China Wins Africa Friends by Building Dam in Ebola Outbreak

COMMISSIONED: Dam built during the world's worst Ebola outbreak shows positive role of China in Africa

As workers at Western companies fled West Africa during the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, a state-owned Chinese company carried on. China International Water & Electric Corp. completed the Kaleta dam on budget and a year ahead of schedule in July, ending chronic power shortages in the capital, Conakry. Construction continued even as companies including London-based Rio Tinto Plc and Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal SA paused projects in the region.

“The Chinese saved us,” Lansana Fofana, 63, said, as he stood on the US$526 million hydroelectric dam that China financed and he oversees.

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For Fofana, the 1,545-meter (5,069-feet) wall is a monument to the positive role China can play in Africa. In other parts of the continent, Chinese companies have been accused of treating workers poorly, building substandard infrastructure and damaging the environment.

"With Western companies, costs would have gone up and they would have walked out as soon as the first case of Ebola hit," Fofana said as he walked beneath a buzzing pylon toward the barrier’s roaring overflow. "This gives us a real basis for our economy. Without power there is no development."

Lansana Fofana: “The Chinese saved us.” (Photo: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg)

China’s experience in other African countries, including Zambia where resentment against Chinese employers erupted into deadly protests, has prompted the government in Beijing to make a concerted effort to reach out to local communities, according to Yejoo Kim, a researcher at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Chinese Studies in South Africa’s Western Cape province.

"They know about the outcry on the ground level and they are trying to rectify that," she said in an interview. "The perception is slowly changing. It’s not going to happen overnight."

Successful projects also help Africa’s leaders. The completion of Kaleta tripled Guinea’s electricity generation and gave many residents of the capital stable power for the first time in their lives, a dividend for President Alpha Condé, who faces re-election next month. Condé is so proud of the dam that he built a private residence next to it and promoted Fofana’s predecessor to energy minister.

At Kaleta’s official inauguration on Monday, Condé said in a speech to other heads of state that work on another bigger dam just upstream will begin within a few months. Thirty percent of Kaleta’s output will go to neighboring Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, Fofana said at the event.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s trip to Africa last month included visits to the three countries hardest hit by Ebola: Guinea and its two neighbors, Sierra Leone and Liberia, which together lost 11,310 people.

MAP: Chinese Investments in Guinea

In Guinea, Wang visited Shanghai Construction Group’s Hotel Kaloum, an 18-storey tower looming over Conakry’s eponymous business district, by far the tallest building on the mangrove-engulfed peninsula.

"Before, we weren’t so understood," the deputy construction manager of the project, Allain Long, said as he pointed to other Chinese buildings rising above crumbling low-rises.

Long is one of a growing number of Chinese who speak French, the official language in Guinea and much of the region. "Now communication is much better,” Long said. “More and more Africans appreciate us. They can see that our work is helping them."

Like the workers at Kaleta, Long stayed throughout the 20-month Ebola outbreak. Workers on projects owned by Rio and ArcelorMittal in Guinea and Liberia left.

In the north of the country, on a muddy river bank near Boke, a bare-chested Chinese worker operates a giant claw hurling mounds of bauxite, an ore that is refined into alumina and then smelted into aluminum, onto a barge. Another man heaves rocks into a metal frame to weigh down a foundation for a new jetty. Building the port only took about eight months and allowed China Hongqiao Group Ltd.’s project to start shipping in July.

Huddled under a makeshift shelter at the site’s entrance, a dozen Guinean men looking for jobs watch enviously as Chinese workers drive trucks and work on the road.

"It’s a bit of a shame,” said Suleiman Kande, 24. “We’re from here and don’t have jobs. The government should be controlling this."

Still, the men said they have friends employed at the new port who are treated and paid well.

Back at Kaleta, Jiahua Liu, the top Chinese manager at the dam, offered a word of advice: build a relationship with the local community at the beginning of any project.

"We built a mosque and a soccer field first," Liu said from under a white hard hat. "We can see our efforts are appreciated here."

When Ebola struck, Liu said he and his men stayed behind and helped deliver medical supplies and rice to local inhabitants.

"We were scared, but we stayed," Liu said with a nervous laugh. "We had to do our jobs.”