It may seem like a relatively simple case, but the legal battle between Buildnex Construction Company and Allport cargo Services (Mauritius) ltd is pregnant with meaning.

Buildnex was supposed to construct a warehouse and a three-storey building in the Jin Fei Industrial zone. That is, before the project was cancelled and now Buildnex wants Rs21.6 million in damages. This case is just one of the casualties in the flop that the Jin Fei Zone turned out to be. And it also spells the death of Port Louis’ dream to turn Mauritius into a bridge into Africa.

Mauritius in recent years formulated an official ambition to become a bridge for Asian investments going into Africa. Officials spoke of turning Mauritius into the ‘Singapore of Africa’. Thus, in 2006, Mauritius launched the Jin Fei industrial zone to great fanfare, to allow 40 Chinese companies to manufacture goods to export into Africa. Former Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam declared that it would bring in up to US$820 million in investments and create 34,000 jobs. There would even be a 34-storey tower to mark Mauritius’ new prominence in Asian-African trade.

Unfortunately, the dream itself rested on a grand delusion: that Beijing actually needs Mauritius to go into Africa. Beijing has been in Africa for decades and has much deeper links with Africa than Port Louis ever bothered to cultivate. So while China has been creating bonds with African states since the 1960s, Port Louis contented itself with limiting its dealings with Apartheid South Africa. That’s where the tourists came from and where we sold our tea. The rest of the continent did not matter since there was no immediate benefit. So when the time came to profit, Beijing was already set up in Africa and they saw no need for a middleman: labour is cheaper in Africa, the market is much bigger and the political-economic ties more enduring. At the end of 2016, 3,000 Chinese had already invested US$2.7 billion in manufacturing in Africa. Meanwhile, Mauritius, suffering from a perennial over-estimation of itself, was left holding a Jin Fei zone that turned into a ghost town.

The same problem hit the Neotown project. This time, an Indian developer was supposed to build up 24 hectares of land in Port Louis to turn it into a commercial centre for businesses to go into Africa. Nothing happened here either. The same miscalculation, that Mauritius was the key into the African mainland, struck once again.

Despite these disasters and a total lack of evidence that Mauritius enjoys some sort of special pull in Africa, diplomats and policymakers in Mauritius still seem stubbornly to stick to the worn out script that Mauritius can be a bridge between Asia and Africa. The trouble is that nobody else seems to believe it – neither in Africa nor in Asia.

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