Africa Insight: Minerals in focus as China taps debt diplomacy

Bloomberg Economics

This article was written by Yvonne Mhango, Economist at Bloomberg. 

China will be able to set the agenda at a summit with Africa this week, and not just because Beijing is hosting. African countries owe China lots of money, and they want more loans. The African countries that are likeliest to get loans are those with more to offer, most notably critical minerals.

• At the top of the agenda at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation will probably be critical minerals — for which China is competing with the US — and infrastructure loans.
• China will sign a billion-dollar deal to refurbish a key railway connecting Zambia’s copperbelt heartland with the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam – a counterweight to the US-funded Lobito Atlantic Railway, which runs from the same copper-producing area to the Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito.
• Africa’s funding squeeze — at a time when debt-servicing payments to China are surging — places the Asian country in an ideal position to leverage debt diplomacy.

China has the upper hand in the refinancing game

Africa’s annual debt repayments to China have increased fivefold over the past 10 years and are set to peak this year. A post-pandemic funding squeeze is making it difficult to refinance this debt in the market. The reasons range from high funding costs to constrained government revenue.

• China is Africa’s biggest bilateral lender – that debt was almost $90 billion as of 2022. Angola ($21 billion), Ethiopia ($6.8 billion), Kenya ($6.7 billion) and Zambia ($6.1 billion) are the biggest holders of this debt.
• The bulk of these loans were granted between 2010 and 2016; loans from China have slowed in recent years, along with the fading financing from capital markets.

• Now that these loans are maturing, African governments find themselves with a financing need three times as large as that in the previous decade, and limited access to market-based external financing and little room to raise their revenues to meet these obligations.
• This could potentially lower African countries’ resistance to giving privileged access to their critical minerals in exchange for a smooth refinancing of debt to China – especially the countries that are struggling the most.

Who is the most vulnerable to these pressures?

Overall debt payments — not only to China — are weighing heavily on African budgets. The share of government revenue that goes toward interest payments has more than doubled over the past 10 years, and is expected to stabilize around 18% over the coming years. That raises the risk of debt repudiation: the debt burden becomes too heavy that a default becomes a material possibility.

• Indeed, Ghana (33.1%) and Zambia (32.9%) — among the countries with the highest share of revenue consumed by interest payments — have defaulted on their external debt since the pandemic. They will likely spend one-third of government revenue on interest payments this year, crowding out expenditure on health care and education.
• The experience of countries that have attempted to raise revenues to fund spending and relieve that burden is discouraging. Tax payers struggling with a cost-of-living crisis are resisting efforts to raise tax revenue.
• Protests in Kenya — where more than one-quarter of revenue will be spent on interest payments this year — forced the government to withdraw a bill that proposed tax increases. That undermined measures to raise resources to fund budgets. In Nigeria, there are calls for protests against high costs of food and fuel, including a demand for reinstatement of the fuel subsidy that was removed a year ago to release revenue for other expenses.
• Tapping markets to pay down debt owed to China doesn’t sound appealing either. A two-year eurobond hiatus ended earlier this year, when a handful of African countries — mainly those seeking refinancing — issued dollar debt. The new bonds have significantly higher interest rates of 8.6% on average, compared to 2%-4% on China loans.

Chinese appetite for lending to Africa has faded in recent years, so borrowing nations cannot take the refinancing of maturing debt for granted. That further raises the stakes at the forthcoming summit.

Chinese goodwill may not be evenly distributed across African nations: those most indebted and with less to offer in terms of natural resources may find it harder to negotiate. For the lucky ones, key reserves of critical minerals might be their ticket to securing Chinese financing – be it through rights to exploration or by using the mines as collateral.