

The Chinese have forged ahead with the plan, effectively ousting major US influence on the body, and signaling how important it is to Beijing to be front and center of what it calls the Health Silk Road — essentially, the export of its medical and scientific expertise globally.

Throughout the pandemic, China has sent doctors to Italy, medical equipment to the Middle East, and has conducted vaccine trials in South America, giving countries such as Brazil early doses of those resources. Priority access to vaccines has also been promised to countries in Southeast Asia, which it has ties with along its Belt and Road project. Early in the crisis, China sent 148 medical workers to 11 African countries, according to state media.

In October, 50 African diplomats visited a Sinopharm vaccine factory and were told by the company’s chairman that “after the Covid-19 vaccine is developed and put into use, it will take the lead in benefiting African countries.”

A friend indeed

African nations are not totally without leverage when it comes to their relationships with Beijing.

While the pandemic has raged, so has China’s long-running trade war with the US — as well as a new one with Australia. It has also gotten into diplomatic disputes with the United Kingdom and Canada, which have condemned Beijing’s violation of democratic rights in Hong Kong.

That has made African countries increasingly important diplomatic allies who can be expected to vote in China’s favor at international forums, and help Chinese candidates get elected at United Nations bodies. When the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General was elected in 2019, for example, it was votes from Africa and South America, where China is also heavily invested, that helped a Chinese candidate win the seat for the first time.

“For international legitimacy, support is key in this region. With Africa, you have 54 votes in any international forum. That’s a huge bloc,” says Moore.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on September 3, 2018, at the Forum of China and Africa Cooperation.

African countries typically negotiate with China as individual units, presenting a David and Goliath dynamic. This year, however, African heads of state are scheduled to meet with Beijing’s top brass in Senegal at the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), usually attended by the Chinese President. Should the event go ahead in person, there could be an opportunity for countries to come together to press Beijing to clarify a timeline on its delivery of vaccines to the continent.

A date for the event has not yet been set.

Over the past 2 decades, this forum has actually traditionally been a showcase for headline pledges of Chinese investment in the continent, going from $5 billion in 2006 to $60 billion in 2015 and 2018.

This year is likely to be the very first in which Beijing will announce a smaller investment than at the previous FOCAC. In the absence of that monetary commitment, vaccines are likely to be the most pressing issue.

“African countries are so desperately in need of a vaccine, not because of the health implications, but because of the economic implications,” said Moore. “We’ll soon be living in a two-tier world, where Western countries will be opening the door after vaccinating their populations and developing countries, especially in Africa, will lack access to the rest of the world.”

Yet there is incentive for China to help African nations, says Yanzhoung Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations: “They want to improve China’s image. Secondly, they want to expand China’s market share of the Chinese vaccines. Third, they want to use vaccines as a strategic tool, especially in countries where China has strategic interest.”

Tellingly, Wang chose to wrap up his tour in the Seychelles, which this weekend will be one of the first African countries to begin inoculating its population. The country has received a donation of 50,000 doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine — but not from China. Instead, they were donated by the United Arab Emirates, which has commercial interests in the Seychelles, and procured the vaccines by conducting clinical trials for the Chinese pharma giant.

While it is natural that China would want to vaccinate its most vulnerable before supplying other nations with resources, African leaders must be wondering what Xi means when he says African inoculations are a “priority.”

According to analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit, coronavirus vaccines are unlikely to be available in most of sub-Saharan Africa until April 2022, at the earliest.

If the vaccines aren’t forthcoming, it will be hard for China to continue peddling the narrative that it shares “weal and woe” with its African brothers when those on the continent remain exposed to the infection, and thus trapped within their own borders, as millions in China attempt to put the pandemic in the previous.

Jobber Wiki author Frank Long contributed to this report.

China China keeps promising Africa coronavirus vaccines. But where are they? - CNN