Africa urged to look to Beijing for inspiration

Solid ties: Visitors to Mukuni Big Five Safaris in Livingstone, Zambia, posing with lions. The country says Africa needs to look to China for advice and solutions on how to accelerate its development agenda.

LUSAKA: China’s resilience, determination and hard work in transforming itself from a poor country to the second-largest economy in the world should inspire African countries in their development aspirations, a Zambian expert said.

Sande Ngalande, Director of the Belt and Road Research Centre of the University of Zambia, said Africa needs to look to China for advice and solutions on how to accelerate its development agenda.

“China is a great country coming from a humble background.

“It offers us, especially in Africa, a great lesson about how a people united, a people focused on a common goal, a people speaking the same language, having one vision and getting together to fight anything in their way can make sure they achieve great things,” he told Xinhua.

China, he said, has shown that it was possible to achieve anything because of what the Asian nation has done in the last couple of years in ensuring that the living standards of its people are improved.

According to him, the lifting of about 800 million Chinese people out of poverty was a phenomenon that African countries need to learn from on how to tackle poverty, adding that this was made possible by the dedicated leadership.

Ngalande, who is also Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Zambia, commended China for going out of its way in helping other countries, especially in Africa, to improve not only infrastructure but human capacity and technical services.

He thanked China for its generosity in giving Zambia a railway link to the sea at the time the southern African nation had problems in exporting and importing goods, adding that this was done despite the Asian nation having problems of its own.

“By the time they were helping us with the TAZARA (Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority), China was also a poor country and nobody could think they could do such a thing,” he added.

He hoped that the friendship between China and Zambia will continue to blossom despite the Covid-19 pandemic. — Xinhua