China’s Africa Engagement Runs Through Grids, Mines and Delivery Gaps
The most concrete piece of China-Africa cooperation on the table this week is not a communiqué but a power line. A new policy brief from Cobus van Staden, published by the South African Institute of International Affairs, examines how Chinese-built transmission infrastructure and generation projects fit into Africa’s ambition to knit national grids into a single integrated electricity market. The continent already operates five power pools that allow countries to trade electricity across borders, with the Southern African pool the most active. Chinese contractors have built major links, including lines moving hydropower from Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to neighbouring countries. The question the paper presses is whether that construction translates into reliable delivery. The answer depends heavily on planning that has not yet happened.
Van Staden’s recommendations are operational rather than rhetorical. He calls for industrialisation plans and electricity plans to be dovetailed, ideally by bundling both into special economic zones that can attract corporate clients whose offtake agreements help finance larger electrification. He urges that corporate-driven projects be extended into community electrification, warning that skipping the community side means buying protests down the road. And he argues African governments need to track cutting-edge Chinese technology, notably ultra-high voltage transmission lines, which China has deployed at a scale no other country has matched. South Africa, shopping for its own industrialisation package in China, plans 14,000 kilometres of transmission network, much of it aimed at selling power across borders through the existing Southern African pool.
Some implementers are already ahead of the curve. Morocco has located entire electricity value chains domestically rather than importing components, a commercial logic reinforced by its proximity to European and Middle Eastern markets. Egypt is doing well on the same measure, and van Staden sees potential in South Africa after years as what he calls an electricity basket case. Cross-border planning remains the weak link, with only early coordination visible between Zimbabwe and South Africa and among Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana.
Meanwhile, in West Africa, the Dorsale Nord project has standardised payments and technical specifications and plans to launch day-ahead electricity markets this year, work that van Staden says changes the game: once African governments set the regulatory regime and systems are running, adaptable Chinese companies will have to fall in line, whatever their preference for bilateral deals. The counterexample is INGA 3, the massive hydroelectric dam proposed on the Congo River that could generate more electricity than all of Southern Africa needs. Chinese involvement has fallen away amid conflict and disarray in the DRC, and Geraud Neema, CGSP’s Africa editor, argues SADC would need to present a clear, commercially viable project structure to bring Beijing back.
Minerals are the other delivery story. President Xi Jinping met Botswana’s President Duma Boko in Beijing October 12 to 17, and Togo’s President of the Council of Ministers Faure Gnassingbé, October 9 to 16, both in face-to-face meetings on October 13. With Botswana, the conversation centred on copper. China acquired the Khoemacau project in 2024, and of the $1.1 billion China imported from Botswana in the most recent figures, $1.09 billion was copper concentrates. Xi laid out four principles: African resources belong to Africa; cooperation should rest on friendship and mutual benefit; development should be high quality, with value addition happening on the ground; and environmental cooperation should be open.
By contrast with the hardware story, the ownership question matters less than the contract structure. Neema and van Staden both caution that ownership is the wrong test. Botswana’s own history with De Beers shows what matters is contract structure and what governments do with mining revenue, not whose flag flies over the mine. Neema argues African states have largely failed to convert mining revenue into economic diversification, infrastructure or jobs, and that value addition framed only as a fiscal win simply means more money for elites.
Diplomatically, the visits signal sustained delivery of attention itself. China-Africa trade is just 5.48% of China’s global trade in 2025, yet Beijing granted Togo a Community with a Shared Future partnership and Botswana a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and both leaders got an hour with Xi. More visits are expected ahead of next year’s FOCAC meeting, where energy is likely to feature prominently. On debt, the roundtable pushed back on the debt trap narrative, noting Chinese lending peaked at roughly $29 billion in 2016, that African defaults in Zambia and Ghana stemmed from Eurobonds, and that confidentiality clauses in Chinese contracts explicitly permit disclosure where domestic law requires it. The bottleneck, the hosts argued, is often African governments’ own refusal to publish. Whether those governments will open the books, and whether INGA 3 can be restructured into a bankable project, may decide how much of this week’s attention converts into megawatts.