From ForeignPolicy. Story by Simon Engler

The China Railway Construction Corporation’s eye-popping $12 billion deal to build an 870-mile railroad in Nigeria is the biggest single overseas contract in Chinese history and will boost the country’s manufacturing sector just as its overall economy shows some signs of slowing.

That’s not the only upside for China, however. The deal will also give Chinese firms more of a foothold in Africa’s biggest economy.

The contract to link Lagos with Calabar, a city in Eastern Nigeria, is part of China’s headlong rush into Africa, where it has built or proposed tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure projects, partly to secure needed supplies of natural resources.

But this process is not without growing pains, both because some Africans object to what smacks of a second kind of colonialism and because those infrastructure projects have been dogged by persistent questions about quality control and environmental concerns.

‘In much of Africa, they have set up huge mining operations. They have also built infrastructure. But, with exceptions, they have done so using equipment and labour imported from home, without transferring skills to local communities,’ Lamido Sanusi, a former governor of Nigeria’s central bank, wrote in the Financial Times last year.

“So China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of
colonialism. The British went to Africa and India to secure raw materials and markets. Africa is now willingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism.”

Read more at ForeignPolicy.