How China’s Free Gift To The African Union Turned Out To Be Conduit Pipe For Its Surveillance

 

African scholars and analysts have continued to hold the opinion that the scramble for Africa is really nothing but a covert means to re-colonize the continent. Through gifts, bogus loans and incredible offers, both China and the US have maintained a steady drive to penetrate the African continent with China clearly leading the way.

This drive is however selfish for these developed nations who have forecasted and seen that Africa is the next frontier in terms of development. They would do anything in their power to maintain a good chunk of the pie through back door strategies which on the surface, appears to be neighbourly interventions and support.

A recent video presently making the rounds online shows this much.

The African Union Conference Center and Office Complex which was started in 2009 and completed in 2012 was built at a cost of $200 million totally funded by the Chinese government as a gift to the union. Unknown to the union, these gift has been the conduit pipe for monitoring by the Chinese government of all its policies and programmes.

According to the video, in January 2017, an IT engineer was taking a look at the servers in the building and noticed something wasn’t right. He noticed that often in the middle of the night, the servers were connecting to some servers in Shanghai and uploading emails and audio files.

Upon further investigation, the entire building was checked and it was found to have been completely bugged with microphones embedded in the furniture and walls. These had been feeding audio and internal emails to China for several years.

These servers were later removed and replaced with new ones but interestingly, the Chinese government still offered to install the new ones but this was promptly denied.

Looking at the several infrastructures built by the Chinese either through loans or as partnerships, no one needs to look far to see the impact. As the popular saying goes, if it looks too good to be true, it most probably is.