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Chapter 5: Conclusion
With the process behind the textile disputes in Nigeria and South Africa addressed, this paper arrives at its conclusion. For clarity’s sake the contents of the previous chapter will be briefly recapped. In sum: African responses to China’s influence on the continent are divided and dissimilar, despite that the need for a united approach has been made known. This dividedness has been attributed to the diverging interests of African nations. Nevertheless, even when facing similar incentives, like under the textile dispute, the countries react in different ways. In order to answer this riddle, this paper looked into the factors of state and civil society applied to the cases of Nigeria and South Africa to explain these discrepancies in the context of the textile industry.
The two countries share quite some similarities regarding these topics: both Nigeria and South Africa have an extensive relation with China which yields significant benefits as well as notable competition, and in both countries the textile industry suffered badly because of this competition. In terms of civil society, the two countries share a seeming suspicion towards civil society and seek to control it, albeit South Africa appears more tolerant than Nigeria, especially towards organized labour. The labour unions in Nigeria as well as South Africa conducted extensive campaigns to influence the government. However, whereas South Africa’s organized labour was able to embed the textile dispute into the other topics of the campaigns, in Nigeria labour unions were on the defensive and left the textile issue as one of the other problems that they campaigned for. Therefore, in South Africa the embedded textile dispute became an
exemplary problem and therefore gained saliency, while in Nigeria it was crowded out. As for the media: in Nigeria the media was more favourable towards the textile industry, while in South Africa it was divided in its reporting. This seems to suggest that the role of the media was insignificant as South Africa was the first to respond, not Nigeria.
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The fact that both countries saw extensive mass action campaigns yet had dissimilar outcomes, indicates that there must have been more at play. The additional variable proposed in this research is the state perspective, which shows that both countries, despite having a notable federal background, function in practice as centralized states in the context of our topic.
Regardless of this similarity, it was only in South Africa that the direct negotiations with COSATU and the ANC yielded the results. The relation between COSATU and the ANC can account for this result as it overcomes the centralized state’s incentive to prevent falling under the influence of civil society. COSATU functioned as a power base for the ANC; it was a
constituency that needed to be appeased. In Nigeria, civil society historically has been divided between pro-state groups which are favoured by the state and anti-state groups which are kept in check, if not outright repressed. Organized labour, even in the latest democratic era, falls under the latter category. As such, the Nigerian elites seek to remain autonomous of the labour unions’
influence if they can, as was the case in the textile dispute. With this in mind, the most recent shift in policy could be explained by Buhari’s personal faith in import substitution strategies, rather than the continued efforts of civil society as new attempts by organized labour to sway the government on other topics displayed the labour unions’ inability to do so.
Then to come back to our research question: How does the difference in the state and civil society between Nigeria and South Africa relate to the difference in responses to the textile dispute with China in Nigeria and South Africa? With the information given above, it is possible to provide a concise answer. The answer is that South Africa’s civil society in the form of its labour congress COSATU was able to grant broader saliency to the textile dispute by embedding it into the wider problems at play in South African society and was able to gain the compliance of the government through the positive incentives that sprang forth from the cooperative relation that the two shared. The difference in Nigeria was that the relation between state and civil society
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was purely competitive and as such organized labour was increasingly marginalized, therefore it was unable to sufficiently push the textile issue. Neither was it able to offer the government incentives from cooperation to offset the government’s hostility, thus it was entirely dependent on the government’s plans whether the textile dispute was appropriately addressed. Hence it can be said that the difference in responses to the textile issue depended on whether organized labour was able to make the issue salient and gain the cooperative compliance of the state, otherwise the outcome relies on the views of the incumbent government.
For the wider question of what causes the discrepancy between African responses to the textile issue and China’s general involvement in the continent, the findings presented in this paper underline the importance of domestic politics in determining the type of reaction that a single African country has to China. Indeed, these findings seem to validate the focus on the domestic arena of the African countries as chosen in this research. This appears to justify further research on how the internal dynamics of countries shape their behaviour towards China, instead of putting the focus on the approach chosen by China to engage the country in question. In turn, this outcome taps into an underlying problem of the China in Africa debate: the sheer size of the continent and notable difference in domestic politics of the constituent countries of Africa, causes continent-wide assessments of the reception of China to lead to broad generalizations that do not account for differences between countries or even specific sectors within countries. This critique differs from the developmental explanation mentioned by Ikome (2010), in that it also underlines the importance of the arrangement of internal interest groups, rather than wider national interests alone.
Indeed, the peculiarity of taking Africa as a whole becomes markedly clear when extrapolated to other continents: it is not common practice to take North or South America as a whole when discussing China in America. The same goes for China in Europe, or in its own
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neighbourhood, Asia, for that matter. Additionally, given China’s own tendency to take a bilateral approach in most of its diplomatic engagements it could be said to favour a country-by-country approach as standard method, rather than a continent-wide perspective (Chidaushe, 2007).
This is not to say that continent wide approaches are without merit, instead the problem lies in that the popular conception of China-Africa relations is skewed too much towards such thinking.
The implications of this problem for future research mean that further studies into China in Africa ought to be more country specific or at least asses the continent’s perspective based on how the domestic arenas of the countries under scrutiny produced the regional response. An example of such research could be an investigation into factors beyond civil society and its relation to the state, that might determine a country’s behaviour towards China. Such endeavour will not only produce more accurate knowledge on the subject but will also be more useful in terms of policymaking.
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