African leaders and their delegations are making final preparations to travel to Beijing soon for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit that will begin on September 4th. This year's gathering comes at a critical time in the relationship between these two regions.
African leaders are looking for ways to move their economies up the value chain in a bid to capture more revenue and generate higher rates of employment, particularly among young people. But to do that requires infrastructure, especially energy. So, they'll be looking to China for financial and technical assistance.
But those requests will come at a sensitive time for the Chinese whose economy has slowed considerably over the past 10 years. Beijing is no longer writing those big checks to pay for large-scale infrastructure projects in Africa.
So, it will be critical for African countries to have robust strategic plans going into this year's FOCAC summit, according to Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Cape Town. Sanusha joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the need for African strategic thinking towards China and why it's so important.
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