By Enyichukwu Enemanna
China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi on Wednesday commenced his annual New Year tour of Africa, focusing on strategic trade access across eastern and southern Africa as Beijing seeks to secure key shipping routes and resource supply lines.
Yi will travel to Ethiopia, Africa’s fastest‑growing large economy; Somalia, a Horn of Africa state offering access to key global shipping lanes; Tanzania, a logistics hub linking minerals‑rich central Africa to the Indian Ocean; and Lesotho, a small southern African economy affected by U.S. trade measures.
His trip this year will last until January 12. Beijing is seeking to highlight countries it views as model partners of President Xi Jinping’s flagship “Belt and Road” infrastructure programme and to expand export markets, particularly in young, increasingly affluent economies such as Ethiopia, where the IMF forecasts growth of 7.2% this year.
China, the world’s largest bilateral lender, faces growing competition from the European Union to finance African infrastructure, as countries hit by pandemic‑era debt strains now seek investment over loans.
“The real litmus test for 2026 isn’t just the arrival of Chinese investment, but the ‘Africanisation’ of that investment. As Wang Yi visits hubs like Ethiopia and Tanzania, the conversation must move beyond just building roads to building factories,” said Judith Mwai, policy analyst at Development Reimagined, an Africa-focussed consultancy.
“For African leaders, this tour is an opportunity to demand that China’s ‘small yet beautiful’ projects specifically target our industrial gaps, turning African raw materials into finished products on African soil, rather than just facilitating their exit,” she added.
On his start-of-year trip in 2025, Wang visited Namibia, the Republic of Congo, Chad and Nigeria.
His visit to Somalia will be the first by a Chinese foreign minister since the 1980s and is expected to provide Mogadishu with a diplomatic boost after Israel became the first country to formally recognise the breakaway Republic of Somaliland, a northern region that declared itself independent in 1991.
Beijing, which reiterated its support for Somalia after the Israeli announcement in December, is keen to reinforce its influence around the Gulf of Aden, the entrance to the Red Sea and a vital corridor for Chinese trade transiting the Suez Canal to Europe.
By visiting the southern African kingdom of Lesotho, Wang aims to highlight Beijing’s push to position itself as a champion of free trade.
Last year, China offered tariff-free market access to its $19 trillion economy for the world’s poorest nations, fulfilling a pledge by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 2024 China-Africa Cooperation summit in Beijing.
