India and Africa 4 eva!

I had been traveling the past three days, had gone to Vizag in Andhra Pradesh to attend a friend's wedding. The wedding went well, very traditional, and the food very sumptuous, and the city, well, quite hot and humid, but very livable. I plan to write more about my trip later.

In the past week, the Prime Minister of India visited two nations in East Africa - Ethiopia and Tanzania. Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, is also home to the head quarters of the African Union, hence the significance of his visit there, where he addressed the African Union and Heads of State of over 10 African nations. Addressing the second ever Africa-India Summit, the Prime Minister talked about all the right things, especially a greater third world partnership between the two economic blocs.

While for much of the western media, and perhaps any journalist/observer not from Africa/India/China, China's and India's parlays in Africa are more about gaining access to its resources than for the genuine reasons of diplomacy, good relations, and economic and cultural ties. 

Given my disinclination towards trusting the Chinese Government (not the people though. From what I read, their abilities to form opinions has been systematically eliminated - all part of the process to be a world superpower that rules through fear), I do know that respecting other nations does not form a part of their plan for world domination if being nice to others does not help them in that regard. As far as I know, its only recently that China actually started making parlays into African nations, giving them money, or rather, building projects for them - with Chinese money, using Chinese labour, and then using that as a quid pro quo for securing mining rights. That's pretty much how the Chinese have been operating. I would like to believe that while India has a need for resources, and that Africa is a great avenue to provide them, I think its just not in our international relations repertoire to be so obvious sometimes (which I think is a very good thing). Don't get me wrong, it amazes me at how sneaky the Chinese can be with so many other things in the world, with the latest example being propping up Christine Lagarde for IMF head and then getting together with the rest of the BRICS and issuing a statement against it! 

It is not that India and the nations of Africa are strangers to each other. To give the most proverbial of examples, Gandhi ji earned his chops in South Africa, to put it very crudely!

So instead of building a huge parliament building, or other infrastructure monuments, India has focused on sectors it is good at, and I believe sectors that genuinely help a nation stand on its own two feet, such as healthcare and education, just to give two examples. In fact, the Indian Railways, which may invoke strong emotions in many Indians, in good ways and bad, are a big factor in India's push, with India offering railway hardware and railway construction to the continent. The Chinese could have offered the technologies, but they're too busy building high-speed railways across the country, which well, are quite unreliable and of poor quality from what I hear, but my point is that the high speed railways will probably not do in most of the African continent. The African Union in fact requested India to assist with the USD 300 million Ethipia-Djibouti railway line, which will link the landlocked nation of Djibouti to the ports of Ethiopia, thus providing a quicker and safer mode of transport for goods and services in and out of the nation. Of course, sometimes one wonders how India manages to get ahead with its sensationalist and unintelligent media, who again sensationalize the move as India vs. China. Sorry, I don't think I should provide a link here to these tabloids.

In Ethiopia, India's Apollo Hospitals will build a super-speciality hospital for $150 million. Its a wonderful thing, because in the long term, it will have such an enabling effect on the people who will have access to better healthcare, research facilities that will attract the best medical talent in Ethiopia and yes, it won't be manned mainly by Ethiopian doctors and other professionals, thus enhancing their own abilities.

Similarly, the information technology sector is somewhere India has been doing very well in providing aid and resources to its African counterparts. While information technology hardware needs intensive capital investment, and probably depends a lot more on markets to obtain economies of scale, the IT services sector, especially the BPO/KPO sector can be a great spur for the local education landscape, because it will spur people to be educated because there are jobs available, and a big industry invariably supports a broader spectrum of support services and industries around it. So its good to read that Ghana has a desire to do well in this sector, and its a very good feeling to read that India's helping them. This is what the third world needs - just ego-less help and support for each other. In fact, the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT in Ghana has been functional since 2003. In Ghana, India's also going to assist in a multi-thousand crore fertilizer project, another project that will go a long way towards agriculture and food security.

India's actually deeply involved in the INR 4,500 crore The Pan-African E-network project with the African Union, which will eventually connect all African nations by fibre optic cable and satellite links! The man who announced this program first was none other than India's great son, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.

There have been similar strides in virtual education and telemedicine, aided by India's strong portfolio of satellites. IGNOU now has plans to open an Indo-Africa Virtual University soon which will focus on very very relevant and important subjects, such as health sciences, vocational training, food and nutritional security, and gender empowerment. IGNOU is already a part of the Pan-African E-network project.

Of course, one of the biggest areas where I have again and again written about the great support India and Africa can provide each other is medicine - cheap, affordable, and effective medicine, a concept which the big drug companies of the developed world can never relate to. If the rich white world had its way, they would have cut India's supply of cheap medicine to the third world a long time ago, and they never stop trying.

A big factor in any international relations is the people. It is my opinion that when governments actually try hard to increase people-to-people interaction, and genuinely invest in developing social and cultural ties, that's when relationships strengthen. India and Russia used to have that for many years, but that's all a thing of the past now. With more African airlines flying into India soon, I really hope a lot more African tourists visit India, and I really really hope our ignorant society does not treat them in its usual racist way - serve the white, scorn the black. Perhaps with more societal linkages, our society, ever lapping up the western pop culture, can realize how common we are to the cultures and cuisines in Africa, especially the east and north, a point which the Prime Minister also raised there.

For those interested, the Africa-India Framework for Enhanced Cooperation, released on 25th May, 2011 at Addis Ababa, is a good read on what the African Union and the Government of India think of as important going forward. For me, nothing will make me happier than to see the third world unite in this utopian picture I have that will make them independent - independent in their economies, and independent in their thought.