Actually, Germany wanted to support South Africa in the energy transition. Beijing is now advancing and scenting access to new raw materials.
Courted guest: South Africa’s President with Chinese President Xi at BRICS meeting Photo: Alet Pretorius/reuter
CAPE TOWN taz | South Africa’s rather colorless Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa surprised many when he appeared before the press with eight representatives of Chinese energy companies on the second day of the BRICS summit and unveiled a cooperation agreement between South Africa and China, which was signed with great pomp and in the presence of heads of state Cyril Ramaphosa and Xi Jinping .
What exactly is it about? On the one hand, it’s about technology transfer to radically reduce emissions from South Africa’s power plants, which are still 80 percent coal-fired and in many places outdated. On the other hand, the co-financing of the long-promised construction of renewable energy centers.
Allegedly, these “partnership” considerations have existed since the minister informed himself during a visit to China in June. They are now to apply for an initial period of three years, with an option to extend them by a further two years. This is accompanied by a one-time, non-repayable financial grant of 167 million Rand (a good 8 million euros) and an interest-free loan of 500 million.
Ramokgopa went on to say that the “Chinese support” was unconditional – and he believed South Africa could expect an end to the daily power outages “in the foreseeable future”. In any case, he left no doubt about the “temporal urgency” and has already developed plans for how those facilities that have suffered most from last year’s escalated power outages should benefit first: hospitals, food processing plants and police stations.
Notoriety
Nevertheless, the chairman of the China Africa Development Fund, Song Lei, also a signatory to the contract, added that it was now up to South Africa to implement the options offered without bureaucratic hurdles. He was polite enough not to mention the word corruption, for which South Africa’s state-owned energy company Eskom has become notorious.
The fact that China’s help is by no means selfless must also be seen in the light of the fact that all offers from the USA and the EU, here in particular from France and Germany, to South Africa in the implementation of its ambitious “Investment Plan for a Just Energy Transition” (Just Energy Transition Investment Plan to support JET-IP) lose importance.
This, especially since the USA, which was hardly hidden in the end, signaled that in return they would expect South Africa to distance themselves more clearly from Putin’s war in Ukraine, which many in South Africa perceived as colonial paternalism.
That said, climate activists are not blind to China’s own reputation for human rights violations and lack of global climate accountability. Speaking at the alternative BRICS from below meeting held at the University of Johannesburg, environmental activist Zaki Mamdoo explained that “despite China’s declarations of friendship with Africa, we know how much China, as a world power on our continent, is interested in commodities first. What presents itself as unconditional is de facto and too often still a sell-out of one’s own fossil energy technologies.”
2023-08-24 16:29:05
#BRICS #summit #Johannesburg #China #South #Africa #green
