The newly enlarged BRICS, which could become a commodities powerhouse, is not the only arena in which the People’s Republic of China is shaking up the global order and expanding its influence.

A joint investigation between Axios and the Danish newspaper Politiken this week revealed how the Chinese Communist Party is teaching young African leaders from the SADC region to embrace its authoritarian alternative to democracy.

The Axios and Politiken researchers were the first Western journalists to go inside the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School outside Dar Es Salaam, which they say is the first overseas training establishment of its kind.

Both publications are well respected and not given to yellow-peril fear-mongering, The story they tell is disturbing.

Writing in Axios, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian described it as the strongest evidence yet that Beijing is exporting its model of governing in its “push to challenge the Western-led world order” — effectively by creating an authoritarian friendly political bloc in Africa:

“At the school, the CCP teaches how to fuse the ruling political party and the state, marking a clear departure from Beijing’s previous, more subtle attempts to peddle influence on the international stage.”

The school has been presented by Chinese and African government officials and state media as a way to “promote economic and social development and alleviate poverty” by training better leaders.

“But behind the school’s closed doors, economics takes a back seat to political training. Chinese teachers sent from Beijing train African leaders that the ruling party should sit above the government and the courts and that fierce discipline within the party can ensure adherence to party ideology,” the publications found.

Richard McGregor, a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Australia, told Axios that the most important part of the model was “imbuing revolutionary parties with the idea that they are the permanent ruling party and educating them on how to achieve that aim”.

Elite invitations

The school is open to rising young members of the ruling parties — but not to opposition politicians.

Ruling parties from the SADC member states of Tanzania, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, South Africa and Zimbabwe have been invited and included.

It was a shrewd move to select these countries because many of them need little encouragement and the party and the state, including the security agencies, are already closely intertwined.

Between them (MPLA, Swapo, Zanu-PF, CCM, Frelimo and the ANC) the ruling parties have had 261 years without a single change of government. They are authoritarian to varying degrees within multiparty democracies.

Except for Tanzania, these were all countries that were ruled 50 years ago by white colonial, settler or apartheid regimes. White supremacy proved harder to dislodge than colonial rule in earlier waves of African independence because of the resistance of large white populations.

Once in power the new governments in turn proved harder to dislodge. Like them, the Chinese Communist Party fought a long war and has dominated China since the revolution 74 years ago, a point of identification for the former liberation movements.

It is no surprise that some cadres were impressed by the lectures. Collin Ngujapeua, a Swapo official, who attended training in June, described the lessons taught by an instructor from the CCP’s Central Party School as “wonderful”. He especially liked the idea of fusing party and government.

So, we need to be clear. Undermining democracy is dangerous and unconstitutional.

Parties in southern Africa that rule for too long lose their vision and run out of new people and new ideas. They morph into patronage machines for the benefit of a few well-connected individuals. Younger generations have no opportunity to rise. The country gets run down and stagnates.

Democracy is not just a luxury. The prospect that one can get beaten in an election or exposed by the media or face an independent judiciary is what restrains ruling parties.

Lessons from China on corruption

South Africa for one is much too diverse and much too unruly to live under the dead hand of one ruling party forever. Even the most authoritarian of the SADC states, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, have been unable to put their opposition away as they battle it out from one chaotic election to the next,

Some lessons could have been quite useful. President Xi Jinping has been in the forefront of the fight against corruption, labelling the looters “tigers and flies”. Under his regime, over 2.3 million government officials have been prosecuted since 2013 — that should be a tremendous lesson for some of the local rent seekers.

China’s extraordinary achievement in lifting 800 million people out of poverty in just 40 years has long been the major selling point of its development model. However, its economy has stumbled recently, and Western analysts put part of the blame on Xi Jinping’s autocratic and erratic behaviour.

The Economist was almost exultant this week with its front-page headline: “Xi’s failing model: Why he won’t fix China’s economy.”

Meanwhile, further north, African leaders are looking elsewhere in Asia for development models. South Korea and Indonesia are the favourites.

Both president William Ruto of Kenya and president Bola Tinubu of Nigeria would like their countries to emulate South Korea, a country that grew based on state support for industrialisation, cheap exports, and free trade.

South Korea was dirt poor in the 1950s, but is today the 13th largest economy in the world. During a visit to Seoul last year, Ruto claimed that 30 years ago Kenya had lent money to South Korea “but today it is one of the world’s largest economies”.

Tinubu, the new president of Nigeria, is an admirer of Park Chung-hee, the architect of modern South Korea, who reshaped and modernised the country through economic growth and social order.

It was under Park that Korean multinational companies moved into the big league. Park’s legacy was to move Korea from being a small, underdeveloped nation to among the best in the world.

Today South Korea is testament to the fact that a country can be a successful economy at the same time as being a democracy. The bigger question is which African countries can take that same path.

The Economist editorial ends this week by pointing out that liberals’ predictions about China have often betrayed wishful thinking.

“In the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth would boost democracy and individual liberty. But China is now testing the reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence is mounting that it does — and that after four decades of fast growth China is entering a period of disappointment.”

The Economist has often called it wrong. Still, Africans should watch closely how it turns out. There is skin in the game. DM

Phillip van Niekerk is the editor of Africa Unscrambled, a newsletter covering the continent in a way you won’t read anywhere else. Get unscrambled by signing up here. He is also the editorial director of Scrolla.Africa.