Europe is Africa’s largest trading partner and its largest source of foreign direct investment. But a lot of that economic engagement is powered by inertia, left over from Europe’s long, painful history of colonial exploitation in Africa.
Just as in the United States, Europe’s politics are decidedly inward-looking where Africa, if it’s on the agenda at all, is still largely seen as a “problem to be fixed.” When policymakers do raise the issue of heightened engagement with the continent, it’s often in the context of what the EU can do to counter China’s influence in Africa.
A new report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace aims to change that by outlining a more proactive, positive vision for why Europe should focus more attention on Africa in pursuit of a more balanced relationship.
The report’s editor, David McNair, an executive director at the anti-poverty NGO ONE.org, and contributor Saliem Fakir, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, join Eric & Cobus to discuss why Europe needs Africa.
Show Notes:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Why Europe Needs Africa by David McNair
- Radio France Internationale: Facing Chinese competition, Europe struggles to hold its position in Africa by Jan van der Made
- FRANCE 24: EU-Africa partnership under pressure: Is Europe losing out to Russia and China? by Armen Georgian
About David McNair and Saliem Fakir:
David McNair is the executive director at ONE.org. Co-founded by Bono, it is a movement of millions of people fighting to end extreme poverty and preventable disease. He sits on the European Council on Foreign Relations Council and is a founding executive board member of the Africa Europe Foundation. Previously, he worked on successful campaigns to reduce child mortality and crack down on grand corruption and tax evasion. In 2012 he was named one of the ninety-nine top foreign policy leaders under 33. He holds a PhD in social geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast.
Saliem Fakir is the Executive Director of the African Climate Foundation. Prior to establishing the ACF, Saliem served as the Head of the Policy & Futures Unit of WWF South Africa for 11 years. Saliem has worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Administration and Planning and an Associate Director for the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy at Stellenbosch University. Prior to that, he served as Director of the World Conservation Union, South Africa (IUCN-SA) for eight years. Saliem has served on a number of Boards and is a prolific writer who contributes regularly to leading South African publications like Engineering News, Business Day and the Daily Maverick.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander, joining you today from the beautiful city of Berkeley, California, on the West Coast of the United States. And Cobus, you are back in South Africa after two weeks, joining us in Washington, D.C. Of course, Cobus van Staden is our managing editor. And a very good afternoon to you from Johannesburg.
Cobus van Staden: Good afternoon.
Eric: I hope you’ve recovered smoothly from a long journey and all the jet lag. We spent two weeks in Washington, as many of you may know from our previous shows and some of our writing in the newsletter, and we left Washington feeling a little bit of despair over the fact that there was a decided lack of vision in terms of what does the United States actually want from Africa. And just before he left, our colleague, Geraud Neema, he did a walk and talk for our YouTube subscribers, reflecting on the past two weeks. And I think it’s going to set up our discussion today about Europe quite well. So let’s take a listen to what Geraud’s final reflections are just before he boarded the plane back to Mauritius.
Geraud Neema: Hello, folks. After two weeks here in Washington, D.C., as we are about to leave, Eric, Cobus and I, to go back in Africa and Vietnam, I’m living here with big questions, really with a sense of doubt. First, not really understanding today really what U.S.-Africa policy looks like, what they really want to achieve, what the strategy beyond kick China out — What does it mean in actual terms when they say they want to counter to China in Africa? What shape does it take? What success looks like. How do they define their successfully counter China in Africa? This is one of the big question we are going to be leaving Washington, D.C. with, without a clear answer of really what to expect from the U.S. When they’re going to be saying that we want China out, we want China out from Africa — Yes, we understand, but what do you offer? What are you offering on the table?
What are you putting on the table for Africa? When they say, we don’t want Africa to buy from Huawei, not to buy Chinese technology or not to take Chinese money in terms of infrastructure, the question is what do you put on the table, and what do you offer them to take? What do you offer Africa to put on the table? So far it’s been unclear with different stakeholders we’ve spoken to. No one seems to be clearly able to define or to understand what success look like for the U.S. in Africa and if there is even an avenue of success for the U.S. in Africa. And this is going to be one of the big question for us as we live the U.S. in order to get, not the understanding, but the clear picture of really what the U.S. want to achieve on the continent.
Eric: Cobus, I tend to think that if we spent two weeks in Brussels the way that we did in Washington, meeting with policymakers, diplomats, scholars, think tank analysts, we’ll probably walk away with a very similar conclusion that is what is the vision in Europe for Africa? And a lot of people will point to the Global Gateway. If you recall, that is the 300 billion, I think it’s 300 billion. At one point it was 600 billion. I don’t know the numbers. It’s a huge amount of money. However, it’s not a real number though because a lot of this money was recycled money, which is typical of what a lot of governments do. But in April, the European Commission’s Director General for International Partnerships issued a scathing report about the Global Gateway, which, of course, is intended in part to challenge China’s Belt & Road Initiative and to make Europe a preferred development partner for Africa.
And the conclusion was, “Our efforts…,” and this is a quote, “Our efforts are spread too thinly across too many fronts, lacking strategic focus.” And then, of course, when we talk about Europe, Cobus, and this is something that you saw firsthand when you were in Germany for a few months last year, the role that immigration plays in politics today in Europe. And I was on a podcast with the Bruegel Institute last week, and they took great offense, and it was actually a pretty tense podcast as you go, when I brought up the question of immigration and that in the politics today, Africa is seen as a problem. Africa is seen as trying to keep the people from Africa from crossing the Mediterranean.
And that in part is driving a lot of the success for the National Rally, which is the French far-right party and AFD in Germany. So Cobus, share some reflections a little bit on this, comparing the United States and Europe in terms of the vision for Africa and the politics today that are driving it.
Cobus: I agree with you there are some strong overlaps, but I think there are also some significant differences. In terms of overlap, I think there is a similar kind of vagueness in terms of what success would look like. At the same time, one also has to say that I think in comparing PGI on the American side and the Global Gateway, there seems to be more like somewhat more concrete projects on the Global Gateway side, particularly the ones that I’ve been looking at, ones in Namibia. I guess, in broad terms, one of the contrasts that I see is that even though there’s similar kind of vagueness, for the United States, I think Africa feels very far away, like the U.S. is geographically isolated from Africa in a way that Europe just isn’t.
So, Europe and Africa, they’re stuck together. And I think policymakers in Europe are, to my mind, increasingly facing that reality. But in my discussions with them, I didn’t necessarily see that as necessarily translating into a new vision of what they could necessarily co-create with Africa. Although that vision hasn’t progressed very far anyway. And the vision of the continent seemed very much framed through domestic preoccupations which is particularly around migration. That’s obviously not true Europe is obviously as a broad canvas and there’s very complicated landscape with a lot of stakeholders. But in government stakeholders that I’ve spoken with, they tended to really focus on migration, to the exclusion of some of the things that Africans would like to bring to the table.
Eric: Well, this void in terms of a larger vision, as you pointed out, out outside of a domestic prism, is something that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sought to address in a new report that was published earlier this month — Why Europe Needs Africa. It was edited by David McNair, who is a non-resident scholar in Carnegie Africa’s Program and is also the executive director of the anti-poverty NGO, ONE.org. Altogether, there were seven essays in the report, including one by Saliem Fakir, who is the executive director of the African Climate Foundation. A very big welcome to both David and Saliem for joining us on the show today.
David McNair: Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Cobus. It’s nice to see you.
Saliem Fakir: Thank you, Eric.
Eric: Well, David, let’s start with you. You co-edited this. I want to make sure that you don’t get all the credit because Kyla Denwood also helped you with this. And you said in your introduction — Europe needs Africa at least as much as Africa needs Europe, which I think, to Cobus’s point, is a statement that may come as a surprise to a lot of people in France and Germany and Belgium and elsewhere in the continent who don’t regard Africa as essential. Can you talk to us a little bit about that premise and then what the motivation was for you to pull together this collection of fantastic contributors and to try and fill this void of vision?
David: Thanks, Eric. I actually had the idea for this essay series back in 2017 when I was living in Brussels. And a lot of the conversations that I was attending and being part of really saw, within the Brussels bubble, Africa as a development program. The world has changed dramatically since then. And I think now, post-COVID, post-Ukraine, post-Gaza, there’s a massive focus away from Africa among the bureaucrats. But there’s also this kind of existential question about, with Europe moving to the right, where does Africa fit into that? And I think if we were to be very straight and crude, we would say a lot of people in Europe see Africa as a source of unmanaged migration. And in a sense, that for a lot of people is a kind of existential threat to their way of life.
In fact, this whole phrase of protecting the European way of life has become part of the political discourse. And what I wanted to do with this essay series was to say, hang on a second. If we look at all of the strategic objectives and threats that Europe faces, it needs partners. And Africa is the most obvious partner. When I first had the idea for this essay series, 2017, that was the year where Africa’s young people became larger in number than the total population of Europe. And Europe is getting older, and that’s got massive implications for fiscal policy for pensions. It’s even currently impacting on European countries’ credit ratings. So, Europe has a major aging problem while Africa’s youth population booms. Look at the climate agenda, and Saliem I’m sure we’ll talk about this later. Europe wants to be competitive in the energy transition.
Africa has 60% of the world’s best solar potential, 70% of cobalt and platinum. There is kind of obvious partnership there. But it can’t be one which is purely extractive. It must be a partnership of mutual interests. If you look at migration, there’s a need to completely rethink those issues. If you look at issues around health security and pandemic preparedness, if you look at AI and technology, if you look at the creative sectors and productivity, there are massive opportunities here, but it requires a complete shift of mindset, which currently isn’t happening in the political discourse. And really what I wanted to do was to give political leaders, particularly the next generation of political leaders, the kinds of arguments and ideas that they could make to, in a sense, shift the Overton window so that Africa is not seen as a development program and is not seen as irrelevant, but is seen as a core strategic partnership for what Europe wants to achieve.
Cobus: So David, just as a scene setter, we’ve become used to, over the last few years, of this drumbeat of anti-migrant sentiment coming out of Europe, but it contains, as you say, it contains some kind of paradoxes, not least, that Europe really, actually for its economic future, Europe desperately needs more migrants. Could you put us a little bit within the European context of how did it happen that migration became such a divisive issue and became framed from such a right-wing perspective. Like, why isn’t there a competing narrative about highlighting other aspects of migration, for example, in European conversation at the moment?
David: I think I would start with the big macro trends, which is Europe has a productivity problem, it has an aging problem. If you look at the latter report, which was a big report commission by the European Commission looking at European integration, it found that a third of Europeans live in regions of Europe that “are slowly left behind.” And there are 60 million Europeans that live in regions where the GDP per capita is lower today than it was in the year 2000. So, people feel poor and they want someone to blame. And I think that creates a dynamic where, of course, it’s really complex to say, “Well, we’ve got this aging problem, these are these big macro trends that are bigger than all of us that we can’t really control.” It’s much easier to say, “Well, that person’s taking my job and therefore we need to kick them out.”
And I think that’s what populist leaders have done. And those with a more nuanced perspective and a longer-term view have not found a way of communicating effectively why we need migrants. Of course, we need to find ways of managing it in an effective way that deals with integration that deals with the kind of management issues around borders, and so on. But it can’t just be let’s keep people out strategy because that doesn’t work for anyone and it won’t solve the productivity problems and the aging problems and the demographic problems that are hitting Europe already, and will hit them much harder in the next coming decades.
Eric: I’m going to say the quiet part out loud here, and Saliem, I’d like you to jump in at any point. David, every point you’ve made makes sense. And it’s the same here in the United States. The Starbucks in my community here at Berkeley closed one afternoon because they didn’t have enough workers to do it. So, one o’clock in the afternoon, they said, “We don’t have enough employees, we’re going to shut the door.” They would rather shut the door on a Starbucks in a bougie upper-middle-class neighborhood than have migrants work behind the counter at Starbucks. In Europe, it’s the same thing. The issue is not that they don’t want immigrants, they need immigrants, as you pointed out, to offset the aging population. They don’t want black immigrants and they don’t want Muslim immigrants. And that has been abundantly clear in the polls and the politics across the continent. Because we saw in the Ukraine war when they were welcoming Ukrainian immigrants with no problem. Viktor Orbán has been probably the best spokesperson of this, and also the Polish Prime Minister as well in saying, “We want to preserve our cultures here.”
So, this idea that they’re going to welcome, out of economic necessity, African immigrants and Muslim immigrants to fill those roles, I just don’t see it. And so, Saliem, I’d be happy to have you weigh in on this before we get to some of the climate issues, but David, can you respond to some of those race and religion issues?
David: Well, I think they’re real issues. I think there’s also an issue of people feeling threatened and they feel that with all of the kind of cultural shifts, economic shifts, people feel like things are being taken away from them. And I think we haven’t yet found a meaningful response to that. But one of the things, and one of the essays that we published here was looking at how can we take a completely left field perspective on migration because the debates and even the word are now so loaded that it’s hard to see how we bring those back into a more reasonable conversation. And part of what we did, and this was an essay that Marta Foresti from LAGO, and I published, was basically to look at the creative industries and to say, but with Africa’s booming youth population is coming a vibrant scene when it comes to music — Nigeria’s Afrobeats, Senegal’s fashion industry.
And there’s a, a huge amount of energy there that if we were to reform even the short term visa system to create spaces in urban environments for creative people to come together, that could unlock a huge amount of value. I think part of what we need to do is to say, “Let’s move away from these toxic words and move away from labels that we put on people, and instead look at specific opportunities that we can create.” And people love the music, people love the fashion, people love the energy and the film and TV and so on. So, is that a route to kind of change this conversation in a way that official debates about migration have not been able to do?
Eric: Saliem, before we go into some of the climate issues, do you want to reflect on some of these opening themes?
Saliem: Yes, sure. No, first I want to congratulate David for pulling together something that I think is timely and important. And I know he’s taken a long time to get here. And now that you look at the work, it’s really important to see. I want to reflect on the reaction of Europe to Africa from three different vantage points. And I want to try to put myself in the position of Europe and its sort of division within Europe as to how to relate and develop a relationship with Africa. I think that the first area that I would like to focus on is the sort of re-tribalization, and I use it in the very loose word of Europe through populist nationalism. The push for majoritarianism, you can see this in the revitalization of traditionalism, but it’s very different from what we see in the U.S.
So, there’s a decline in the early post-European model of unified cosmopolitanism and welcoming, even to some extent to immigrants, and that the immigration issue was not as significant as it is now. And it’s just inflamed by other two factors that I think have contributed to this. So, it might not just be about Africans, but it’s really a story about Europeans and the unsettled and instability that they’re facing in terms of different political threats and economic threats that they are subject to at this present time. And that is outwardly reflecting and there is no central ground anymore on how to carve a vision that is clear with Africa. Because whichever position you take, you are going to be shot down.
So the middle ground is basically a form of conservatism that, in effect, has brought about a treadmill of increased sort of Euro tribalism with a breakdown of sort of a tradition of cosmopolitanism. And that is affecting, I think, the way Europe looks at it. So, two other factors I would say is the cost of living in Europe is going up because you have an aging population with high medical cost. Many parts of Europe are being depopulated of young people. There’s no fresh blood that can sustain local economies. You’ll find that the energy crisis, because of the Ukraine war, has caused some inflationary effects. And there’s a potential in some countries of deindustrialization because of the Inflation Reduction Act, and so on.
And then the European Union is being frogged marshaled with its North Atlantic Alliance to fight a great power war with Russia as first port of call, and then China, if you look in the specific region. And in fact, look at where all the budgets are going. There’s increase in military spend. And who would’ve thought about conscription in Europe at this point in time? So, I do think that this is very much about a troubled Europe, the fracture within Europe that is not creating a center that is useful for a conducive relationship and partnership with Africa, and the culture of cosmopolitanism is really breaking down very rapidly. That’s my summation, that’s my reading. I’m not European, I can see from outside the tensions that are playing out.
Cobus: So, Saliem, as we’ve pointed out, China plays a very large role in this discussion. And in your article in the collection, you were outlining energy and critical mineral approaches from Europe and the U.S. particularly in relation to Chinese influence there. But you also pointed out that there’s some very significant differences between G7 partners in their approaches. So I wonder if you could lay out how Europe and the U.S’s positions are different in relation to critical minerals and energy in Africa and China specifically.
Saliem: I think the Europeans took a more protectionist view. They basically said, “Let’s penalize those who have carbon intensity from exporting goods to us so that we can protect our industries that we will support even on the basis of generating revenue from the carbon border tax adjustment to get them to make a transition to low carbon decarbonized models of production and technology development.” It took a protectionist approach with the hope that that would lead to some level of reindustrialization in the green sector. And hanging together with that is obviously financed through the green deal. And thirdly, the European Union, if I remember engaging, was very focused on the circular economy. But then you had China, which became very dominant in the clean energy sector and green industries.
In fact, if you watch the 3rd plenum, Xi Jinping was very clear that that’s modernization and advancing new technologies is core to Chinese self-determination in the longer term. The U.S. took a different approach, which is also anti-Chinese. And effectively also probably the idea that the U.S. needs to also reshore and claim back the dominance around industrial development. Going back to the Alexander Hamilton days, if you saw the idea of infant industry protection that was germane to the advancement of U.S. industrial development in the 1900s, etc. So, there’s been basically, with the collapse effectively of the World Trade Organization, the U.S. is pumping a lot of incentives, different kinds of incentives to onshore in the U.S. and to bring back jobs into the U.S. on the back of a decarbonization program, supercharged with investments in green hydrogen electric vehicles, expansion of renewables, and also the grid and many other things that they’re trying to do.
And this is to counter the advancement in China. And also, in some respects, also to counter the potential for Europe to also advance in this arena. There is more cooperation happening between the U.S. and the European Union. But it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Trump comes into power, if he does.
Eric: Hey, wait, there’s still a ways to go — still a ways to go.
Saliem: Yeah, there is still ways to go, for sure. Yeah. I think the difference is difference approach, but the intent is more or less the same. And there is the big fear of China’s dominance in the new technology wave, even the advanced AI and quantum technology going into the future.
Eric: David, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has echoed many of the sentiments that Saliem just laid out in terms of China serving as an organizing principle in terms of why Europe needs to be engaged in Africa. And in many ways, Europe is set up as somehow the underdog trying to catch up to Chinese engagement on the continent, which is rather misleading when you look at the statistics, particularly in sectors like mining where all of China’s mining output in Africa accounts for about 8% to 9% of the total. Anglo American has about 16% to 17%, double that of all the Chinese — just one company. And when you look at the statistics on FDI, it’s the same thing.
The former colonial powers remain way ahead of everybody else. And then in your report, you mentioned that the trade paradigm between Europe and Africa looks today much as it did 300 years ago. In 2021, you quoted statistics that said 68% of goods exported from Europe to Africa were manufactured goods, and the majority of imports from Africa were raw materials and energy. That is an extractive relationship. Again, in many cases built on the legacy of colonialism. And so, on the one hand, you’re trying to put a vision and a shape to European outlooks towards Africa, but on the other hand, there already is one that is deeply entrenched. How do you reconcile those two?
David: I think currently there is a misperception among policymakers in the European institutions that they talk about the rhetoric of a partnership of equals and wanting to like pursue common interests. But that rhetoric is not really reflected in the core decision-making of the European Council. It’s not really reflected in trade negotiations. And as you said, the statistics are pretty striking, it’s extract raw materials and export manufactured goods. And I think part of what we need to do is to think through. We’re now entering a kind of unprecedented era where everyone needs to transition their energy systems and their economies pretty rapidly. And there are ways in which we can use finance and trade policy to shift these dynamics towards mutual interest. And I think the other thing that’s changing, and you guys have talked a lot about this, is African leaders now have options over who they want to partner with.
And they’re using that leverage to get the best deal. And I think what has not yet really dawned on a lot of European policymakers is that they’re losing soft power, they’re losing hard power, and that’s because these dynamics are changing, and therefore Europe needs to bring something meaningful to the table. And that comes back to the Global Gateway, because if you look at the EU-Africa Summit that happened in 2022, there was a really striking interview with Cyril Ramaphosa afterwards where he was asked about this pledge, and that was the first time the pledge was made for investing 150 billion euros of the Global Gateway, so half the Global Gateway in Africa. And he said, “Well, let’s see if the money actually materializes.”
And if you look at the data now, I mean, it’s very, very hard to find the data, but there are lots of promises of leveraging private capital that actually are not reflected in the numbers. And therefore we need to really change those dynamics. How do we do that? I think there’s a big part of using European capital, so the multilateral development banks, the European Investment Bank, for example, better leveraging its investment capital in Africa, moving faster. I think there’s also Europe’s role as a trade partner and as a regulatory superpower. One of the essays, by David Luke, at the London School of Economics, basically shows how there’s a collision course happening, where Africa’s ambition is obviously trade integration in the way that Europe did at the start through the Continental Free Trade Area.
But if you look at European trade negotiations, they’re bilateral and they fragment Africa’s internal market. So, there are some kind of basic things that can be done to say, “Okay, if this is a partnership of equals, let’s look at our common interests, let’s look what will serve us together and then negotiate on that basis.” But again, I come back to where we started — that requires a shift of mindset away from the idea that we just have market and to list deals and extract what we want for the short term to a long-term strategic vision for how the two continents can operate together.
Eric: Cobus, this is an area that you spend a lot of time thinking about in your research as well. I’d just love to get your take on what Saliem and David, how they frame this and how the papers frame this in terms of what Africa’s role is in this economic trading system.
Cobus: Africa occupies a kind of a structural position of exclusion frequently from the global economy, where it’s frequently stuck at the bottom of value chains and find it very difficult to industrialize and move up the value chain. Partly like the dynamic that you outline, the trade dynamic between Europe and Europe and Africa is part of that problem and the danger of that being entrenched by growing protectionism that Saliem was also referencing. So one of the issues is that there seems to be a lack of co-planning between the two, not only for African industrialization, but particularly for a kind of African industrialization that would also benefit outputs that European companies can actually use. For example, there’s a big push for mineral refining in Africa.
There’s a big need for intermediary products by some European manufacturers. But there’s not a lot of discussion about how to bring those two together in a way that benefits both sides. The fact that they’re so together geographically, we already see third parties making use of that. For example, we are seeing large-scale Chinese investment in countries like Morocco to produce some battery components, for example, that would then go into cars that are destined for the European market. So, it is possible to make that work. But it is interesting that the party that’s making that work on the level that we’ve seen it so far is China. What lands in between there is sometimes political divisions between how Europe thinks of itself as a global norm leader and how Africa thinks of European norms as sometimes ways of maintaining exclusion.
Saliem was mentioning some of these measures. And I was actually hoping to ask him to expand on that a little bit, particularly in relation to the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. In short term, it’s called CBAM, and it’s been raising a lot of unhappiness among African producers. And Saliem, I wonder if you could put us a little bit in place about what that is and how both Africa and also external actors like China could be pivoting to deal with it.
Saliem: Let me just say the Carbon Border tax adjustment mechanism, in fact, David Luke, who wrote a paper, did a wonderful study on the impacts of CBAM on African exports. And a couple of countries, basically any country that is carbon intense like South Africa, which is highly coal-dependent, if you look at Egypt, oil and gas, Nigeria, etc., that are exporting into the European Union, they would have to sort of identify the level of carbon intensity that is embedded in the goods. And the European Union would institute a sort of a carbon tax on those goods and make them less competitive within the EU effectively.
And if you wanted to, you’ll have to either decarbonize in your own country or you’ll have to pay the penalty within the EU. And the EU has not clarified how it would use the revenues that it will collect. The assumption is that it will use it to support its own decarbonization and still continue to penalize and not support transitions outside. And those supported transitions won’t work if there is no substantive form of partnership between the EU and Africa on how these CBAM mechanisms can be alleviated over time. So, to be able to allow for some transition mechanism and support to be given to that. we did that very well under the Montreal Protocol. And so we ought to be able to figure this out also for the CBAM in Europe.
But the CBAM in Europe is not the only one. We find that other G7 countries are also going to start to, to introduce as… UK, for example, is looking into this in South Africa, put out a statement objecting to that and calling on the harm that it might cause. I just wanted to say something about the nature of Europe’s approach to climate issues with regard to Africa. It’s not a unified position. For example, we must distinguish between the European Union and member states. Different member states may have completely different approaches and kinds of diplomacy around climate issues compared to the European Commission itself. It’s very important for us to be able to distinguish that. Secondly, the EU is very much focused on climate risk and vulnerability that leads to migration on sort of forced migration into Europe, even though there may be a migration as a result of conflict and other factors. So that’s where they are really concentrating. And then thirdly, wherever they are doing sort of industrial development, whether it’s for electric vehicles and so on, it’s a very fragmented approach.
It’ll be highly, mostly concentrated like green hydrogen, and we concentrate in Namibia, Egypt, EVs probably in Morocco and potentially in South Africa, although the Chinese are starting to move rapidly with the manufacturing of battery technology and also electric vehicles in South Africa. So their approach to climate investments is very much about market creation and a very fragmented approach. And that also influences the investment decisions. Thirdly, I would like to say that, on the Global Gateway Initiative, we are working with NEPAD and the Africa Europe Foundation to try to understand where the Global Gateway initiative is presently, how it is working within the bureaucratic system of the European Union, and what are already pipeline of investments that are envisaged or are being invested so that we can get some sense of being able to track progress since it has been announced, 150 billion Euro.
Eric: David, I’d like to close our discussion, and Saliem, I’d like to get your thoughts on this as well, some final thoughts. David, you said you started this in 2017 to think about this. Here we are in 2024, and we’re still having this discussion of explaining why Africa’s important to Europe, same discussion that’s going on in the United States. And in many cases, these are difficult discussions to have. People just don’t buy it. You have a very optimistic outlook in this report. You’re really trying to give a vision and lay it out. It’s a tough sell, I imagine, in many parts of Europe. And we have talked about Europe really as a continental power, but at the end of the day, it’s more than two dozen individual countries that have their own bilateral policies, which as Saliem pointed out, sometimes are consistent with what the European Union wants to do, and sometimes they’re not.
So this is even more complicated than that. But does it surprise you that seven years after you started thinking about this, here in 2024, we’re still having what is effectively a foundational discussion about what Europe wants from Africa, when in fact this is something that should have happened decades ago and should have been evolving consistently, but still, for the most part, hasn’t? What do you want people to take away from this discussion and your report?
David: Well, I wouldn’t just say that it’s surprising that we’re still having the discussion. I think it’s actually got worse. The politics have got worse. The behavior of European institutions and their hypocrisy around the vaccine issues, the stuff that Saliem has talked about with the Carbon Border Adjustment Program, and the divesting of investment in fossil fuels for emerging markets, but then as soon as Russia and invades Africa, buying up new gas. We’re moving into an era where I think policymakers are just not thinking strategically or they’re consumed by the things that are right in front of them. And I remember an old boss of mine used to talk about the fact that we’re like responding to like hard military threats that are the same threats that existed in the 1950s, but we really haven’t got these kind of new trends that are going to be the real drivers of shaping our societies for the long term.
And really what I want policymakers to take away from this is, sure, you’ve got a lot on your agenda, but look at the data. Look at the long-term trends on demography, on climate, on trade, on productivity. All these things mean that if you want to be foresighted, if you want to have a legacy, if you want to be remembered, and if we want to maintain peace and prosperity across both continents, then we need to be making these deals, making these investments now. And if we don’t take that four-sided approach, then we’re just going to be responding to crises, and those crises are going to amplify, and we’re going to be in a situation where things are getting worse and worse. So, take a strategic approach. I’m not confident, to be honest, that the current political leadership are going to really buy that. What I’m hoping is that these kinds of ideas can be fed into the next generation of political leaders who, when they come into par, will see things somewhat differently.
Eric: Saliem, you’re going get the last word. What do you want people to take away from this report and this discussion?
Saliem: The African continent is also having to organize itself around a responsiveness to different geopolitical partners that is more coherent. I don’t think it is there where we can’t just say, well… I think the Europeans can fragment Africa because even on the continent, the approaches to dealing with Europe is on a fragmented base, and we shouldn’t miss that point. So even though there’s a Pan-African sentiment, there’s a Pan-African institutional mechanism, and now we have the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement, there is a stronger desire for many Africans to not only have a unified political setup, but also an economic setup that hopefully an overarching, sort of the discussions that are happening within the global finance reform agenda, architecture agenda for an African monetary union.
These are long way away. These are obviously desires and dreams that need to be achieved, but there’s a real danger that a unified approach that is a sentiment and aspiration within the continent cannot move forward when there’s also a divisive competition between different geopolitical partners that are also scrambling for the continent and breaking up… We’re creating a source of self-interest dynamics on both sides, which is not conducive in my view for what I would say we need to work very hard. And this is clearly also the work of the African Climate Foundation to take a more unified approach, at least on climate and many economic issues.
But just the last point, I would say that where the vision of Africa and Europe is not aligned, and I would say that is a stronger desire now that we have, the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement, is a desire to connect energy access, cheap expansion of electrification with energy security, and then to look at a diversified economic model. So many countries are moving to a more greater diversification. And then to connect that with scale up of technology, decarbonized technology that brings, makes African economies more resilient to any type of risk that they may face from a carbon-concentrated work going into the future.
We’re still long way from that, but these are aspirations we need to fight for. And I think, lastly, the European Union is very internally focused and will increasingly be so. If Trump wins, that will even be magnified. And the threat of Russia expanding its influence within Europe and disinformation campaigns and other things, and what China’s competition, the Europeans will still continue to see Africa as not really a true partner, and maybe not even a strong focus in the interim. But I think the realities on the continent are changing rapidly with a very young population where Africa’s population is going to be caught over the world’s population. That pressure will come to bear on Europe. It’s too close for you to ignore.
Eric: The report is Why Europe Needs Africa, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It’s a collection of seven essays that was edited by David McNair, who’s a non-resident scholar in Carnegie Africa’s Program, and executive director of the anti-poverty NGO ONE.org. Also co-edited by Kyla Denwood. And also one of the contributors of those seven essays was Saliem Fakir, who’s the executive director of the African Climate Foundation and joins us on the line from Cape Town, today. Saliem, David, thank you so much for your time today. We’re going to put a link to the report in the show notes, and we really appreciate your insights.
Saliem: No, thank you, Eric. This was wonderful. And also David and Cobus, to engage with you as well. Thank you very much.
David: Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Cobus.
Eric: Cobus, after what we experienced in Washington and then listening to Saliem and David hear about the sum of the same challenges, maybe not identical, but there is a vision problem in Europe towards Africa. And again, rooted in many of the same concerns about migration and domestic politics and far-right politics and all of this. It brings me back to the fact that say what you want about the Chinese, and there’s a lot to criticize, and we’ve done that a lot on our shows, but at least there is a clear vision. When they come with the Belt and Road, when they talk about bricks, when they talk about the new development bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, these are all visions, these are blueprints. They’re forward-looking, and that’s something that’s missing in the U.S.-European debate.
They don’t have the programs. Global Gateway was supposed to be that Belt and Road vision, but I don’t think, again, as your president, Cyril Ramaphosa said, “I’ll believe it when I see the money.” And I don’t think that people are persuaded that Global Gateway or PGI in the United States are any type of visionary rivals to the Belt and Road. And so we have a vision problem. And in that respect, I think the Chinese have a distinct advantage.
Cobus: I agree. I mean, for me, the Chinese advantage is both that they themselves bring a vision, but also that the precedent of the work that they’ve done in Africa, I mean, good, bad, it’s a mixed bag, but the fact that they just did all these projects and got them in on time, some of them, most of them, and everything continued moving forward, that itself, I think it fundamentally shifted the narratives about what doing business in Africa could look like. And so, in that sense, I think China, just of the precedent that it set, also opened the door to a whole bunch of other emerging powers to do very similar work in Africa.
And what that also brings is a different set of kind of state private hybrid actors that find it easier to engage with state-owned enterprises in Africa, whereas on the western side, and that I think we’ve particularly seen in the U.S., but it’s also true in Europe. There, the calculus is a lot more about trying to corral a very reluctant private sector into doing business in Africa, which is a whole other political challenge. And that emerges from the way that these companies are set up. I’m hesitant always about global gateway versus BRI or simply because-
Eric: Yeah, I think those are bad comparisons.
Cobus: Not necessarily, but I mean that is how it’s set up also by proponents of the Global Gateway. But the reason I’m hesitant about it is when you speak to Africans, they’re like, “Yeah, we need both. We need three, five different Global Gateways from different places.” So there’s enough space in Africa for all of these actors to be engaged, and they don’t even have to work together. They can just be in the same landscape. The kind of narrative logic of one having to displace the other I think is inherently flawed. But unfortunately, that is the narrative that we’re getting at the moment from both the EU and the U.S., I think.
Eric: One of the aspects of the readouts from African and Chinese high-level engagements, whether it’s at the president level or at the foreign minister level, is at the bottom, there is a reference, and this is from the Chinese side, how the two discuss their shared colonial history. And the Chinese are seemingly emphasizing more of the shared bond of colonial trauma that they suffered at the hands of the likes of the Europeans, and to some extent the Americans, and certainly, in Asia, by the hands of the Japanese. Of course, that has no bearing on Africa. But this idea of colonial trauma is one that is playing out in the Sahel where you’re seeing this passionate drive to expel the French and, and, again, the depths of just acidity that so many young people feel towards the French cannot be overstated. And yet in France, people don’t really hear very much about that as much.
I follow French media quite closely in the discourse in France about the Sahel. It’s so radically different than what we’re seeing on the outside, and definitely different than what people are talking about in Africa. But when we talk about Europe-Africa relations, it seems that the colonial trauma, which is still present today, cannot be separated from it. And yet it’s very, very much something Europeans don’t like to talk about.
Cobus: Yes. The fact that they don’t like to talk about it is maybe understandable considering what we’re talking about. But also-
Eric: You come from the country of truth and reconciliation. I mean, at the end of the day, we cannot move forward, and this is in-
Cobus: Can’t move forward without talking about it. Exactly.
Eric: That’s exactly it. And just pretending that it isn’t there, or it was in the past. And in the United States, it’s even worse in many respects because, in the United States, we are ahistorical. So they will talk about the Congo as if the United States had nothing to do with the present-day catastrophe in terms of Governance.
Cobus: Yeah. Just somehow magically, yeah.
Eric: I mean it just happened this way, as if we were not involved 40… it just somehow magically happened. It’s ahistorical. and so it’s a certain level of denial. And by the way, that is present in our own culture here in the United States, that we don’t want to talk about the traumas of slavery. And they’re literally rolling back discussions about race and accountability in many of the school districts. So, it’s not even a forward-looking, it’s a backward-looking thing. I tend to think that there’s a little bit of that or quite a bit of that in Europe as well.
Cobus: I think so. And the thing is, as David and Saliem were pointing out, and many people point out this demographic kind of weight of Africa, right? Soon, a large percentage of the world’s population is going to be African. And what that means, and particularly considering that these are such young people, what that means is not only that they’re going to be more important and important workforce and market and so on, but it means that their worldview is going to be more important, right? Their worldview is going to be more dominant. Europe and the U.S. may have forgotten about these things or like have chosen to forgotten about it, but historically it’s very recent. I mean, the decolonization of Angola and Mozambique from Portugal was in the ’70s. It’s like in living memory of people that are not even objectively that old.
In that sense, there’s going to have to be some reckoning with this because, the Europe might have forgotten, but Africans have certainly not forgotten. And in a lot of ways, these things are still very live. People feel the impact of European kind of dominance in their societies. They feel it on a daily basis, and none of it is good. It manifests as a systemic underdevelopment. And a love of baguettes and croissants might be packed in there, but it’s certainly not the dominant experience of that relationship. And so they’re going to have to work it out in some way. There’s no other way.
Eric: Well, It’s interesting because in Vietnam where I live, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, just passed away and part of his legacy was overthrowing the French colonial government. And that’s an amazing thing that you and I are alive today, Cobus, where these legacies are fresh. I mean this colonial legacy was not that long ago in the lifetime of some of the current leaders. And that’s one of the reasons why I think the Chinese are signaling, in their official communications, about the shared trauma of colonialism. And so I think, to your point, it’s a very powerful thing. And by the way, it’s coming at an interesting time because we are now six weeks away from the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Summit, taking place on September 3rd in Beijing, where dozens, if not the vast majority of African leaders are going to go. And so as we talk about this lack of vision in Europe, in the United States, the Chinese have a unique opportunity.
And man, if I were the Chinese, if Xi Jinping invited me over for coffee, which will never happen by the way, but if he did, I would say, “You should double down. This is your moment. Because these guys, it’s the keystone cops in Brussels and Washington right now. You have a unique opportunity right now to lock in not only Africa, but other parts of the global south because Europe and the United States are now consumed with wars in the Middle East Russia, and, of course, in the South China Sea and Southeast Asia and other places where the Chinese can make huge inroads diplomatically and in soft power.”
I don’t know if they will, their mind is also distracted by domestic politics as well. But FOCAC hack is coming up. How does this play into all of this of what we’ve been talking about over the past couple of weeks?
Cobus: I agree that I think China has this kind of opportunity. And, of course, it has its own reasons for leaning into this, not least because it frequently finds its own engagement in Africa framed by Africans, particularly civil society as a neocolonial. So I have some problems, where I find that that argument a little incoherent or ahistorical itself considering what African colonialism has looked like in the past. But it certainly reflects misgivings on the African side about trade imbalances, about power imbalances, about the acting, the way that certain Chinese actors, particularly on the private sector sometimes treat workers. There’s a conversation in Africa around whether Chinese engagement in Africa is good or not, which the Chinese should be aware of.
And I’m sure that part of this very heavy leaning into the historical legacy of Western colonialism is part of that. The problem is that Western actors are so blinkered — not blinkered. I think there’s such repressed issues around this historical legacy that they find it very, very difficult to move forward. They find it difficult to face it and acknowledge it and to actually decide what to do about it, which means it leaves a very fruitful rhetorical opportunity for China and for other emerging actors. I mean, Russia is playing the anti-colonial card itself, even though Russian actors acted quite colonially in Africa in the past. The legacy of Russians in Mozambique in the seventies is very close to what we’ve seen in the past. And there’s been a colonial discourse in Russia as well about Africa. But the fact that Russia can lean into that narrative shows how incoherent that discussion is, but at the same time how live those resentments are.
Eric: Well, just a little bit of housekeeping now before we wrap up, the month of August, we are going to dedicate our columns to FOCAC. So, Cobus and I are going to be writing every week about different perspectives on fac. We’re also going to be reaching out to almost three dozen Africa-China scholars around the world to get their perspectives and to share with you what they’re expecting from FOCAC. And we’re going to include those in our China Africa Podcast, on this show, but also in our newsletter as well. And we’re going to try and give you as diverse, a range of opinions about FOCAC from the perspective of Chinese Africans and others as well. So, keep a lookout for that in the month of August. Cobus, let’s leave the discussion there. What a fascinating time to be talking about great power politics — Europe, United States, African — and what each wants from each other.
If this is the kind of thing that you just love, well, that’s what we do every single day at the China Global South Project. We just have this fantastic team that’s in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, producing some phenomenal research on mining and FOCAC, and these other issues that nobody else is covering. And so, if you’d like to support the work that we do, we would surely appreciate that. Subscriptions are very affordable at just $19 a month — $199 a year. And most of our folks, they write it off as a business expense. But if you are a student or a teacher and you would like to get half off, just email me, eric@chinaglobalsouth.com, and I will send you the links for the $10 subscription rate. So that’ll do it for this edition of the China in Africa Podcast. Cobus and I will be back again next week with another episode. Until then, thank you so much for listening.
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