Insider

Lula says he tried to avoid Africa being “taken hostage” by China

Lula and Xi Jinping at a BRICS meeting in August. The Brazilian president took an uncharacteristic dig at China. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Tuesday said Brazil developed close relationships with Africa during his previous terms as president (2003-2010) so the continent would not be “taken hostage” by China. The statement was a very rare dig by Lula at the country’s main trading partner.

“We took Embrapa to Ghana,” the president said at the graduation ceremony of Brazil’s newest diplomats at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. An office of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) in Ghana was created in 2007, during Lula’s second term. Lula also mentioned the Open University in Mozambique, a joint remote learning initiative to train Mozambican teachers.

“Brazil had to play a very strong role to not allow Africa to continue being held hostage by colonizers or by very strong intervention from China, which was seeking places to buy the food they needed so much,” Lula said to the audience of young diplomats.

China is Africa’s largest trading partner, bilateral creditor, and a crucial investment source for infrastructure projects. The Asian giant has also reportedly built naval bases on Africa’s Atlantic coast, where Chinese companies have constructed and upgraded port facilities.

But a 2014 report by the Rand Corporation on Sino-African relations highlights that “most analyses of Chinese engagement with African nations focus on what China gets out of these partnerships” instead of looking at it as “a vibrant, two-way dynamic in which both sides adjust to policy initiatives and popular perceptions emanating from the other.”

President Lula visited Africa in August and promised Brazil would re-engage in the continent — which was an afterthought for previous administrations.

Lula and China

Lula and his administration have mostly been very close to China. Earlier this year, Elias Jabbour, a far-left economics professor and staunch China apologist, was hired by the BRICS bank to serve as an aide to Dilma Rousseff, who Lula named to head the institution.

In September, Brazil’s Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of China (CPC) signed an agreement to strengthen their cooperation and increase the number of high-level visits to both countries.

Furthermore, authorities from Brazil and Hong Kong met last week to discuss an extradition treaty.

Multiple non-governmental organizations have urged countries not to engage in such talks, as a new security law gives Beijing sweeping powers over the former British colony and may be used to try activists in Communist Party-controlled courts.