What about China?

In 2006, 9 percent of Africa’s oil exports went to China (with 60% of Sudan’s oil export China-bound). The U.S. received 33 percent. Already, China has sped past Britain and France to become Africa’s second-highest trading partner behind the United States.

Though Angola, the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, supplies the U.S. with approximately twice as much oil as it does China, China has outpaced the United States in partnering Angola’s rapid development with its multi-billion dollar investment support in the country’s infrastructure. For example, in 2006, Sinopec, China’s state-owned energy company, bid $2.2 billion for two deep-water blocks off the Angolan coast. Two years earlier, Beijing softened the ground with a $2 billion package of loans and aid to Angola, which has Chinese companies building telecommunications infrastructure, roads, railways, bridges, buildings, schools and hospitals.

However, in 2007, Erica Strecker Downs of the Brookings Institute think tank made some headway in calming American anxiety over China and African oil. She wrote that contrary to public opinion, China's NOCs are not "locking up" the lion's share of African oil as part of a centralised quest for energy. But while China, with a mere 3% of its FDI in Africa and controlling under 2% of oil reserves on the continent, may not be winning the race for oil exploration and production in Africa, there is no question that China is winning more and more of the oil supply produced in Africa.

If the U.S. wants to out-muscle China in the 21st century scramble for Africa, then it will have to show more aggression in investing in the development of infrastructure on the continent, as China is doing. Even if American money comes with job for American companies, Africans are not likely to complain so long as it ends in the brick and mortar of the continent’s infrastructural development. Africans believe they are increasingly feeling more and more the positive might of Beijing in their quest for advancement. Chinese investment deserves a big part of the credit for Africa’s highest ever economic growth rate, 5.8 percent in 2007. Furthermore, China has cancelled $10 billion in bilateral debt owed to it by African countries.

Outside of Ghana’s oil exploration and production zone, the U.S. and China’s involvement in Ghana’s development has been most obvious in two major infrastructural projects in the energy sector. The first, the West African Gas Pipeline (WAGP), is 59% owned by Chevron, the U.S.-based oil multinational company and Royal Dutch Shell. This $700 million onshore-offshore pipeline will run 681km from the Western Niger Delta of Nigeria via Benin and Togo to Ghana, and was cooperatively underwritten by the World Bank in 2004. The Bank, however, refused to underwrite the Bui Dam project designed to generate 400MW of electricity for Ghanaians. It took a 2006 visit to President Hu Jintao of China by President J A Kufuor to secure Chinese support for the Dam’s construction (by Sino-Hydro) and funding (Exim Bank) at an estimated cost of $600 million.

These two projects highlight the masterful diplomacy that the Mills’ administration will need to deploy in the coming years in order to secure optimal benefit for Ghana from its new oil-rich status.