Angola is the African country that has received the most loans from China in the last 20 years, more than 42 billion dollars, according to Chatham House, which argues that the region's debt is a "global priority".

According to data from the UK's Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), African countries owe 696 billion dollars, around 651 billion euros, a five-fold increase compared to the start of the millennium, with 12% of that owed to Chinese creditors.

The study analyzes seven countries in detail, including Angola, and points out that the debt to GDP ratio has improved in recent semesters, essentially due to the appreciation of the kwanza and the growth of the economy, improving from 130% in 2020 to 86.4% in 2021, and falling again to 56.6% in 2022, but the cost of servicing the debt is expected to be close to 13 billion dollars in 2022, of which 38% refers to external debt.

Angola, in fact, owes more to China than the next three countries, surpassing the sum of 13.7 billion dollars owed by Ethiopia, 9.8 billion by Zambia and 9.2 billion by Kenya, according to Chatham House.

"Debt repayment, relief and cancellation remains a priority for the government of President João Lourenço in his second term, which began in September 2022, as does diversifying external partnerships beyond over-dependence on China," reads the Chatham House study, which points out that the debt of African countries should be seen as "a global priority".

China has been the largest creditor of African countries in recent decades, surpassing the United States, the European Union and Japan, but the Chatham House researchers point out that "far from being a sophisticated strategy to appropriate African assets, China's loans, at an early stage, may have created a debt trap for China, which became deeply entangled with increasingly mature and assertive African partners".

The Asian giant is the largest creditor of Zambia, for example, the first country to go into financial default in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, and the economic consequences not only of the pandemic, but also of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have caused other countries to stop paying their debts, as is the most recent case with Ghana.

According to the criteria of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 22 of the 54 African countries are over-indebted, including all the Portuguese-speaking countries.

The analysis by Chatham House and quoted by Lusa also shows that China is changing its interaction with African countries, having put a strong brake on disbursements, which went from 28.4 billion dollars in 2016, to 8.2 billion in 2019 and only 1.9 billion dollars in 2020, during the pandemic.

The debt crisis affecting African countries has sparked intense debate among academics, multilateral banks, analysts and investors, with several observers arguing that the current level of the debt-to-GDP ratio, between 60 and 70%, is unsustainable given the rise in interest rates by Western central banks and the increase in inflation, particularly in food and energy goods, which is compounded by the high price investors charge to lend money to African countries, perceived as riskier in terms of the credibility of payments.