Have you noticed Africa’s rise in the institutions of global governance? World Health Organization director general Tedros Ghebreyesus is Ethiopian. Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the director-general of the World Trade Organization.
Kenyan Mukhisa Kituyi was secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for two terms.
Ahead of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written to the club asking for Africa’s full membership.
On Friday, June 16, an African delegation led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa travelled to Russia and Ukraine to try to end the war. The team included Senegal’s Macky Sall, Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema, and Comoros President Azali Assoumani, currently heading the African Union.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni (recovering from Covid), Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Congo-Brazzaville’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso were initially to travel but sent representatives.
“The high-profile diplomatic team hopes to bring to the table the voice of a continent that has been badly hit by rising grain prices and the wider impact on global trade since Russia invaded Ukraine last year,” the French news agency AFP reported.
The BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher reporting from Nairobi laughed off the peace mission as “an unusual burst of activism given Africa’s largely hands-off approach to a conflict that many here see primarily as a confrontation between Russia and the West.”
Wareva. From where we sit, Ramaphosa and team want to send out a powerful message that Africa is no longer the sole destination of peace missions. We are sending out peacemakers to the world.
Our very own Murithi Mutiga, a former Nation editor and now Africa director at the International Crisis Group think-tank, sees the mediation as a “welcome development” given Africa’s growing demand to have a bigger voice at the UN and other international organisations.
Building Africa’s voice on the world stage is exactly what drove a university in South Africa to try something absolutely novel. In 2018, the University of the Witwatersrand launched the African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS).
The deputy director of ACSUS is Dr Bob Wekesa, a Kenyan media scholar and former journalist. His major area of academic expertise is China, where he undertook his masters and doctoral studies.
Last month, Wekesa told the US Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in an interview that China is exporting its model of “total state control of information” to Africa.
“From my research, lived experience in China as well as following up on Chinese media in Africa, there is quite a lot of focus on the African continent by Chinese media. And one has to perhaps distinguish between straight conventional media practices and those that fit into China’s broader global ambitions, which is big power competition particularly with the reining power which is the United States. And in those respects, therefore, Chinese media take an ideological bent in the sense that there would be certain media items that are calculated at persuading Africans to take a certain perspective.”
Every year China flies out African journalists to Beijing and other parts of country, where “they are loaded with the ideological positions that China is pursuing on the African continent,” Wekesa said.
“The understanding is that these journalists, selected usually from government media, or sometimes from the leading private media in the African continent, write articles or shoot videos or do radio productions while they are there on the ground, but then they become some kind of journalistic ambassadors for Beijing to the continent helping build relations back in their newsrooms, and persuade their colleagues in the continent to use as much content, for example Xinhua news agency, in their media houses be it print newspapers or digital formats of other forms of media.”
The US Africa Command, Washington’s military programme for Africa, amplified Wekesa’s observations in its quarterly magazine, Africa Defence Forum. Watch the full interview here.
Wekesa’s views echo a report published in March by the United States Institute of Peace that says, “In Africa specifically, China has made significant investments to secure favorable media coverage to promote a positive view of China, to counter the influence of the United States, and to assert and normalise China’s territorial claims over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other contested areas.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with China using its media resources and other tools of soft power to entrench its global influence. Africa itself is striving to grow its voice on the world stage. Its strategic partnerships with China, the West, or anyone at all, must be guided by the interests of the African people.
Kenyan and African journalists who get a chance to visit or study in China – or anywhere else – must grab the opportunity. But their work must always be guided by the ethics of the profession and love for the Motherland.
