US dilemma vs Sino-African opportunities

To compete with China's ongoing presence in Nigeria, the US must become more engaged, implementing and promoting effective, mutually beneficial and social responsibility driven strategies in oil and non-oil sectors alike.

Stephen Hayes, president and CEO of the Corporate Council on Africa, was quoted recently as having said: " given all of this activity, it should not be alarming that the US market share in Africa is significantly declining. What should be of great concern is that US investment is not increasing at a faster rate, failing to keep up with much of the rest of the world."

Scott Eisner, vice-president of African affairs at the US Chamber of Commerce, has said that the US " probably has a small window in the next couple of years before China, India and Brazil take over all of the ownership on the continent and trade relations are theirs to own'".

The "pivot to Asia" policy of the US has created a controversy, not simply because it denotes a theme of containing China as opposed to capitalizing on the opportunities offered by the developing world, but also because by allowing such two-way relationships in Africa to flourish without offering significant competition, the US has fundamentally missed the mark in asserting such control.

The World Bank ranks 11 African countries higher than Russia for doing business, which in itself speaks volumes of the opportunities offered by the continent. One can live a secluded life only for so long, shying away from unprecedented access to emerging markets, and ignoring the potential to foster new business models and integrate and flourish investment opportunities. We believe that today politics is enough "malleable to facilitate growth abroad and on the home front".

It is fair to say that China has set a benchmark in African integration for the world to follow. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who warned: " let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world". But no one assumed his prediction would work out so productively.

The author is an entrepreneur and politician in Nigeria.