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EXCLUSIVE: African WH correspondent warns against China, details real reasons behind VP Harris’ visit: ‘Anything else is a lie’

March 30, 2023 | | Print Article

Vice President Kamala Harris is in Africa this week, and according to Today News Africa journalist Simon Ateba, she isn’t there to talk about “democracy.”

“Listen, she’s not going to Africa to talk about democracy,” Ateba told BizPac Review in a Tuesday morning telephone interview. “She’s not going there to talk about human rights, even though that’s what she says. It’s about influence, power, and money.”

As BPR reported, Harris arrived in Ghana on Sunday, the start of a weeklong, three-nation tour of Africa that will also take her to Tanzania and Zambia.

While in Ghana, “The Vice President applauded President Akufo-Addo for his steadfast leadership to defend and advance democracy in West Africa and to hold anti-democratic governments accountable,” the White House stated.  “She reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to support human rights and women’s empowerment.”

On Monday, Fox News’s Jesse Watters had a different take, blasting Harris’s trip and accusing her of turning up with a $100 million “bribe” intended to strip Africa of its “lithium and cobalt,” mined by “children as young as four.”

“Is Kamala the black face of American colonialism?” Watters asked his viewers.

Ateba did not catch Watters’ monologue, but the notion made him chuckle.

“All I can say is, if she is the ‘black face of American colonialism,’ I would say that she’s not doing a great job because right now, the U.S. is playing catch-up,” he said. “China is everywhere.”

The Cameroon native pointed to recent testimony from the Commander of U.S. Africa Command, General Michael Langley, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he stated that, in Africa, China is America’s greatest threat.

“One of the reasons was the mineral resources,” Ateba explained. “Forty percent of the mineral resources used by American companies are in Africa.”

The rare earth minerals are necessary to make everything run — from your smartphone to the electric cars the Biden administration wants to force you to buy.

And, Ateba warns, “Right now, China is installing military bases across Africa.”

For more than two decades, China’s Belt and Road initiative has rolled across sub-Saharan Africa, with the communist nation dropping a total of $155 billion to develop infrastructure in the region.

“As a result, Beijing has gained enormous influence and contacts with several African nations,” Nikkei Asia reported this week.

“And they are doing it in strategic locations,” Ateba said. 

“So, while we are talking about democracy and human rights and all the nice stuff, in reality, it’s about mineral resources, power, money, influence,” he stated. “Anything else is a lie.”

“So, when she’s in Africa and she’s saying, ‘You know I’m giving Ghana— I’m announcing one-hundred-million-dollar grants for this,’ all I can say is, the real challenges that the U.S. faces in Africa will have to do with investment and trying to compete with China,” he continued. “Those things, she’s not touching them. So, it’s almost like a waste of time, even though it looks great.”

“You know, she was hosted to a state dinner, she gave great speeches, but the U.S. is playing catch-up in Africa, and China is now leading, taking over… and then spreading misinformation to turn Africans against the U.S.,” he said.

Given the evidence of the Biden family’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that is coming to light thanks in large part to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, one must wonder if U.S. policies in Africa have been influenced.

 “I think that’s the fear,” Ateba said. “If the president is — I’m not saying he is — but if he’s compromised and doesn’t do his job, what ends up happening is, the CCP takes over Africa, and Biden cannot do anything, which presents a great danger. Not just to the U.S., but also to the U.S.-Africa relations. And that is what is happening now.”

“Again, I’m not saying that the president is compromised,” Ateba stressed, “but if he is… of course it will affect Africa, because China will continue to increase, and the president and the administration will not be able to stop them.”

Public-private partnerships, or PPPs, are a large part of Harris’s push in Africa, but Ateba does not have much “faith” in them.

“I don’t have a lot of faith,” he said. “Maybe that is the first thing I need to say. Because those PPPs, they always go through the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and all those international institutions. And those ones are already extremely corrupt.”

“When they do the public-private partnerships,” he explained, “they try to partner with the private sector, maybe to build roads and bridges, but what ends up happening is, they also pick the people who are— they are cronies, right?”

“So even if it looks like a PPP,” he said, “it ends up being someone who is connected to someone in government, and it ends up being just the same corruption.”

Ateba continued:

You know, every year the World Bank has been saying, “We just gave money for this road in Africa.” When you go there, you hardly see those roads. Most people don’t even know what the World Bank does. 

When you go [to Africa], if you ask people, “Where is the World Bank,” or “What does the World Bank do?” “What is the U.N.? What does the U.N. do?” “Where is the IMF? What does the IMF do?” — they don’t know.

They’ve never been impacted. They’ve never seen anything. 

All they see is their government taking loans or those people taking loans from those international institutions and then building roads, and then they end up paying until they die. They end up paying for those roads. Sometimes the interest rate is so high. The interest rate is even more than the loan they received in the first place.

 

With the CCP, Africans are rarely even able to land jobs on the projects for which they are paying so dearly.

“Most times, they bring their own people,” Ateba said. “So, they come into Africa, they give these loans and these interest rates, and then they bring their own workers. So they don’t even provide work for the local population.”

While Ateba notes that the IMF and the World Bank “are also not saints,” they do offer a measure of transparency.

“But with the CCP, you don’t know anything. They just come to Africa, they do things with the government, and they support the government to actually oppress their own people,” he said. “We’ve seen it in Gabon. We’ve seen it in Cameroon. We’ve seen it in different countries where the CCP is actually sending proxies and cronies to do a project.”

The popular journalist stressed that it is not the Chinese people he opposes.

“The Chinese people are just people, like the Africans, the Americans. People are people,” he said. “But the CCP is bad. The CCP doesn’t believe in democracy. The CCP doesn’t even pretend to believe in human rights. The CCP doesn’t even pretend to have transparency when they give those loans to Africans.”

“So, when I am saying I am against the CCP, it’s because I don’t want to be in a country like China,” he stated. “I want to be in a country like the U.S., with freedoms — if we can protect them.”

Melissa Fine
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