Daily
Maverick
25th August
2023
An
investigation has lifted the lid on China’s leadership school in Tanzania where
‘Chinese teachers sent from Beijing train African leaders that the ruling party
should sit above the government and the courts’.
The
newly enlarged BRICS, which could become a commodities powerhouse, is not the
only arena in which the People’s Republic of China is shaking up the global
order and expanding its influence.
A
joint investigation between Axios and the Danish
newspaper Politiken this week revealed how the Chinese Communist
Party is teaching young African leaders from the SADC region to embrace its
authoritarian alternative to democracy.
The Axios and Politiken researchers
were the first Western journalists to go inside the Mwalimu
Julius Nyerere Leadership School outside Dar Es Salaam, which they say is the
first overseas training establishment of its kind.
Both
publications are well respected and not given to yellow-peril fear-mongering,
The story they tell is disturbing.
Writing
in Axios, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian described it as the strongest evidence
yet that Beijing is exporting its model of governing in its “push to challenge
the Western-led world order” — effectively by creating an authoritarian
friendly political bloc in Africa:
“At
the school, the CCP teaches how to fuse the ruling political party and the
state, marking a clear departure from Beijing’s previous, more subtle attempts
to peddle influence on the international stage.”
The
school has been presented by Chinese and African government officials and state
media as a way to “promote economic and social development and alleviate
poverty” by training better leaders.
“But
behind the school’s closed doors, economics takes a back seat to political
training. Chinese teachers sent from Beijing train African leaders that the
ruling party should sit above the government and the courts and that fierce
discipline within the party can ensure adherence to party ideology,” the
publications found.
Richard
McGregor, a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Australia,
told Axios that the most important part of the model was
“imbuing revolutionary parties with the idea that they are the permanent ruling
party and educating them on how to achieve that aim”.
Elite
invitations
The
school is open to rising young members of the ruling parties — but not to
opposition politicians.
Ruling
parties from the SADC member states of Tanzania, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola,
South Africa and Zimbabwe have been invited and included.
It
was a shrewd move to select these countries because many of them need little
encouragement and the party and the state, including the security agencies, are
already closely intertwined.
Between them (MPLA, Swapo, Zanu-PF, CCM, Frelimo and the ANC) the ruling
parties have had 261 years without a single change of government. They are
authoritarian to varying degrees within multiparty democracies.
Except
for Tanzania, these were all countries that were ruled 50 years ago by white
colonial, settler or apartheid regimes. White supremacy proved harder to
dislodge than colonial rule in earlier waves of African independence because of
the resistance of large white populations.
Once
in power the new governments in turn proved harder to dislodge. Like them, the
Chinese Communist Party fought a long war and has dominated China since the
revolution 74 years ago, a point of identification for the former liberation
movements.
It
is no surprise that some cadres were impressed by the lectures. Collin
Ngujapeua, a Swapo official, who attended training in June, described the
lessons taught by an instructor from the CCP’s Central Party School as “wonderful”. He especially liked the idea
of fusing party and government.
So,
we need to be clear. Undermining democracy is dangerous and unconstitutional.
Parties
in southern Africa that rule for too long lose their vision and run out of new
people and new ideas. They morph into patronage machines for the benefit of a
few well-connected individuals. Younger generations have no opportunity to
rise. The country gets run down and stagnates.
Democracy
is not just a luxury. The prospect that one can get beaten in an election or
exposed by the media or face an independent judiciary is what restrains ruling
parties.
Lessons
from China on corruption
South
Africa for one is much too diverse and much too unruly to live under the dead
hand of one ruling party forever. Even the most authoritarian of the SADC
states, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, have been unable to put their opposition away as
they battle it out from one chaotic election to the next,
Some
lessons could have been quite useful. President Xi Jinping has been in the
forefront of the fight against corruption, labelling the looters “tigers and
flies”. Under his regime, over 2.3 million government officials have been
prosecuted since 2013 — that should be a tremendous lesson for some of the
local rent seekers.
China’s
extraordinary achievement in lifting 800 million people out of poverty in just
40 years has long been the major selling point of its development model.
However, its economy has stumbled recently, and Western analysts put part of
the blame on Xi Jinping’s autocratic and erratic behaviour.
The
Economist was
almost exultant this week with its front-page headline: “Xi’s failing model:
Why he won’t fix China’s economy.”
Meanwhile,
further north, African leaders are looking elsewhere in Asia for development
models. South Korea and Indonesia are the favourites.
Both
President William Ruto of Kenya and President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria would like
their countries to emulate South Korea, a country that grew based on state
support for industrialisation, cheap exports, and free trade.
South
Korea was dirt poor in the 1950s but is today the 13th largest economy in the
world. During a visit to Seoul last year, Ruto claimed that 30 years ago Kenya
had lent money to South Korea “but today it is one of the world’s largest
economies”.
Tinubu,
the new president of Nigeria, is an admirer of Park Chung-hee, the architect of
modern South Korea, who reshaped and modernised the country through economic
growth and social order.
It
was under Park that Korean multinational companies moved into the big league.
Park’s legacy was to move Korea from being a small, underdeveloped nation to
among the best in the world.
Today
South Korea is testament to the fact that a country can be a successful economy
at the same time as being a democracy. The bigger question is which African
countries can take that same path.
The
Economist editorial
ends this week by pointing out that liberals’ predictions about China have
often betrayed wishful thinking.
“In
the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth
would boost democracy and individual liberty. But China is now testing the
reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence
is mounting that it does — and that after four decades of fast growth China is
entering a period of disappointment.”
The Economist has
often called it wrong. Still, Africans should watch closely how it turns out.
There is skin in the game. DM
Phillip
van Niekerk is the editor of Africa Unscrambled, a newsletter covering the
continent in a way you won’t read anywhere else. Get unscrambled by signing
up here.
He is also the editorial director of Scrolla.Africa.
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