Africa ‘catch-up’

AS MANY African countries transitioned from colonialism to freedom, India’s democracy was the template for them. The continent’s strongmen, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, had strong personal links with India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw the potential benefits of increased economic and strategic co-operation with the continent.

As Prime Minister Modi’s three-nation Africa tour in the run-up to the BRICS Summit today gets under way, the story has changed to one of lost opportunities and benign neglect.

It is not that India has done badly in Africa. But given the historic ties between many African countries and India, a more robust engagement would have paid much higher dividends. India’s lack of a consistent proactive policy towards Africa led to the Chinese stealing a march over it in terms of investment and trade.

Despite being Africa’s oldest trading partner, India is now forced to play catch up with China as the latter has aggressively wooed the continent’s leaders with its largesse, pushing its investments up to $3.5 trillion in 2015. In contrast, India will cross the $500 billion mark in 2020. This suggests that India and Indian companies must shed their traditional conservatism and pursue bigger gains in Africa.

New Delhi did the right thing in extending a $10bn line of credit from 2015 to 2020, but it must now push to see that it is used appropriately. Whereas India’s policy has focused on job creation in the countries it has invested in, China has tended to bring in its own labour, causing resentment among the locals. The good news is that India is scrambling to rectify past mistakes and re-engage with Africa in a big way, as the series of high-profile visits in the last four years shows.