China's £4bn drive to buy Africa's mineral wealth
China's modern-day "Scramble for Africa" to buy up the continent's mineral wealth enters a new phase this week.
By Mike Pflanz in Lubumbashi
Full scale work by the Chinese begins to rebuild 2,050 miles of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo, left to rot in the rainforest after the Belgian colonialists pulled out 48 years ago and further shattered by seven years of war.
The vast project, which will triple Congo's current paved road network, is part of China's largest investment in Africa, a £4.5 billion infrastructure-for-minerals deal signed in January.
As well as the roads, Beijing has promised to repair 2,000 miles of largely defunct railways, build 32 hospitals and 145 health centres, install two electricity distribution networks, construct two hydropower dams and two new airports.
In return, China has won the rights to five copper and cobalt mines in Congo's southern minerals belt which boasts some of the world's richest ore deposits.
The deal has confirmed Beijing as Congo's largest foreign investor and extended its dominance over swathes of Africa previously allied to the West.
Britain has increased its aid to Congo sixfold since 2002, and is now one of the country's leading bilateral donors, but analysts in the capital Kinshasa said that "the Europeans are now largely playing catch up to the Chinese, and they are unlikely ever to succeed".
"Really to engage with the Chinese you have to move pretty quickly," a senior European diplomat in Kinshasa told The Daily Telegraph.
"They are setting themselves up as being unlike other donors who are seen as too slow and always telling governments what to do, and there is a sense that the Europeans have been caught a little on the hop."
Victor Kasongo, Congo's deputy minister of mines, said: "To be honest, China was Plan B.
"We first approached the Europeans but they said they did not have the muscle to do what we needed.
"China has stepped into that opening, very quickly."
More than 1,200 miles to the south, beside a corrugated earth road snaking through dense bush, Mambwe Katenta, 45, watched a mechanic trying to fix his battered Toyota pick-up, broken once again by Congo's atrocious roads.
"It is only 30 miles to the city, but we cannot reach there with the things we have to sell: tomatoes, cassava, charcoal," he told The Daily Telegraph.
"The road is too bad, the trucks are too expensive, and we are facing too many difficulties. It has always been this way, but now we hear that the Chinese will come and fix this."
Mr Katenta will not have long to wait. South of his village, on the other side of Congo's mining capital Lubumbashi, the Chinese are on their way.
At the unheard-of speed of half-a-mile a day, crews from the Chinese Railway Engineering Company are rebuilding the key road linking Congo's south to Zambia, the first 60 miles of what will eventually become a 1,000 mile highway to Kisangani, the rainforest capital far to the north on the Congo River. Already, stretches of pristine asphalt have been laid.
"Our former rulers made so many contracts but we never saw the colour of that money, we saw nothing being built," said Moise Kitumba, the newly-elected governor of the Katanga, Congo's richest province.
"The Chinese contract is much better because people will see the roads, the railways, the hospitals."
Not everyone agrees. Congolese opposition leader Jean-Lucien Mbusa said the agreement is, "incoherent, unbalanced ... and forces us to sell off our heritage to the detriment of several generations".
Patricia Feeney, director of the British organisation Rights and Accountability in Development, said: "If you start to unpick the deal, you find the Chinese are setting conditions which are much stricter and which are going to be more difficult to meet."
Congo's government has been forced to include loan guarantees in the deal. If the mineral deposits are lower than estimated or more difficult to extract, it will need to borrow more to keep up its repayments.
This threatens International Monetary Fund programmes to scrap Congo's outstanding £4bn of debt owed to the West.
The country is also politically fragile, still stumbling after seven years of war which has killed more than 5.4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease, in the deadliest conflict since the Second World War.
President Joseph Kabila was elected in 2006 but faces an ongoing civil war in the east of the country, grumblings of discontent from old-school corrupt hardliners and the constant threat of political efforts to unseat him.
"The worst case scenario is that the Chinese pull out and leave half-built roads or half-built hospitals all over the country," said Mrs Feeney.
According to the Chinese ambassador, Wu Zexian, that will not happen.
"No-one is ever 100 percent sure of what will happen in the future, but if you wait until the point where there is no risk, the opportunity will have passed," he said.
"Congo was ready to offer cooperation with anyone who came here to invest - any others could have come but they did not ask. We just took up the offer which was there."