Property – Infrastructure & Megaprojects · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · China-in-Africa · June 2026

The numbers China attaches to its African infrastructure record are continental in scale. By its own count, Chinese assistance since FOCAC's founding has helped build nearly 100,000 km of highways, more than 10,000 km of railways, nearly 1,000 bridges, 100 ports, 66,000 km of power transmission lines and 150,000 km of communications backbone. The contradiction running underneath the tally is that the same projects that move people and goods also move debt onto national balance sheets – and one flagship shows both halves at once.

The continental ledger, in China's own figures

Beijing's data, treated as an attributed claim, lists 120 million kW of installed generating capacity, more than 80 large power facilities, over 200,000 km of optical fibre and nearly US$200 billion in infrastructure investment over 2016-2020. Total Chinese direct investment in Africa had surpassed US$43 billion by the end of 2020.

These are supplier figures, not independently audited, and they mix grant, loan and commercial work under a single promotional heading – which is reason to read the totals at arm's length rather than as a verified ledger. Read with that caution, they still describe a build-out unmatched by any other single partner this century. The right posture is neither to repeat the totals as fact nor to dismiss them: the assets are largely visible on the ground, even where the framing is the financier's own and the financing mix is left unspecified.

The scale is real and largely visible – the framing is promotional and worth reading at arm's length.

Mombasa-Nairobi: the showcase and the warning

China's readout highlights Kenya's Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway as having carried 5.4 million passengers and 1.3 million containers and created 46,000 jobs. The line is genuinely useful for inland freight, shortening a haul that road transport handled slowly and expensively and giving the corridor a modern spine.

It is also the cautionary case. Kenya borrowed around US$5 billion from China Eximbank for the SGR, and by late 2024 it had missed payments and incurred penalties in the region of KSh 1.7 billion, before extending the loans to 2040 and converting them to yuan to cut annual servicing. The asset works; the bill bites. A railway that performs operationally can still arrive with repayment terms that strain the treasury that owns it, and the restructuring – longer tenor, a different currency, a grace period – is the visible record of that strain. Several African finance ministries are now living through the same arithmetic.

A railway that moves millions can still strain the treasury that owns it – capacity and liability arrive together.

Wires and fibre: the less-debated half of the build

The 66,000 km of transmission lines, 1.5 GW of photovoltaic capacity and 200,000 km of fibre attract less scrutiny than the marquee railways, but they may matter more for daily economic life – connecting some 6 million broadband households and serving close to 700 million mobile terminals, on Beijing's figures.

Power and connectivity are foundational; they are also where overcapacity, maintenance and tariff sustainability quietly decide whether the asset endures. A transmission line or a solar station only pays back if the offtake exists and the upkeep is budgeted – recurrent costs that fall to the host long after the construction crews leave, and that rarely make the summit communiques. The unglamorous half of the build-out is where its long-run value is settled, and where the difference between an enabling asset and a stranded one is actually decided.

The grid and the network outlast the ribbon-cutting only if someone budgets to keep them running.

The continental pattern behind one country's bill

Kenya's SGR is not an isolated case but the legible version of a continental pattern. The same model – a sovereign loan from a Chinese policy bank, a turnkey build by a Chinese contractor, repayment denominated in a foreign currency – recurs across the roads, rails and ports in Beijing's tally. When commodity prices soften or a currency weakens, the asset keeps running while the repayment grows harder, and the renegotiation that follows is the predictable next chapter, not a surprise.

That is why the more than US$10,000 km of railways and nearly 100,000 km of roads should be read on two ledgers at once: the physical one, where the infrastructure is real and largely functioning, and the financial one, where the liabilities sit. Treating the build-out as purely an achievement, or purely a debt trap, both miss the point. It is a stock of useful assets bought partly on terms that several borrowers are now revising – and the lesson is in the revising.

One country's restructuring is the continent's preview – the model repeats until the terms change.

China's African build-out is the most visible feature of this era's infrastructure landscape, and much of it is plainly useful. The mature reading is to hold both facts: the roads, rails and wires are real and largely working, and the financing that delivered them carries terms that several African treasuries are now renegotiating. The next decade's question is less whether to build than how to build affordably – on tenors that match the life of the asset, and on terms the borrower helped set rather than merely accepted.

Sources: China MFA – infrastructure record, Business Daily (Kenya) – SGR loans