How does the continent press its advantages in the age of multipolarity, summit diplomacy and the new scramble for minerals for the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
The recent Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing highlighted the importance for African countries of their relations with China. All were represented (except Eswatini), dozens at head of state level.
The meeting demonstrated China's commitment to Africa, with President Xi pledging another $50 billion of badly-needed investment in Africa over the next three years and meeting many African leaders one-to-one. But it was also criticised on the grounds that such Africa+1 summits make African leaders appear as supplicants, coming when called to plead for crumbs from the tables of the rich.
More interesting, however, was what it revealed about the dilemmas facing African governments as the world moves away from a multilateral order based on institutions, rules and norms towards a multipolar system based predominantly on the exercise of economic and military power. If they are to be winners not losers from this process, African countries need to respond in a smarter, more unified way to this shifting global order.
Of course, being courted by great powers should give African governments extra leverage. But can they use it? And if so, use it for what?
The mirage of China-Africa
China presents itself as an equal partner with fellow countries of the 'Global South' and one that, unlike Western countries, places no political conditionality on its partnership. Yet its current economic relations with Africa closely mirror those of the former colonial powers. China invests in infrastructure and primary production in order to import African raw materials - copper, lithium, gold, rare earths, oil and gas, coffee and wine - and then exports Chinese manufactures - mobile phones, electronics, vehicles and more - to the continent, running a sizeable trade surplus amounting to 2.6% of Africa's total GDP in 2022..
The investments have also saddled several African countries (Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ghana) with heavy debts that it has been reluctant to forgive. So, while the relationship is portrayed as win-win, with Chinese political support reflected in African support for China's position at the UN, economically one side wins significantly more than the other.
Russia offers partnerships of a different kind, providing military support in return for access to precious minerals. This has been helpful for the survival of several regimes in the Sahel and central Africa, even if it has exacerbated relations with their ECOWAS neighbours.
Still, neither China nor Russia can match the financial firepower of Western governments and the multilateral institutions. Even if bilateral aid volumes are falling, many African countries still rely on support from the IMF, World Bank, African Development Bank and EU to make ends meet, and on Western capital to provide funds for investment, and Western markets for their manufactured exports. But these tend to come with financial and sometimes political requirements that are often felt to be onerous, while some investments - like the Lobito corridor railway in Angola - reflect Western strategic concerns as much as African economic interests.
With African countries competing, often with each other, for investment, trade and aid, it is relatively easy for external powers to play one against another in the quest for support. So why not present a united front?
Pan-Africanism vs the neoliberal calculus
Since its birth in the diaspora in the late-19th century and its later migration to the continent where it became the driving force of the liberation movement, pan-Africanism has been a powerful ideological force. The case was clearly set out by Kwame Nkrumah and others in their political writings in the 1950s and '60s. But it has too often been subordinated to the political survival of national regimes. Regional economic communities, the institutional stopovers to full economic and political integration, were set up at first with pan-African zeal, but later, increasingly with neoliberal calculation, where markets rather than people were the focus of integration. Even so, they found themselves dealing more often with political and security issues than economic integration. The multiplication of different overlapping economic initiatives (Tanzania alone belongs to the EAC, SADC and COMESA) also meant the efforts at integration created incoherence as much as convergence.
After 2000, however, the pan-African impetus revived. The OAU was transformed into the African Union in 2002; ambitious agendas for development and unity by 2063 were agreed; the East African Community was revived and began to accelerate economic integration. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was launched in 2018.
Africa has also successfully lobbied for more representation in international fora, gaining a seat for the AU at G20 meetings. The US has also now given its explicit backing for two permanent seats for Africa in the UN Security Council.
But closer integration has stalled again. Not just in Africa: the EU has also found it hard to maintain the impetus for integration against the growing forces of populist nationalism and protectionism. But for Africa, external as well as internal forces are working against closer unity.
Africa in disintegration?
Some of these forces are largely outside Africa's control. Climate change is having a more drastic impact in Africa than elsewhere - the floods, droughts and heatwaves being all the more devastating where people are less protected. Combined with rapid demographic growth, a result of improving health care, this puts growing pressure on limited resources.
Without robust political structures to manage that pressure, the result is all too often increased conflict - such as we have seen across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa in recent years. States like Burkina Faso and Sudan are effectively disintegrating before our eyes. This is no coincidence and will happen elsewhere as climate impacts worsen unless preventive action is taken swiftly.
But in other areas too, like the Great Lakes, instability has become chronic, with external actors seeking their own advantage to the detriment of local stability: some states struggle to assert their authority in peripheral regions, and official borders no longer reflect who has de facto control of an area.
As Dani Rodrik has argued, Africa may find itself the victim of an economic trilemma that makes it hard to tackle climate change, reduce poverty, and keep the middle class happy in countries that aspire to democracy. The recent riots in Kenya have highlighted exactly this trilemma, middle class youth protesting against the political choices the government is making on the economy. Nigeria faces similar challenges as it seeks to bring its public finances under control in the face of rampant corruption and unaffordable petrol subsidies. The politics in many of these countries are as fragile as the environment and, put under too much pressure, are at risk of collapsing.
A playground for powers great and middling
Yet African solutions for these African problems have been in short supply. The Political and Security Committee of the AU has issued statements but been unable to act. Action by the UN Security Council has also been blocked by Great Power rivalry, and UN peace-keeping forces have been pulled out of Mali, Sudan and the DRC, while the African Union force in Somalia, ATMIS, is also under notice to be wound down.
They are not leaving because peace has been established. On the contrary, with both Africa and the Great Powers divided, middle powers have felt at liberty to intervene in pursuit of their own agendas. In the Horn, regional powers like Egypt, Turkey or the Gulf monarchies have taken sides and stoked rather than resolved conflicts. In the Sahel, Russia's support for the juntas encouraged them to leave ECOWAS, while singularly failing to defeat the jihadists who threaten people's livelihoods. Displacement and destruction have followed and development has been set back a decade or more.
The multipolar world may not have caused Africa's problems, but on recent evidence it is exacerbating rather than resolving existing conflicts.
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How to move forward
In practice, the multilateral institutions and the rules-based order were created to protect and support small countries and vulnerable minorities. They are far from ideal - like all diplomatic outcomes they were the result of compromise and realpolitik. So reform is both desirable and urgent. But if they are destroyed or neutered, it is the poor and the world's smaller states that will suffer the most.
Africa is about to choose a new President of the AU. The challenge the new man faces - the candidates are all male - will be enormous. But necessity also provides an opportunity to demand greater and more effective unity if Africa is to defend its own interests in a multipolar world.
Three priorities stand out:
Firstly, to accelerate Africa's economic integration so it can reap greater benefit from its natural resources and rapidly growing human market. Member states should be relentlessly pushed to implement the AfCFTA and overcome the obstacles thrown up by often corrupt vested interests as well as the understandable concerns of national industries. Everyone will gain if leaders are willing to be brave and honest about the benefits.
Secondly, African countries need to hammer out common negotiating positions to take with the middle powers stoking conflict, as well as with the Great Powers - China, US and EU - that must support solutions. And they need to offer those solutions themselves.
Thirdly, African governments need not only to press for reform of the multilateral institutions, but insist that they be allowed to do their work, and support them in doing it. If big countries ignore the rules, small countries will be reduced to clients or become mere victims of proxy wars. So Africa has to find a way to speak with one voice, a voice that will carry on the world stage.
Nick Westcott is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London.
