Ethiopian president says colonial models of assistance are changing

Ethiopian president Mulatu Teshome believes China's investment in Africa will transform the fortunes of the continent.

He equates the role that the Export-Import Bank of China and the China Development Bank play in building infrastructure to that of the Marshall Plan through which US aid to Europe was channeled after the devastation of World War II.

"These institutions are playing a very significant role in Africa's economic development, " he said.

"There are no big words from either side about this but in the financing of these big heavy projects, it is the same."

Mulatu, who became president in October, was speaking in the Presidential Palace in Addis Ababa, which was once the residence of emperor Haile Selassie.

The 57-year-old is very much a Sinophile, speaking fluent Chinese and having spent more than a decade in Beijing, first as a student and lecturer and then as his country's ambassador in the mid-1990s.

He says China, through such bodies as the Forum on China-Africa Corporation, has moved the aid agenda away from humanitarian relief to trade and business.

"The old colonial masters, or the Western powers, shaped international aid architecture in the 1980s and 1990s, which was very much a humanitarian aid agenda. The Chinese have changed it to one that is based on economic interdependence through trade and investment," he said.

Mulatu, who met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Addis Ababa earlier this month, says China's approach is different from that of the World Bank and other Washington-based institutions.

"There are no strings attached to the investment or the aid China is giving African countries," he said.

"All these countries have got their own domestic policies, different political views and attitudes and China is basically complying with all of them."

Mulatu came back from Turkey, where he was ambassador, to become Ethiopia's fourth president, succeeding Girma Wolde-Giorgis, who had completed two six-year terms.