Is A China That Refuses To Cancel All Africa's Debt To It A True Good-Faith Friend?

If China refuses to convert debt owed it, by African nations, into grants, it would amount to a strategic-error-of-judgement, of mammoth proportions - for it will lose its goodwill across Africa: goodwill that would have been assured, for it, had it proved to be a genuine African friend, in the continent's hour of need.

In such a situation, Africa should rather look instead to Japan, as a good-faith long-term-strategic-partner, to replace China, in the drive to create a prosperous free trade area, for the benefit of all demographics, across the continent.

When it mattered most, even the exploitative West, understood clearly that it was in its own long-term self-interest, to help the continent's highly indebted nations, to enable them return to a path-of-growth, economically, to boost their GDPs, and thereby increase the living standards of ordinary people, right across the continent. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), in 2018, by the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, was the result.

If China wants to be remembered by posterity, as a ham-fisted shylock-lender, forever insisting on its pound-of-flesh, which neither cared about ruinous high-level corruption nor ever condemned egregious human rights abuses, by callous self-seeking African leaders, that is its own affair. However, such a ruthless nation, cannot ever be a genuine good-faith friend of ordinary Africans. Never. Period.