Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Tensions on Ethiopia’s borders with Somalia and Sudan, mpox vaccines aren’t reaching the Democratic Republic of the Congo quickly enough, and a civilian nuclear power deal between the United States and Ghana.
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African Leaders Head to Beijing
Officials from approximately 50 African nations are in Beijing for a China-Africa summit that begins today—the first such gathering since the expansion of the BRICS bloc last year. The grouping, initially formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, recently added two African countries—Egypt and Ethiopia—as well as several other new members.
Ethiopia—represented by Foreign Minister Taye Atske-Selassie—is expected to make several deals with China at the summit, as Beijing has lately focused less on big infrastructure loans and more on smaller green technology financing, such as its $14 million Africa Solar Belt program to supply 50,000 African households, including in Chad and Nigeria, with solar energy.
Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, has often been referred to as the “city that China built.” Ethiopia is Africa’s second-largest debtor to China, with several massive completed rail and road projects, including a $475 million light-rail system, an $86 million ring road, and the $5 billion Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway line.
What’s special about Ethiopia is that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is one of the few African leaders to have successfully leveraged China’s model of special economic zones within his country’s textiles industry—although this strategy was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and civil war. These zones are Chinese-backed industrial parks that manufacture finished goods for export—an avenue for growth that the continent has lacked.
Crucially, Addis Ababa has adapted its business dealings with Beijing—from megaprojects to small-scale private sector lending—as China’s economy has stagnated, a reality that many other African nations have not properly adjusted to in their negotiations. Ethiopia’s attention has now turned to the electric vehicles (EVs) industry, a market that China has dominated.
Last year, Ethiopia banned the import of nonelectric cars from everywhere and offered a new tax exemption for the import of electric cars as part of a 10-year development plan that calls on the government to aid in the creation of at least 50 emerging technology enterprises. In June, Ethiopia opened its largest EV factory yet, a locally owned plant in the city of Debre Berhan in the Amhara region. The effort is aimed at reducing the country’s dependence on imported vehicles, mostly by building cars domestically from Chinese-made components.
Western nations are clamping down on the Chinese EV industry by imposing high tariffs, meaning that Beijing’s focus could shift to Africa as a potential growth area for its export market as well as a manufacturing site for cheap labor. Chinese exports of electric vehicles to Africa increased by 291 percent in 2023.
To upgrade its transportation infrastructure, Addis Ababa aims to import around 5,000 electric buses and more than 100,000 electric cars. About nine Ethiopian firms also build vehicles from semi-assembled car parts imported from China, whose engineers have provided Ethiopian workers with the necessary skills as part of a modernized form of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Abiy wants to expand on all of this to boost Ethiopian jobs, and last month, Ethiopian Trade Minister Alemu Sime encouraged Chinese manufacturers to explore EV production and assembly opportunities in the country.
These are just some of the ways in which Ethiopia has gone from striking big-ticket rail and road agreements to negotiating the smaller private-sector green deals that Beijing is now offering. Its BRICS membership will make these business negotiations much easier, allowing Addis Ababa access to the bloc’s major initiatives—the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement—in terms of financing its own development plans by leveraging China’s global ambitions.
According to research by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, Beijing has shifted its financing in recent years toward social development and green energy projects such as hydropower. And in his address to the summit on Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to promote China’s green energy industry to African leaders.
Another major topic at the summit will be value addition on minerals exports. African leaders are looking to hammer out fairer resource extraction deals—not just with China, but also with India and Western nations. Amid growing great-power competition over resources, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye is visiting China for the first time. Senegal recently rolled back deals with European companies and set up a committee to review the country’s oil and gas contracts.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema will also be a leader to watch, as his country is the site of dueling railway projects spearheaded by the United States and China for critical minerals exports. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s president—Félix Tshisekedi, who recently renegotiated a $7 billion infrastructure deal with China for copper and cobalt mining—could also be looking for more deals with Beijing. Xi pledged in a meeting on Monday with Tshisekedi to help the Congo add value to the critical minerals that it exports.
Read more about China’s EV and green tech industry in this week’s FP China Brief here.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, Sept. 4: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara to rebuild diplomatic ties and discuss the war in Gaza.
Nigeria’s money laundering case against Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan continues in a federal high court in Abuja.
Wednesday, Sept. 4, to Friday, Sept. 6: The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit is held in Beijing.
The African Union holds a forum in Addis Ababa to discuss rapid urbanization.
Saturday, Sept. 7: Algeria holds presidential elections.
What We’re Watching
Somalia-Ethiopia tensions. Somalia, which signed a defense pact with Egypt last year, has now received weapons and ammunition from Cairo. Somalia’s ambassador to Cairo, Ali Abdi Aware, confirmed the delivery last Tuesday while speaking to Somali radio station Arlaadi Media. He added that Egyptian troops would be deployed within an updated African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia. As Foreign Policy recently reported, Mogadishu has sought military backing from Cairo in response to Addis Ababa’s port deal with Somaliland—a breakaway region that claims independence from Somalia.
Cairo has a separate conflict with Ethiopia over a controversial mega dam, and the prospect of Egyptian troops near its borders is something that Ethiopia opposes. Ethiopia’s foreign minister issued a warning following Turkey-led peace talks. “Tangible progress has been made in these talks. Instead of pursuing these efforts for peace, the Government of Somalia is colluding with external actors aiming to destabilize the region,” the statement read. “Forces trying to inflame tension for their short-term and futile objectives must shoulder the grave ramifications.”
Ethiopia is also facing tensions on its western border. Sudanese officials in the eastern Gedaref state closed a border crossing with Ethiopia on Sunday after Fano fighters from a militia across the border in Ethiopia’s Amhara state seized the town of Metema, according to Sudan Tribune. The fighting has forced hundreds of Sudanese refugees at a reception camp near Metema to flee back to Sudan, where there is an ongoing civil war.
Libya oil disruptions. Libya’s central bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, has fled the country due to threats from armed militias as two rival governments fight for control of the institution. “Militias are threatening and terrifying bank staff and are sometimes abducting their children and relatives to force them to go to work,” he told the Financial Times on Friday. As FP reported last week, the Tripoli-based government recently replaced Kabir with a rival board, prompting the eastern government to enforce a blockade on oil exports. According to a U.N.-brokered accord, both governments should endorse who heads the central bank.
Mpox response in DRC. A much-needed vaccination program for mpox has been set back in Congo, the epicenter of a new variant outbreak, due to delays in approving the jabs. Last Tuesday, Nigeria received 10,000 doses of mpox vaccines donated by the U.S. government—but that deal process had begun well before the latest outbreak; the badly needed vaccines were earmarked for Nigeria after a 2022 outbreak but took two years to reach the country.
There’s a risk that if the vaccines don’t get to where they are needed in time, there could be a repeat of what happened with COVID-19 vaccines, when by the time they had arrived in African nations, much of the public had already had the infection and therefore no longer wanted to be vaccinated. Epidemiologists suggest that had vaccines been available in Africa when an outbreak of a milder mpox variant hit in 2022, this new and more serious outbreak would not have occurred.
Uganda shooting. Ugandan opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, better known as Bobi Wine, was reportedly shot by police near Kampala on Tuesday, according to Wine’s party. The National Unity Platform accused security officials of making “an attempt on the life” of the opposition leader who had to be “rushed to hospital for urgent medical attention.” Wine can be seen in pain after apparently being shot in the leg in a video circulating online.
This Week in Tech and Paleontology
U.S.-Ghana nuclear deal. Ghana has signed an agreement with a U.S. company to help build the country’s first small nuclear reactor. The landmark agreement is seen as a win for Washington at a time when the U.S. government is seeking to counter the influence of Russia and China in Africa. Regnum Technology Group won out against other bids from China, Russia, and South Korea.
Neighboring Burkina Faso signed an agreement with Russian state nuclear company Rosatom last year to build a nuclear power plant. Ghana’s agreement includes technical training. In a statement, the U.S. State Department called it a “significant milestone” in civil nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Ghanaian nuclear industries.
Prints confirm supercontinent theory. Near identical dinosaur footprints found in South America and Africa affirm the theory that the two regions were once part of the same megacontinent, called Gondwana. Researchers were able to identify more than 260 matching footprints in Brazil and Cameroon that date to 120 million years ago. The two continents began to split apart about 140 million years ago.
“We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar, in their geological and plate tectonic contexts,” said Louis L. Jacobs, the lead author of the study. “Any of us can see that Africa and South America used to fit together like puzzle pieces. It is easy to conceive that in a connected world, animals, including dinosaurs, could and would be likely to move from place to place.”
FP’s Most Read This Week
- How the Russian Establishment Really Sees the War Ending by Anatol Lieven
- M. Night Shyamalan Pulls Off the Ultimate Twist by Jordan Hoffman
- How the Hundred Years’ War Explains Ukraine’s Invasion of Russia by Lucian Staiano-Daniels
What We’re Reading
UAE weapons in Sudan. In Foreign Policy, Yasir Zaidan argues that the international community has failed to resolve the war in Sudan because it has ignored the Emirati government’s reported support of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.
“The UAE and its proxy, the RSF, must be held accountable for their alleged crimes. … The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council should publicly address the UAE’s reported support of RSF crimes and the Emirati government’s violation of the international arms embargo in Darfur,” Zaidan writes. More worrying, media reports suggest that the U.K., serving as the current penholder on Sudan in the Security Council, has been actively discouraging African states from criticizing the UAE.
Ethiopia’s Beetle-mania. In the Guardian, Fred Harter writes on Ethiopia’s love affair with the Volkswagen Beetle, which still populates the capital’s roads. “Many people in Addis Ababa associate Beetles with old men who still pootle about in the rickety models they bought half a century ago, but a younger generation of petrolheads have also embraced the car and its vintage look,” Harter writes.
Chinese army medics in South Africa. South Africans in Cape Town are flocking to a Chinese hospital onboard a ship for free medical care, Mohammed Allie reports for the BBC. More than 2,000 South Africans have been treated by Chinese and South African army medics on board China’s so-called Peace Ark, which docked two weeks ago.
