Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Egypt unveils plans for another urban megaproject, the Wagner Group leaves Mali after three and a half years, and Ghana recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
Egypt’s Debt-Funded Megaprojects
Earlier this month, Egypt unveiled plans to develop a new 1,680-acre desert city named Jirian. The massive initiative will see roughly 7 percent of the country’s annual Nile River quota rerouted from fertile delta regions via a human-made channel that winds through the city. It will be located near the colossal Grand Egyptian Museum, which recently opened on the outskirts of Cairo, and the Sphinx International Airport.
It is the latest in a string of megaprojects undertaken by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. These have included a $59 billion new administrative capital east of Cairo, a $1.3 billion monorail, a $23 billion high-speed rail, and several other planned upmarket cities—all financed with soaring external debt.
Egypt’s hope is that these projects will spur long-term growth and development. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly has said that the Jirian development, for instance, will create 250,000 jobs and homes for millions of families.
Yet critics argue that these undertakings are just another way for the Sisi regime to ensure its grip on the country. Since Sisi led a military coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, the military has been closely involved in many government projects. As firms connected to the military gain control over more prime real estate, many of the country’s urban poor are being moved to the outskirts of cities, making it harder to mobilize mass unrest.
Meanwhile, multilateral lenders and governments continue to pour billions of dollars into Egypt. The country receives loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union, and China, as well as grants from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Egypt’s external debt has climbed from $37 billion in 2010 to $155 billion as of last September.
An initial $3 billion IMF bailout package approved in 2022 was expanded to $8 billion in March 2024. In April, the EU approved a $4.6 billion loan package for Egypt.
Meanwhile, Egypt has partnered for many of its infrastructure projects with Chinese companies, including the state-owned China State Construction Engineering Corporation. And the UAE has invested $35 billion in a project in Ras El Hekma, a planned resort destination on the Mediterranean coast.
Although the Egyptian economy is recovering this year, as financial reforms required by the IMF have put the country on a growth trajectory, many analysts warn that Sisi’s failure to curb spending on vanity projects could harm the country’s economic prospects.
In February, Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris called for the country to reconsider its foreign-funded megaprojects spurred by what he described as “an overambitious president.” Last month, international trade expert Nermin Tahoun warned that Egypt’s debt service burden surpasses 50 percent of its public spending and could lead to worse fiscal challenges for the country.
The Jirian luxury city is expected to take five years to complete. In the meantime, poverty in Egypt is on the rise, and ordinary Egyptians continue to face a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation hit a four-month high in May, reaching 16.8 percent.
The Week Ahead
Wednesday, June 11, to Friday, June 13: The Africa Impact Summit is held in Accra, Ghana.
Thursday, June 12: Kenyan Treasury Secretary John Mbadi presents the 2025-26 budget to parliament.
Nigeria celebrates Democracy Day, which marks the restoration of democracy in 1999 following the annulled 1993 presidential election that culminated in a military coup.
What We’re Watching
Sudan’s civil war. The number of people who have fled Sudan since war broke out in 2023 between factions loyal to rival generals has surpassed 4 million, according to the latest data from the U.N. refugee agency.
Last week, agency spokesperson Eujin Byun described the war as “the world’s most damaging displacement crisis at the moment.” “If the conflict continues in Sudan … we expect thousands more people will continue to flee, putting regional and global stability at stake,” she said.
Wagner exits Mali. On Friday, Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group announced that it would leave Mali after more than three and a half years as the country grapples with a worsening Islamist insurgency.
In a message on its Telegram channel, Wagner said it was withdrawing after “the completion of its main mission,” during which it had killed “thousands of militants and their commanders, who terrorized civilians for years.”
Yet the announcement comes as the al Qaeda-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin has intensified its attacks on Malian military bases in recent weeks. Wagner suffered its deadliest setback in Africa in its history last July, when at least 50 of its mercenaries were killed in an ambush by Tuareg rebels in North Mali.
Africa Corps, which is seen as the Kremlin’s successor to Wagner, will replace the group in Mali. Around 70 percent to 80 percent of its troops are former Wagner mercenaries, Reuters recently reported. One key difference between the forces, according to analysts, is that Africa Corps engages less in direct combat and instead provides training and weapons to Malian soldiers.
Rwanda quits bloc. Rwanda said on Saturday that it is pulling out of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) as tensions rise over its involvement in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rwanda backs the armed M23 rebel group, which has seized swaths of land in eastern Congo this year.
Rwanda was supposed to assume the chairmanship of the 11-member bloc at a meeting over the weekend, but the bloc kept Equatorial Guinea in the role instead. In a statement, Rwanda said that its right to assume the chair was “deliberately ignored in order to impose [Congo’s] diktat.”
At the summit, ECCAS ordered Rwanda to withdraw its troops from Congo. Congolese government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Sunday that ECCAS’s actions “should inspire other regional organizations to adopt a firmer stance against Rwanda.”
Shift on Western Sahara. Ghana has recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. It now sees Rabat’s plan for the disputed region as “the only realistic and sustainable basis to a mutually agreed solution,” according to a joint statement issued on Thursday after Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa and Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita met in Rabat.
Since 1979, Ghana had supported the Algeria-backed Polisario Front in Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that boasts rich Atlantic fishing grounds. The Polisario Front has sought full independence since the 1970s, but over the years, Morocco has consolidated control over 80 percent of the area.
Until recently, most countries supported a U.N.-brokered plan to have the territory’s fate determined by a future referendum. But in the past year, Kenya, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom have changed tack and backed Moroccan sovereignty.
This shift comes as Morocco builds a $1.2 billion trade port in Western Sahara and countries seek to boost economic ties with Rabat. Ghana and Morocco have scheduled a joint business forum in Morocco for October.
This Week in Culture
Human Somali exhibit. Researchers are attempting to trace the stories—and descendants—of those who lived in a Somali village in the city of Bradford, England, in 1904. A group of around 100 Somali men, women, and children were brought to the purpose-built village as part of a six-month exhibition that attracted an estimated 350,000 visitors.
So-called human zoos of Africans became popular in the United States and Europe around the turn of the 20th century. Germany, for instance, had around 400 human exhibitions by the 1930s. The people living in them were often expected to give daily performances.
“There are many aspects of this story that are definitely uncomfortable,” Yahya Birt, a community historian working on the Bradford project, told the BBC. “The best history happens when you’re made to feel uncomfortable because it makes you question your own assumptions.”
African Christians. Africa has replaced Europe as the region with the largest Christian population, according to a Pew Research Center report released Monday. As of 2020, more than 30 percent of the world’s Christians live in Africa, compared with roughly 22 percent in Europe.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Putin Is a Gambler, not a Grand Master by Anastasia Edel
- What Is the Impact of Ukraine’s Raid on Russia’s Air Force? by Franz-Stefan Gady
- How Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Drone Attack Depends on Trump by John Haltiwanger
What We’re Reading
Africa’s balancing act. Africa faces significant geopolitical challenges as it navigates not just policy reversals in Washington and U.S.-China competition, but also relationships with emerging trading partners such as India, Turkey, and the Gulf states vying for the continent’s critical assets, Mebratu Kelecha writes in Africa Is a Country.
“In theory, this competition for African markets could increase African leverage—a chance to play suitors off one another for better terms. But in practice, it could also become a race to the bottom,” he writes.
Can the African Union survive? In the Republic, Afolabi Adekaiyaoja argues that the African Union is on borrowed time, especially as public disillusionment grows over the bloc’s willingness to condemn military power grabs but not constitutional coups.
“No further rebranding or retrofitting will stem the increasing disillusionment citizens feel with the body and the looming fear of a future without an AU,” he writes.