The Alassane Ouattara Stadium rises like a piece of sculpture from the dusty brown earth north of Ivory Coast’s largest city, its undulating roof and white columns rising above the empty landscape like a spaceship crashed on an uninhabited planet.
On Sunday, the three-and-a-half-year-old stadium will host its signature moment when the national soccer teams of Ivory Coast and Nigeria compete in the final of Africa’s biggest sporting event, in front of tens of thousands of fans shouting and cheering in a stadium sponsored and made in china.
While this is nothing new for the tournament, the Africa Cup of Nations, the arena is just the latest example of the contradictions arising from Chinese projects built on Chinese terms and on African soil.
The stadiums have been a cornerstone of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa since the 1970s, but their number has increased since the early 2000s, part of a broader Chinese strategy to build infrastructure – from highways to railways, ports to presidential palaces and even the headquarters of the African Union — in exchange for diplomatic influence or access to natural resources.
Through this trillion-dollar program, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, China has become a central partner in developing countries that benefit from expensive projects that they otherwise could not afford. But Chinese construction has sometimes been accompanied by accusations of local corruption, and critics have questioned the value of the big-budget projects, noting that they bring dubious long-term economic benefits but very real debts that governments can struggle to repay.
“China is not asking why you need a stadium,” said Itamar Dubinsky, a researcher at the African Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. “He’s just financing it and building it.”
Over the past two decades, Chinese companies have built or renovated dozens of stadiums across Africa, including, in the past 15 years, nearly half of those that have hosted matches at the Africa Cup of Nations. That total includes three of the six used for this year’s tournament, the showpiece of which is the 60,000-seat Ouattara Stadium, designed and built by two Chinese state-owned companies.
Its exterior of white pillars and curved arches – inset with panels painted in green and orange, the national colors of Ivory Coast – is a stylistic improvement from previous projects on the continent, which critics have derided as concrete monoliths.
However, three years after the stadium hosted its first game, the new road leading to it has yet to open, forcing fans to walk up to an hour to reach or leave the arena, and the sports city around it has not has yet to materialize. This, critics say, is another regular feature of the works. Chinese-built stadiums are rarely delivered with the infrastructure to support them or the know-how to maintain them.
However, for countless fans who attended games last month, what mattered lay elsewhere. Ivory Coast, rebounding from civil war and boasting one of West Africa’s largest economies and a dynamic middle class, has demonstrated its ability to host a major tournament in state-of-the-art facilities.
“One can only be impressed,” said one fan, Halima Duret, as she scanned the stands on a recent night. An interior designer living in Abidjan, Ms. Duret was watching a soccer match for the first time, and it was special. Her hometown team, Guinea, had reached the quarterfinals. “What a beauty,” he added.
The partnership between China and Ivory Coast, a major producer of rubber and cocoa, is emblematic of how China is fervently pursuing ties with resource-rich African countries.
As Chinese and Ivorian workers built the stadium in Ebimpé, on the outskirts of Abidjan, President Alassane Ouattara visited his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing in 2018 to strengthen the countries’ relations. Since then, Ivory Coast has increased its exports of rubber and crude oil to China, which has become Ivory Coast’s largest trading partner. China is also financing the expansion of the Abidjan port, one of the largest Belt and Road Initiative projects in West Africa.
When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Ivory Coast during the Africa Cup of Nations last month, he thanked Mr Ouattara for his country’s support for China’s “vital interests”, including Taiwan. Mr. Ouattara pledged to deepen bilateral relations and said the countries share a similar vision of the world order.
While the stadiums may not be the biggest infrastructure projects or the most noteworthy, they are popular, at least in the beginning, experts on China-Africa relations said.
“A stadium is one of the most impressive signs of China’s ability to contribute to the development of African countries,” said Filomène Ebi, an Ivorian Sinologist and research associate at the National Taiwan University. “Most people in Ivory Coast know that China built the Ouattara Stadium,” he said.
As mass athletic consumption takes off in Africa, other countries have gotten in on the act. A Turkish construction company built Senegal’s new national football stadium, which will host the Youth Olympic Games in 2026. And “Visit Saudi Arabia” is the main sponsor of a new pan-African football championship.
Western companies and governments are also playing: French oil company Total Energies is the main sponsor of the Africa Cup of Nations, and the NBA is the main sponsor of the Basketball Africa League.
But no country has made more of an effort to integrate itself into Africa’s sporting scene than China, and the Nations Cup hosts have been favored. All the stadiums built for the recent editions of the tournament in Angola and Gabon were built by Chinese companies. And in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, a Chinese company is renovating the stadium where President William Ruto was inaugurated and which will host soccer matches for the 2027 edition of the cup.
Most of the stadiums are donated by China or financed through soft loans from Chinese banks. “A football stadium is a small price to pay for potentially much bigger benefits,” said Simon Chadwick, professor of sport and geopolitical economics at Skema Business School in Paris.
However, many African governments have left stadiums that were once a point of pride to fall into disrepair. A Chinese-built stadium in Gabon’s capital, Libreville, has been mostly abandoned since it hosted the Cup of Nations final in 2017. The national stadium of the Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries, cannot even host the matches of its own national team.
Even Ivory Coast’s glitzy stadium has flaws: Its grass doesn’t extend far enough beyond the playing surface, so organizers have had to patch its perimeter with artificial turf to keep players from slipping with slits onto the adjacent track.
The future of the smaller stadiums built across Ivory Coast also appears uncertain.
Government officials said local teams would use the infrastructure once the tournament was over, but in the resort town of San Pedro, home to a new 20,000-seat stadium built by a Chinese company, the city’s main soccer club said the facilities were too big for the his needs.
“At best we might be able to fill it to 30 percent,” said Abdelkarim Bouaziz, an executive at FC San Pedro, which plays in Ivory Coast’s top league. “But we won’t be able to pay for its upkeep.”
Ivory Coast invested more than $1 billion in hosting the tournament, but also struggled to fill the glitzy seats of its stadiums, raising questions about whether it made sense to build such large venues for a month-long event.
During the opening match, in which the host nation participated, Ouattara Stadium was about two-thirds full. In San Pedro, city hall was recently filled with unsold tickets, which Mayor Nakaridja Cissé said she was handing out for free in an effort to invite residents to the new arena.
Ivory Coast officials say they have a post-tournament strategy for new or renovated infrastructure. Ousmane Gbané, the head of the National Office for Sports, said local clubs such as FC San Pedro would finally leave Abidjan, where they have trained and played for years, and use the new facilities. International hotel chains, Mr. Gbané said, had expressed interest in managing the residences built for the tournament teams.
“We have learned from other people’s mistakes,” Mr Gbane said. In just a few weeks, he said confidently, “the infrastructure we built for Afcon will have a new lease of life.”
Abdi Latif Dahir, Tariq Panja and Loukouman Coulibaly contributed to the report.
