"Several years ago, AU technicians discovered that the building’s Huawei-provided servers were daily exporting their data to Shanghai, and that the walls of the Chinese-built headquarters were peppered with listening devices," reported The National Interest.

"It is a strange way for Beijing to treat a continent whose rulers have emerged as key backers of its international agenda. Yet the Chinese government’s spying, which almost certainly extends far beyond the African Union headquarters, may in fact be one of the reasons why African rulers are willing to defend Beijing’s increasingly indefensible actions," wrote Joshua Meservey, Senior Policy Analyst specializing in Africa and the Middle East at The Heritage Foundation, in his opinion piece published in  The National Interest.

He wrote: "Beijing’s opportunities for eavesdropping in Africa are vast. Chinese companies—many of which are state-owned, all of which are legally obliged to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party on intelligence matters—have built at least 186 government buildings in Africa, including presidential residences, ministries of foreign affairs, and parliament buildings. Huawei has built more than 70 percent of the continent’s 4G networks and at least fourteen intra-governmental ICT networks, including a data center in Zambia that houses the entirety of the government’s records."

"Beijing has many reasons to take advantage of the spying opportunities its companies’ activities in Africa provides. It can eavesdrop on the sensitive conversations they have with their non-African counterparts, and the Chinese government might be able to gather useful economic information it can pass to its many companies operating on the continent," read the opinion.