Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: the AGOA summit hosted by South Africa, a prison break in Guinea, and Zimbabwe’s lithium windfall.
China and Activists Complicate the UAE’s Push for Ports
In a bid to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East and outperform other Persian Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the United Arab Emirates has been expanding its influence in Africa through port access.
Members of the Emirati royal family operate around 12 ports across Africa through state-owned companies, and that investment is growing—including plans finalized last year to build a $6 billion Red Sea port north of Port Sudan.
The United Arab Emirates has been the fourth-largest investor in Africa over the past 10 years, after China, the EU, and the United States. Investment from the UAE to Africa hit nearly $60 billion over the decade, focused on infrastructure, energy, transport, and logistics.
But a new multimillion-dollar deal between Tanzania’s government and maritime giant Dubai Ports World (DP World), which is owned by the Emirati royal family, has provoked public anger and political opposition.
Under the agreement, DP World will invest $250 million to upgrade and exclusively operate about two-thirds of Dar es Salaam’s port for 30 years. DP World said that its investments into the port’s facilities could rise to $1 billion over the concession period.
The deal was signed on Oct. 22, but reports of the contract first emerged in July, when civil society groups and the opposition argued that it “violated Tanzania’s constitution and endangers national sovereignty.” On Aug. 10, Tanzania’s High Court in Mbeya dismissed a petition that challenged the legality of the port agreement. At least two dozen people were arrested for opposing the deal, Amnesty International said in August. Some have since been released.
Critics argue that the terms of the deal favored the UAE and undermined local rights and management. However, Tanzanian Transport Minister Makame Mbarawa said Tanzania would retain 60 percent of earnings.
DP World began investing in the Horn of Africa more than two decades ago by managing the Port of Djibouti, constructing additional terminals and helping to finance roads and infrastructure. The port alone accounts for 95 percent of Ethiopia’s imports. The company quicky ramped up investments into port operations in Angola, Egypt, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, and—controversially in 2016—a 30-year concession to operate a port in the breakaway region of Somaliland. The deal led to a clash with Somalia’s government, which wanted DP World to liaise directly with Mogadishu.
This didn’t stop DP World signing a $366 million port expansion in the semi-autonomous Puntland region of Somalia, or from launching the construction of a $1.2 billion deep-sea port in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is expected to be completed by 2025.
Behind the scenes, the UAE has long embroiled itself in Sudan’s internal conflicts as part of a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. “As emerging Middle East hegemons, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are now at odds—each seeking to control Sudan’s resources, energy, and logistics gateways by aligning with [Sudanese Armed Forces Gen. Abdel Fattah] Burhan and [Sudanese Rapid Support Forces Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo] Hemeti, respectively,” Middle East scholar Talal Mohammad wrote recently in Foreign Policy.
Yet Abu Dhabi’s quest for regional influence has come up against China’s dominance. In 2018, the Djibouti government seized the UAE-built and -run Doraleh port, located near Djibouti’s main port, and handed the terminal over to Hong Kong-based China Merchants Port Holdings. This coincided with the opening of a $3.5 billion free trade zone of state-owned Chinese firms next to the port. However, DP World, which had a 50-year concession since 2006, argued that the plan violated its “exclusive access” deal.
The Djibouti government blamed DP World’s refusal to “settle amicably” when it terminated the contract. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman of DP World, reportedly said that the UAE would “send Djibouti back” to the conditions in which it existed before its investments. The dispute was thought to have started after Djibouti rejected proposals for a UAE military base there—but then allowed China to establish a base in 2017.
While the Djibouti government accused the firm of using corruption to secure its Doraleh concession, a Hong Kong appeals court ordered Djibouti to pay DP World more than $600 million in damages following previous rulings from a London arbitration court. There are other pending lawsuits related to the spat, including one being heard in a U.S. federal court.
In its recent deals, the UAE is increasingly coming under pressure not from China but from human rights organizations, following the arrests of critics who have opposed its deals. Last year, more than 70,000 Maasai were evicted from their ancestral lands within a conservation area in Tanzania. According to rights groups, this was so the Tanzanian government could turn part of the area into a luxury game reserve—allegedly for the Emirati royal family as the country pushes for more tourism from the UAE.
The Week Ahead
Thursday, Nov. 9: Kenyan President William Ruto to present annual state of the nation address.
Tuesday, Nov. 14: Liberia to hold presidential runoff vote.
Thursday, Nov. 16: Elections held in Madagascar.
Friday, Nov. 17: The second European Union-Angola Business Forum will be held in Luanda.
What We’re Watching
AGOA Summit. More than 30 African beneficiaries of the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) participated in the trade forum held last week in Johannesburg, with U.S. lawmakers expressing support on Friday for the program’s extension beyond its expected expiration in September 2025.
AGOA grants tariff-free access to U.S. markets. U.S. President Joe Biden recently announced that Niger and Gabon will be removed from the program due to coups in those countries, and the Central African Republic and Uganda will be removed for rights violations. Uganda’s AGOA trade covered just $5 million worth of exports in 2021. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Sunday that U.S. officials “overestimate themselves” and “erroneously think that African countries cannot move forward without their support.”
AGOA, which was launched in 2000, has failed in many areas to counter China on trade due to African supply chain issues and difficulties meeting import requirements. In 2019, China received 11 percent of the continent’s exports while the U.S. dropped to 5 percent from 19 percent in 2001. The program benefits few non-oil exporting countries, and some U.S. officials have signaled that they want improvements to the program before it can be renewed.
Tinubu yacht rejected. Nigerian lawmakers rejected extra funds to the 2023 budget this week from Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s administration after public outcry that it included plans to buy a presidential yacht. Lawmakers instead reallocated the proposed 5 billion naira ($6.3 million) yacht purchase to the student loan budget, doubling its total allocation. Tinubu’s office argued that the yacht proposed was for the Nigerian Navy.
Parliament still approved in total the nearly 2.18 trillion naira ($2.8 billion) budget addition, which includes the purchase of SUVs ($3.6 million), including for the office of the president’s wife ($1.9 million) although that office is not recognized in Nigerian law, and renovation costs for the president’s villa (about $5 million), which has caused anger among Nigerians as the country struggles with mounting state debt and a high cost-of-living crisis.
Guinea jailbreak. Guinea has sacked more than 60 soldiers and prison officers over the jailbreak of former President and junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara and two others. At least nine people were killed in a shootout after “heavily armed commandos” stormed into a jail in Guinea’s capital on Saturday and briefly freed Camara, who was recaptured and returned to prison a few hours after.
Camara led a 2008 military coup and ruled Guinea for almost a year until a 2009 assassination attempt. He has been on trial since September 2022, accused of being responsible for a stadium massacre in 2009, during which at least 150 people were killed and more than 100 women were raped by Guinean security forces at a pro-democracy rally.
This Week in Energy
Zimbabwe’s ‘white gold’ profits. Zimbabwe has tripled its export earnings from lithium after it banned raw exports of the mineral. Zimbabwe earned $209 million from lithium exports in the first nine months of 2023, nearly three times last year’s earnings, Mines Minister Zhemu Soda said. Zimbabwe’s government banned raw lithium exports last year to retain more value, a move that favored Chinese companies that commissioned processing plants in the country this year and are shipping lithium concentrates to China for further processing. As reported in Foreign Policy, the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency reportedly received 160 lithium investment applications from investors based in China in the first half of 2023, compared to just five from the United States.
Niger-Benin oil pipeline. Niger’s military has inaugurated an as yet unfinished 1,200-mile-long oil pipeline that will carry its crude oil to neighboring Benin’s port of Seme. Niger said that $6 billion had been invested in the project, which was supposed to be completed in 2022 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to AFP. The project is expected to be completed in a few months, and oil will be extracted by the China National Petroleum Corporation. In August, Benin said that work on the pipeline would not be affected by sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States following a July 26 coup. However, a separate $13 billion project to carry Nigeria’s gas onto Europe via Niger and Morocco could be threatened after Chinese banks pulled out of financing the project.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Are Chinese Battery Companies the Next Huawei? by Craig Singleton
Ehud Barak on Israel’s Next Steps by Ravi Agrawal
The Storm of Dissent Brewing in the State Department by Robbie Gramer
What We’re Reading
Nairobi’s controversial experiment. Two years ago, a randomized controlled trial, which aimed to enforce water service payments by cutting off water and sewage services to poor citizens in Nairobi, sparked backlash. In Africa is a Country, Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta, and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah argued that the project—which was supported by the World Bank—worsened an already-unequal water access system in Kenya. The authors call for “an ethical mandate” in the development of research studies.
DRC gas contract controversy. A major natural resource contract in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was awarded to a months-old startup run from a residential home in Canada, according to an investigation by Josephine Moulds and Hajar Meddah at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The contract to extract natural gas from Lake Kivu, was awarded late last year to Alfajiri, a company set up just 10 months previously by the DRC-born Christian Hamuli, without meeting the requirements needed by law to win the bid. Small and unqualified entities usually bid on major contracts and sell them to larger and more qualified operators at a profit. Sources accused Hydrocarbons Minister Didier Budimbu—who was previously sentenced in Belgium for fraud and money laundering—of having rigged the bidding process, which he denied.