Page 3 of
3 China draws Africa into its
orbit By Bright B Simons, Evans
Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
the
country.
Indeed, it is believed that the
first satellite-relayed live telephone call was
between Nigeria's then-prime minister Taffawa
Balewa and US president John F Kennedy.
In
2003, when Nigeria commissioned its first
satellite, it was manufactured in the UK and
launched from a Russian base in
Plestek.
The shift
therefore to China, so comprehensively, is
noteworthy. The problem is that like so many of
the switches of "allegiances" in Africa, it is
predicated less on an understanding of Africa's
own structural needs and more on a sounder if
narrow-focused appreciation of external
geopolitical trends.
Nigerian strategists
were perhaps shrewd in deciding to award the $450
million contract to Great Wall just when China is
in a mood to impress developing countries. But it
is unclear whether this particular project will do
much in ensuring a sustained technology transfer
to Nigeria.
Contrast this with South
Africa's approach. When in 2003 China successfully
launched its manned space mission, Andrew Aphana,
an official at the South African Department of
Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, told Xinhua
that his country saw commercial space cooperation
with China on the horizon.
In fact
cooperation already existed. For instance, China
was maintaining a tracking ship alongside Cape
Town's Table Bay harbor, and another telemetry,
tracking and control station - one of the few
outside China - is based in neighboring Namibia.
But the broached cooperation is unlikely to follow
the same pattern as the Nigerian case.
In
February 1999, the US National Aeronautics and
Space Administration successfully launched South
Africa's satellite, SunSat. SunSat had been wholly
designed, developed and built by South Africa. A
commercial firm spun off the country's University
of Stellenbosch had been responsible for managing
the entire project. Toward the end of January this
year, South Africa successfully completed the
development of another satellite. By May, the
satellite - SumbandilaSat - will be launched from
a Russian submarine into orbit, whereupon its
remote-sensing equipment is expected to begin
delivering on the $68 million investment by
providing useful geo-imaging information for use
in agricultural, forestry and surveying research.
Thus, should South Africa begin serious
space collaboration with China, it will have the
capacity not only to insist on copious technology
transfers but, even more crucial, the capacity to
utilize these transfers toward the local
development of competencies. Its current
collaboration with Russia is based on just such a
framework. In a recent visit to South Africa,
President Vladimir Putin pledged to expand the
sphere of existing cooperation to embrace
microgravity, navigation and space medicine,
signaling that China will really have to up its
game on the technology transfer front if it is to
get in on the action.
Whereas South
Africa's government had invested much of its small
budget in bolstering the capacity of the country's
human infrastructure through public-private
partnerships with institutions such as SunSpace
and Stellenbosch, Nigeria has decided to send
missions to the moon by 2030 - this at a time when
such countries as India are pulling back to focus
on the use of satellite systems in novel, socially
transforming segments such as telemedicine.
At this juncture, some readers may wish to
question whether space research is even an
appropriate arena at all for a developing country
to be expending its resources on. Couldn't Nigeria
have used the nearly $100 million it spent on
establishing a space agency in 1998 on malaria
eradication, for instance? This is a
misconception. The same argument could have been
made with regards to India's software industry
when it started.
In fact, space technology
these days is not predominantly about space
telescopes and Mars orbiting missions. Nigeria's
satellites, for instance, when operational, will
provide Internet access to parts of the country
where telephone and fiber-optic networks are
non-existent. It will provide an observation
platform for monitoring the country's besieged
pipelines; help in disaster relief by providing
up-to-date data; and help better manage epidemics
such as Guinea-worm infestation. It will also be
crucial to geological forecasting to optimize food
security and hydrological resources.
Also,
it is entirely possible that Africa's future may
depend on how successfully it "leaps" a
developmental phase such as industrialization or a
green revolution and moves directly into
technology-driven services. Indeed, these days
only the boldest, or most reckless, economists
hold out any future for Africa in traditional
industrialization along the lines of steel mills
and aluminum foundries. Space research, provided
the priorities are respected, can be extremely
beneficial to the development of human resources,
especially as the technologies studied, developed
and deployed in its course often find useful
applications in less flamboyant-sounding areas
such as agricultural engineering and consumer
electronics.
There is therefore every
justification for developing countries, ranging
from budding superpowers such as China to
struggling states such as Nigeria, to pursue such
technologies to whatever extent their resources
permit and, while doing so, to collaborate with
one another toward mutual goals. But for these to
yield maximum returns, it is important that
partners in such prospective joint schemes are
each positioned in a manner that allows
synergistic cooperation to flourish.
At
present, countries such as Nigeria make Africa
seem like the weakest link in the chain.
Bright B Simons is an adjunct
fellow at the Center for Humane Education (Imani),
an Accra-based think-tank dedicated to researching
economic trends to glean practical public-policy
insights for the benefit of government, business
and civil society in Ghana. Evans Lartey is
director of development at Imani. Franklin
Cudjoe is the executive director of Imani.
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