Specialists from China are erecting massive buildings across Africa, including Ethiopia’s new national soccer stadium. The workers must leave behind their families and move to faraway countries. But the money is hard to beat.
Xu Dingqiang, the head of electrical and sanitation installations at the future Addis Ababa National Stadium.
Xu Dingqiang’s position at the top of the construction site hierarchy is apparent in the way he dresses. Work pants, steel-toed boots, hard hat, reflective vest. Not all the workers here have access to such equipment. But the 47-year-old has an important task.
Xu is in charge of installing electrical and sanitary equipment in the future stadium of Ethiopia’s national soccer team. The building stands out from the maze of streets that surround it in Addis Ababa, as if a spaceship had landed in the center of the Ethopian capital.
Xu hurries up through the stands where up to 60,000 spectators will soon sit and cheer. At the uppermost level, he enters a dimly lit restroom where 10 of the stadium’s 1,000 toilets have been installed. The lights don’t yet work and the floor tiles are covered by a layer of construction dust. A colleague speaks to him in their native dialect from Jiangsu province in eastern China. Xu stands with his legs apart and his arms crossed in front of his chest.
Xu Dingqiang talks to a colleague about ongoing work at the construction site.
The two specialists work for the China State Construction Engineering Company, or CSCEC, one of the largest construction companies in the world. The Adey Abeba Stadium, the roof of which will ultimately look like the shell of some primeval lizard, is one of the Chinese state-owned company’s showcase projects. It is also busy erecting glamorous new headquarters for the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and Africa’s tallest skyscraper in Egypt.
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CSCEC is just one of many Chinese companies, whether state-owned or private, that have been feverishly building new skyscrapers, roads, railways, stadiums and dams in Africa. The China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. estimates that African countries borrowed in the neighborhood of $143 billion (130 billion euros) from China’s government, banks and entrepreneurs between 2000 and 2017.
Source: Unleash Africa
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