Deep in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, members of the National Youth Service tirelessly swing machetes to clear dense shrubs obscuring railway tracks more than a century old. It is a distinctly low-tech phase for China’s Belt and Road drive in Africa to create the trade highways of the future.
China has lent African countries hundreds of billions of dollars as part of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) which envisaged Chinese institutions financing the bulk of the infrastructure in mainly developing nations. Yet the credit has dried up in recent years. There is not enough money left to complete the new 1,000-km super-fast rail link from the port of Mombasa to Uganda. The road end abruptly in the countryside, 468 km short of the border, and now Kenya is resorting to finish the route by revamping the 19th-century colonial British-built tracks that once passed that way.
China lists 39 African countries on the Belt and Road official website, ranging geographically from Tunisia to South Africa. Of these countries, China’s government financing is the principal creditor of only three countries: Congo-Brazzaville, Djibouti, and Zambia.
