China's Hu to visit Africa from Jan. 30

BEIJING, Jan 23 (Reuters) Chinese President Hu Jintao leaves for a visit to eight African nations late this month, a spokesman said today, deepening ties that an African financial official said were key to putting the continent's economies on more solid footing.

China has defended its growing trade ties with Africa and its more than 6 billion dollar worth of investments in the continent, whose energy and mineral wealth it covets to fuel its booming economy.

Hu will visit Cameroon, Sudan, Namibia, South Africa, the Seychelles, Liberia, Zambia and Mozambique between January. 30 and Feb. 10, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.

He told a news briefing the visits were a follow-up to last year's China-Africa summit in Beijing and aimed to ''consolidate traditional friendship'' between China and the African countries.

China has been criticised for ignoring human rights and environmental standards and for failing to attach demands for transparency and accountability to offers of aid, loans and investment to Africa.

Separately, Eric Chinje, head of external affairs and communications at the African Development Bank (AfDB), told reporters that African nations were looking to their growing economic ties with China to help reduce their reliance on natural resources.

Chinje said the AfDB was hoping its annual meeting, in Shanghai on May 16-17, would build on the recent China-Africa summit by carving out more detail on the economic aspects of their relationship and providing an impetus for more investment by Chinese firms in the continent.

Africans hoped that broadening economic activity with China would help prompt other countries to treat them as more than a source of natural resources, bringing the continent more deeply into the global economy, Chinje said.

''Because it is happening with China, the hope is that Africa's traditional partners would also see the need to revise the nature and the quality of their relations with the continent,'' he said.

Chinje also expressed the hope that, with China's input, African firms would produce more for the global market, giving governments an impetus to improve their governance.

''This increased focus on the export market would impose that need for institutional reform in ways that the policy dialogue that's gone on forever between African governments and global institutions has never succeeded in making that happen,'' he said.

REUTERS AB PM1802