‘Equals’ EU and Africa remain worlds apart

From Left: African Union Commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, African Union and Mauritania President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, European Union Council president Herman Van Rompuy, and EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso give a joint press conference on the second day of 4th EU-Africa summit on April 3, 2014 at the EU headquarters in Brussels. Photo/AFP 

By DANIEL K. KALINAKI The EastAfrican

In Summary

• Such is the effort Europe is putting in re-aligning its relationship with Africa that it has gone to great lengths to argue that the two continents are partners and neighbours, sharing a long history.
• It is a long relationship and invaluable to both sides but it is also occasionally fraught with disagreements, the unresolved sense of colonial injustice and increasingly threatened by interest in Africa from China, Japan, India and other emerging economies, as well as the United States.

If Africa received a dollar every time “partnerships” was mentioned at the just-concluded EU-Africa Summit in Brussels, a lot of the continent’s foreign debt would be wiped out.

Such is the effort Europe is putting in re-aligning its relationship with Africa that it has gone to great lengths to argue that the two continents are partners and neighbours, sharing a long history.

“Our partnership of equals has come of age,” Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council announced grandly at a press conference at the end of the summit. He had declared, in equally grand terms at the start, that “the days of the donor-recipient relationship are gone.”

It is a long relationship and invaluable to both sides but it is also occasionally fraught with disagreements, the unresolved sense of colonial injustice and increasingly threatened by interest in Africa from China, Japan, India and other emerging economies, as well as the United States.

“We have made real progress in partnership of equals,” Manuel Barroso, the head of the EU Commission, added, standing next to him and adding to the charm offensive.

But the officials then went on to reel off figures that show how much this is a partnership of unequals. There will be, in total, 28 billion Euros made available to Africa by the EU between 2014 and 2016. The money will go towards aid, trade, investment as well as peace and security programmes in Africa.

“Africa is Europe’s top priority when we talk about development assistance because Africa is our near neighbour,” Barroso added. “We are keeping up the generosity level for 2014-2020.”

Both European officials read from prepared texts and stayed to the script and the message of partnership, announcing promises of money while arguing that the donor-recipient relationship is over.

Their African counterparts, Abdel Aziz the chairperson of the African Union and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the chairperson of the African Commission, gave off-the-cuff remarks. And it showed.

Mr Aziz made a few polite remarks about partnership but Ms Dlamini-Zuma’s rambling speech was more revealing. Come see our wild animals, lie on our beautiful beaches, enjoy our sunny weather and invest in our agriculture, she said, to brutally summarise her pitch.

It was, to her credit, more of a pitch for investment than a plea for aid. It, however, showed how long Africa has been in a recipient mode, how far it has to go to strip itself of the yoke of expectation of external assistance, and how it had failed to draw any significant concessions out of the summit on the issues that matter.

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Take, for instance, the matter of illicit financial transfers from Africa to Europe. In 2011 Africa received €34.3 billion in aid, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Yet The Africa Report magazine noted in a story released ahead of the summit that in the same year €43.7 billion was funnelled out of Africa to the rest of the world, including into tax havens in the EU.

A lot of this is money stolen by corrupt African leaders and their cronies, or filtered out by tax-dodging and tax-avoiding multinational corporations.