Beijing
 After offering loans to countries in Africa, China is now leveraging the “debt trap” to strategically penetrate the continent’s political landscape.
Chinese financiers have so far committed more than USD 153 billion to African public sector borrowers between 2000 and 2019 which is pushing the continent into debt, according to researchers.
China has recently emerged as a major lender in more than 32 African countries including Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Zambia reaching USD 11.2 billion in 2019.
Notwithstanding, the debt Africa owes to China is persistently on the rise.
Research historically has shown that soaring debt has the ability to compromise the sovereignty of African states, owing to the complexity of corruption and frequent political instability in the continent.
An article by an online International Journal, IJSER, seeks to interrogate the impact of Chinese loans to Africa through a review of secondary data. The article provides a different lens of Chinese loans in Africa in the 21st century.
During the wave of African independence post-the second world war, African economies incurred substantial debts from to the dictates of Britton wood institutions (International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) which they could not repay.
The debt kept African countries at a vulnerable position. Hence, by mid-1990s, Africa was booted out of the global financial system due to unpaid loans.
There were various attempts to address the debt. Africa again, is presently confronted with another side of the same coin- “debt-trap”. This time from China. The peril of Chinese debt in Africa is evident.
