When Liam Casey, the swashbuckling Irish businessman who built PCH International into the Western world’s foremost holder of data on China, with an unrivalled knowledge of the Chinese business world, walked into his office in the morning of the 6th of March 2010, little did he know that his fortunes were about to change dramatically.
When he sat down to read his emails that morning, there was one from an unfamiliar name, Shegelegebangoshe, who it turned out was an African internet-blogger and journalist. It made the point that in spite of the global economic recession most educated Africans still yearned for an African Renaissance.
This yearning presented PCH International with an opportunity to extend its corporate footprint across Africa – where opportunities for it to expand abounded. According to Shegelegebangoshe, the opportunity for PCH International arose from the African continent’s desperate need to add value to its raw materials. It also needed to improve its infrastructure by bringing them up to world-class standards. An example, he pointed out, was its power-generating capacity.
Shegelegebangoshe also pointed out that in view of its unfortunate and painful past experience of European colonial domination and exploitation, coupled with the fact that most Western nations still unconsciously had the colonialist-mindset in their dealings with the continent, the perfect way to actualize Africa’s economic regeneration was for nations in the continent to partner the best-resourced Chinese companies to help their modernization drive. PCH International could be the perfect facilitator for such partnerships across the continent.
In his email, Shegelegebangoshe stressed the fact that because of its unrivalled knowledge of the Chinese business world, PCH International had the perfect business model to facilitate joint-ventures in which African governments would partner world-class Chinese companies in projects designed to upgrade the continent’s infrastructure and add value to Africa’s abundant natural resources.
That way, its huge deposits of valuable minerals such as gold, bauxite, manganese, and iron ore, could all be processed locally, in order to create jobs and generate wealth for the nations and peoples of Africa. Liam Casey felt intrigued by the vision outlined in the email. He had never really thought about Africa as a place of opportunity before.
In his mind’s eye it had always been a continent of famine and wars that went back as far back as he could remember. However, there was no denying the fact that facilitating projects that entailed partnerships between reformist-minded and democratically-elected regimes in the continent and leading Chinese companies, both state-owned and private-sector ones, would fit into PCH International’s business model perfectly.
He immediately thought he had to find suitable Africans whom he could work with. Shegelegebangoshe had mentioned Mr. Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General and Mrs. Gracia Mandela, former South African President Nelson Mandela’s wife, as key figures that could help him get PCH International into Africa in a "turbulence-free" manner. The more he thought about it the more exciting he found the prospect of PCH International venturing into Africa.
Here was a unique opportunity for an Irishman to make a buck whiles providing the means for Africa to escape from the clutches of imperialism and neocolonialism. The idea of making that happen appealed to him enormously. In its own turbulent past history had his native Ireland not also suffered as a victim of British colonialism and imperialism too?
He had to start boning-up on the continent’s economic outlook and find out as much as he could about the key nations on the continent. He definitely had to make a start by contacting the ambassadors of those key nations in Africa. Shegelegebangoshe had mentioned Ghana as the perfect place to begin his African odyssey from.
It was politically stable, had a government run by a former university professor, President John Evans Atta Mills, whom everyone agreed was an honest man. “That definitely must be a breed of homo sapiens rare in African politics,” he chuckled to himself. Ghana needed power plants that it could use its huge deposits of natural gas to run. It could generate considerable foreign exchange exporting power to its neighbours.
In addition to building state-of-the-art oil refineries to process its oil deposits into petroleum products to export to its neighbours, it could also build natural gas liquefaction plants. That could enable it to freeze its natural gas, stick that unto ships, and export it to an energy-hungry Europe, desperate to find alternative sources of energy, to enable it lessen its dependence on the unreliable Russian bear.
Yet another idea that Shegelegebangoshe had brought to his attention was an interesting invention by a Colonel Kofi Abaka Jackson, said to be a retired Ghanaian air force officer and former member of one of Ghana’s past military regimes.
Colonel Jackson’s genius was to invent a system to harness the flow of rivers to produce hydro-power without the need to build expensive hydro-power dams. Such a power-generating plant could definitely enable a nation like the D.R. Congo to harness the flow of the giant Congo River to produce power for a large swathe of the continent. His own native Ghana itself could harness its many rivers using his power-generating invention to produce power too.
Then there was the country’s good quality cocoa beans. They were famous the world over amongst major chocolate producers. If it could process all of its cocoa production, Ghana could generate tens of thousands of jobs, in cocoa processing plants, spread across the country’s cocoa-growing regions.
It could do same with its Shea-nut crop. That could also be processed locally into various products for export. It also had suitable land too for Ghana-Chinese joint-ventures to grow and process rice both for local consumption and to export to the nations in the West African sub-region.
To finance such deals Liam Casey thought that the suggestion by Shegelegebangoshe that creatively utilizing Ghana’s sovereign bonds could be a useful way to fund Ghana-Chinese joint-venture projects. It was an idea that the Chinese government would probably accept in principle. The Chinese government would give bank guarantees for such projects with the sovereign bonds of reformist-minded and politically stable regimes in Africa as insurance.
It was an idea that needed fine-tuning; but it certainly made a great deal of sense to him. Ghana had oil and natural gas in abundance. If it issued US$20 billions worth of sovereign bonds to China, that sum could easily fund its development plan and turn it into a developed nation within a maximum seven-year period – the global recession notwithstanding.
Liam Casey rose from his desk and stretched out his hands. He had to think carefully about this intriguing idea. He was an adventurer: and this was some adventure indeed. It could benefit all concerned. If he could help Africa to break free from its dependence on the charity of other nations by becoming prosperous economically, as well as help his beloved China to profit from such joint-ventures, whiles PCH International itself grew and made vast profits too in the process, why not, he smiled to himself?
Coincidentally, he noted, Ghana’s independence anniversary was today, 6th March, 2010. He thought that that had to be a good omen. Apparently, under the regime of Ghana’s founding father, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the country had also been a special friend of China’s in Africa. He would make sure the goodwill that existed between the two nations from that era was revived again to benefit both nations. He had to get cracking. He had to buy himself a very light jet (VLJ) pronto. He could imagine the newspaper headlines: “Mr. China ventures into Africa!”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment