Burkina Faso is a country of 15 million tucked between West Africa’s coastal nations and a vast lawless desert. Its Foreign Minister, Bedouma Yoda, has just visited Ottawa to figure out why Canada’s not that interested.
His country counts Canadian companies, mostly mining firms, as their largest source of foreign private investment. But last year, Ottawa dropped Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest nations, from the list of countries where Canada will concentrate bilateral aid.
“We have not understood why. And we have asked the reason,” Mr. Yoda said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “It’s illogical that while doing a lot of business in Burkina Faso, development aid won’t complement this opening in the private sector.”
Burkina Faso isn’t the only African country confused about Canadian intentions. Embassies, such as the one in Malawi, have been shut. Last year’s slightly smaller list of 20 priority aid recipients marked a shift to Latin America, but eight African countries were dropped, and just one, Sudan, added. It was taken as a signal.
“Africa understood that Canada was becoming disinterested in her,” Mr. Yoda said.
The hardheaded question now is: Will it hurt Canada’s interests?
A demographic boom is coming to Africa, one that is expected to see its population double to 2 billion in 40 years. Its fate and its economy will matter to Canada’s children.
Even now, Canada, courting rising economic powerhouses in China and India, might take note: Those countries are rushing into Africa, along with Russia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, seeking a stake in the continent’s rich resources, contracts for roads and wireless phones, and an edge in future business.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, many African nations were posting annual growth rates of 6 or 8 per cent. Angola’s was 16 per cent in 2008. By 2050, Nigeria’s economy will be bigger than Canada’s, according to projections by both Goldman Sachs and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and South Africa’s just a little smaller.
“People of my generation spent a long time talking about when China and India will begin to stir,” former prime minister Paul Martin says. “Well, when it happened, it happened with an explosion.
“The takeoff for Africa is inevitable. You may wait for it for a long time. But understand that when it happens, as it happened in the case of China and India, it’s going to happen overnight.”
China has emerged the big low-cost producer, but like Japan and South Korea before, its rising wages and an aging population will pass the high-growth mantle to other Asian countries, Mr. Martin argues. Africa, with a store of resources and energy potential and a young and large population, will follow.
He worries Canada is getting out on the ground floor. So does another former prime minister, Joe Clark, the long-serving foreign minister under Brian Mulroney, who travels often to Africa and has watched other countries rush to build connections.
In Democratic Republic of the Congo, China is now bartering, with one state corporation negotiating for mineral rights and offering a road built by another state corporation as payment – an alarming prospect for Canadians who might want to compete. The Russians, Mr. Clark says, are deliberately going back to old Cold War allies and connections.
But Canadians already have connections. Its missionaries have been there for a hundred years. Teachers, doctors and nurses are there now. Africans have been educated here. Canada’s place as neither superpower nor former colonial power are an underestimated asset, Mr. Clark says. Foreign policy, whether Brian Mulroney’s vocal opposition to apartheid or Jean Chrétien’s spearheading a G8 African development initiative at the 2002 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., has often built goodwill. Aid matters, but so does aggressively pushing investment, trade and diplomatic presence and alliances, Mr. Clark says.
