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Rwanda’s largest bank joined China’s yuan payment system this week, the first in East Africa to do so directly. Kenyan and Tanzanian businesses already settle Chinese invoices in renminbi through Standard Bank. Somalia, whose markets are full of Chinese goods, has no bank on that system and no Chinese bank on its soil. The obvious assumption is that a country running on the dollar has little use for the yuan. The opposite is true.
By Abdullahi — The country with the deepest Chinese engagement on the continent is also the most sceptical of it. That is not a contradiction. It is the reason the engagement has worked, and it is the lesson a young partnership like Somalia’s should take from Johannesburg.
By Abdullahi — The panel on a rooftop is the visible part of a transition that runs much deeper, through batteries, grids and the economics of an entire industrial chain. What China built over the past decade is what makes it possible for a Somali city to cut its electricity price by half. What Somalia does next is its own.
By Abdullahi — The New Development Bank has approved forty-four billion dollars of projects, and for most developing countries that is the headline. For a country two years out of debt relief it is the one instrument we cannot touch. What has actually reached Somalia this year came from Beijing, cost us nothing, and appears nowhere on our balance sheet.
By Abdullahi — The Shanghai Cooperation Organization turned twenty-five this week. Somalia is not a member and was not in the room. But one line in President Xi Jinping’s speech was addressed to countries exactly like ours, and the commitments attached to it are specific enough to be worth reading closely.
By Abdullahi — A frozen bird is raised, slaughtered, packed and shipped twelve thousand kilometres, and it still undercuts anything a Somali farmer can produce. The reason is printed on my electricity bill, and it explains rather more than poultry.
By Abdullahi — The power that could halt global manufacturing within weeks has spent this year keeping it running. The power that designed the trading system is shaking it. For a country like Somalia, which produces little and imports almost everything, the difference is not an abstraction. It arrives as the price of rice.
By Abdullahi — The country with the deepest Chinese engagement on the continent is also the most sceptical of it. That is not a contradiction. It is the reason the engagement has worked, and it is the lesson a young partnership like Somalia’s should take from Johannesburg.
By Abdullahi — The panel on a rooftop is the visible part of a transition that runs much deeper, through batteries, grids and the economics of an entire industrial chain. What China built over the past decade is what makes it possible for a Somali city to cut its electricity price by half. What Somalia does next is its own.
By Abdullahi — The New Development Bank has approved forty-four billion dollars of projects, and for most developing countries that is the headline. For a country two years out of debt relief it is the one instrument we cannot touch. What has actually reached Somalia this year came from Beijing, cost us nothing, and appears nowhere on our balance sheet.
