I wasn’t surprised when I saw a plastic bag of Gari with the inscription, “Gari Made In China.” The People’s Republic of China has become one of the minor but independent players in Africa.
China was building communism, but Chairman Mao, especially after his epic spat with Nikita Khrushchev, had his vision. Beijing first supported the movement of African states for independence, and after receiving it, it began to provide all possible economic assistance to young countries.
The first major Chinese project in Africa was a railway connecting the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania with the Zambian city of Kapiri Mposhi. In just five years, from 1970 to 1975, about 50,000 Chinese engineers and civil engineers built a 1,860-kilometer-long highway that gave Zambia and its resources accessible to the sea.
It seems while China is working in Africa, the people were analyzing the market to see what Ghanaians needed most and fast enough to make money from it. They first started planting the tropical food cassava and acquired machines to process the raw material into a finished product. Today, China sells GRI.
This may sound interesting, but it’s not good for Ghana or Africa in general because China is capable of taking hold of the African international markets with its African products, which will affect the products from Africa exported to Europe or America.
Once China takes over the market, the moderate prices of their commodities kill other quality products. This is one of the reasons the US government and China are in a trade war over China’s cheap products that have taken over international markets.
How many Chinese products has Ghana been able to produce as a country? It’s the biggest embarrassment to the Ghanaian government that despite all the agricultural products, many can’t afford the prices of foods now produced by a foreign country.
Apart from being one of the most industrious countries in the world, the Chinese people are very hard-working people, able to do things that people don’t expect. Today is Gari. Let’s wait and see. Very soon China will be producing already boiled kenkey on the international market.
