Fresh allegation has resurfaced in Nigeria that Chinese firms operating in the West African country employ prisoners from China, but although the validity of the rumor is questionable, the presence of large numbers of Chinese workers laboring on infrastructure projects built by Chinese companies is one of the most controversial aspects of China’s economic engagement with Africa and the wider world.
The rumor that Chinese companies in Nigeria import convicts from the Asian country has been making the rounds among Nigerians, fed by a number of senior Nigerian officials. “I have on good authority that prisoners from foreign land are working in Nigeria as construction workers,” Adams Oshiomhole, chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior, said earlier in December. “I even believe and dare to say it that there are foreign prisoners who are working in Nigeria. They were shipped to our country to serve their prison terms.” Caroline Wura-Ola Adepoju, the newly inaugurated comptroller general of immigration, has recently commented on the allegations, stressing that such practice would not be tolerated, adding that “there is a new sheriff in town.”
According to an analysis by two leading scholars in the field published in The Conversation (January 2023), with the launch of Beijing’s “Go Global” policy in 2000 and Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, the number of overseas contracts signed by Chinese companies more than doubled from just under 6,000 in 2004 to almost 12,000 in 2019. Titled ‘Chinese Workers on Africa’s Infrastructure Projects: the Link with Host Political Regimes’, the analysis points to strong empirical evidence that democracies host significantly fewer Chinese workers than autocracies, all other things being equal. Chinese workers laboring on infrastructure projects across Africa have been accused of taking job opportunities from locals and undercutting labour standards.
The study has also found that democratic governments were much more prone to limiting the number of Chinese workers in the infrastructure sector in the face of potential domestic opposition to those workers. The opposite was true in more authoritarian countries. This means that the long-term economic benefits that Chinese-built infrastructure brings are likely to be limited in authoritarian countries. The comparison between Ghana, a vibrant democracy, and Algeria, a “hybrid” regime that was ruled by a single man, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, from 1999 to 2019, is striking. While in Ghana, both the country’s main political parties faced pressure to ensure Chinese-built projects delivered local jobs, in Algeria, on the other hand, domestic discontent over Chinese workers was essentially ignored and Chinese labour has been used to quickly complete projects seen as politically expedient.
