Without More Transparency, FOCAC Could Become Irrelevant

The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit gets underway in Beijing soon, but you'd hardly know that this was once a really big deal. The vibe this year is noticeably different than in the run-up to past FOCACs when African think tanks released working papers, scholars in the U.S. and Europe were booked solid for seminars, and there was constant news coverage. So far, very little of that is happening.

In Africa, there seems to be a malaise about the whole thing. Other than a flood of fawning Chinese-sponsored media extolling FOCAC, major news outlets in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria that largely drive the African news cycle are all preoccupied with other stories — mostly their own domestic politics.

It's the same on social media, where the feeds are also dominated by government narratives with very little engagement by individuals and civil society.

FOCAC used to be the premier summit for African leaders. But this year, at least so far, it all feels a bit, well, "meh." The excitement of the past is missing.

All month, I've been surveying the China-Africa scholarly community and other experts to get their take on what's going on. Everyone, without exception, agrees that the buzz of past FOCACs is not evident this year, but no one is really sure why.

The first thing that most experts pointed to is that FOCAC isn't new anymore. For a lot of people, it's just another one of these "Africa Plus One" gatherings where fancy people go to hobnob but don't bring home tangible benefits for their constituents.

The people who once used to get excited about FOCAC are now a lot more jaded after their leaders take expensive trips to participate in summits in the U.S., Russia, Turkey, South Korea, India, and Indonesia, among other places. Other than a photo op, what do they have to show for the enormous cost of ferrying their large entourages to these events?

The other problem that the experts I surveyed mentioned is the lack of any reporting mechanism to verify that Chinese and African leaders actually fulfilled the promises laid out in the FOCAC joint declarations.

Did China re-direct the $10 billion of its IMF Special Drawing Rights to African countries, as it promised at the last FOCAC in Dakar? We don't know. Did the Chinese fulfill their pledge to provide a billion doses of vaccines? We don't know.

The fact is, we know very little about how many of the FOCAC promises made over the past 24 years were ever kept. Until there's a formal tracking system that provides both African and Chinese constituencies with some kind of transparency and accountability, it's likely that more and more people will just get bored with this whole process.

What's puzzling here is that, for the most part, the Chinese have a pretty good story to tell when it comes to FOCAC. But unless they ease up on the secrecy, this once-dynamic gathering is going to become increasingly irrelevant.