Venezuelan Vice-minister of Foreign Affairs to Africa, Reinaldo Bolivar, today concluded an official visit to Angola. 

The Angolan news agency, ANGOP, reported that the Venezuelan diplomat stated, on arriving back in Venezuela, that the visit had the objective of strengthening the two nations’ cooperative ties in the fields of energy, diplomacy, politics, and indeed in their respective economies.

The motives of Venezuela aren’t new- it has been a long-practiced geo-political strategy of China to fly under the radar by having a top diplomat visit a developing nation, (usually rich in natural resources but badly mismanaged), shake hands and smile for photo ops while publicly backing the developing nation’s goal of infrastructure reform, all the while quietly locking down the nation’s resources and forcing ideology upon its citizenry. 

What may be a trend in the making, however, is the reason why Venezuela is investing in Africa – because they have to.

Political risk is a non-issue to the Venezuelan government. After all, nations like China and Venezuela aren’t exactly safe havens with minimal integration risk themselves. The reason there isn’t even a murmur of trepidation is due to the widely reported notion that Venezuela may be going broke from sinking oil revenues, revenues that have left a whopping budget deficit (estimated by the Economist Intelligence Unit at 5.2% of GDP). Political risks of integration are even further disregarded when an economy is in peril.

Investments in emerging markets have recently bore fruit and can indeed be implemented to competitively shore up resources ahead of another state. However, as a result of the economic crisis, an almost emergency-like rush of “infrastructure reform“, most significantly from China and now interestingly from Venezuela, has hit emerging markets, regions schooled in sensing corruption, keen on adapting to economic adversity, yet welcoming of any infrastructure reform, little being better than nothing, after all. 

We’ve seen the Hugo Chavez world tour forgo issues of moral dilapidation and human right nightmares in an effort to create or further investment funds. For Venezuela, these are non-issues; the World Democracy Audit, relying on findings from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others, ranks Venezuela 134 out of 179 countries in its propensity towards corruption — above Sierra Leone and Liberia. Even further, the Heritage Foundation puts Venezuela 174^th in its ranking of economic freedom; Iran is 168^th.

It will therefore be interesting now to document what else will be forgone for the sake of investment, in an era signifying the fall of pragmatic globalization and the rise of dog-eat-dog, dog-shake-hands-with-cat diplomacy.