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Russia-Africa summit

Vladimir Putin to woo African leaders at first Russia-Africa summit

Vladimir Putin to woo African leaders at first Russia-Africa summit
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 July 2018. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Alexey Nikolsly / Sputnik / Kremlin / Pool)

Moscow is playing catch-up with the likes of China, Japan and the EU, which have been meeting Africa at the continental level for many years.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will launch a big catch-up bid for influence, commercial opportunities and co-operation on the continent at the first Russia-Africa summit which takes place here on the Black Sea on Thursday 24 October.

President Cyril Ramaphosa will address the summit and Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan will participate in an economic forum before the summit on Wednesday, which business leaders will also attend, including some from South Africa.

The Kremlin announced on Monday that 43 of the continent’s 55 heads of state or government were expected to attend the summit. The two meetings will discuss a wide range of areas of co-operation, including mining, energy – mostly nuclear power – agriculture, financing trade and infrastructure, military, security, including fighting terrorism and even improving the image of both sides in the media.

The summit and forum are being held in the Olympic Park which hosted the main events of the 2014 Winter Olympics. But the atmosphere will be far from icy.

Whereas Moscow and most of the rest of Russia are shivering in near-zero temperatures as winter looms, the continent’s leaders will meet Putin in the more Africa-friendly, relatively balmy climate of Sochi, the resort city on the Black Sea where temperatures are currently above 20°C.

That will be appropriate for Putin’s attempt to thaw relations with the continent that have been mainly on ice since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Several analysts see this summit as an opportunity inadvertently created for Putin by the retreat from Africa of President Donald Trump’s US administration. But it is more widely seen as Russia’s belatedly joining what has been dubbed the Scramble for Africa, competing with other powers which already have similar institutionalised engagements with the African continent, including Japan, the European Union, France, China, India, Turkey, the Arab League and South Korea.

However, Russia’s new ambassador to South Africa, Ilya Rogachev, last week dismissed the characterisation of the summit as a Russian attempt to compete with Western powers for influence and natural resources in Africa, saying this was a colonial perspective.

He said Russia was returning to Africa on an equal footing. He noted Russia had been an active player during the Soviet era, especially in helping to decolonise Africa. Moscow now wished to put the relationship back on track after it had been put on hold during the 1990s because of Russia’s own internal problems during that decade.

Ramaphosa said in a statement this week that he expected the summit to deepen friendly relations between Russia and African countries, to forge closer collaboration on regional and international issues, increase strategic dialogue between Russia and African countries, and contribute to peace, security and sustainable development in Africa.

The summit would also help address the aspirations of African countries as encapsulated in Agenda 2063, the African Union’s development vision for the continent.

Ramaphosa said South Africa was participating in the summit in line with the country’s foreign policy goal of encouraging South-North co-operation in technical fields, as well as promoting economic development.

Relations with Russia were “at optimal level and continue to grow from strength to strength” and were governed by the long-standing Intergovernmental Committee on Trade and Economic Co-operation (ITEC), the 2008 South Africa-Russia Friendship and Co-operation Agreement and the 2013 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement.

He noted that the strategic nature of the relationship was manifested “in both countries consistently adopting common positions around key issues facing the world at the United Nations, African Union and other international forums”.

He said SA-Russian relations were further bolstered by his meeting with Putin at the BRICS summit in SA in July last year and on the margins of the G20 summit in Japan in June 2019.

But Western countries regard Putin’s Africa gambit with some scepticism, as they have done China’s much older engagement with the continent as a whole.

China’s engagement began in Beijing in 2000 and has evolved into the Forum for China-Africa Co-operation which now meets every three years. At the forum, China regularly offers large packages of aid and investment to Africa, usually of about $60-billion over three years.

Given Russia’s much smaller economy, Putin is unlikely to try to match such generosity and is more likely to offer technical assistance in fields such as energy generation, especially nuclear power and in military co-operation to fight security threats such as terrorism and international crime.

Russia, like China, also appeals to African governments by offering its assistance unencumbered by any conditions related to the quality of governance, democracy and human rights, as Western countries and international development financial institutions are prone to do.

And, so, the brief for a discussion at the economic forum on “Economic Sovereignty for Africa: Problems and Solutions” says that African countries are compelled to turn to foreign sources of financing to meet their development objectives and the needs of their citizens.

However, these mainly take the form of credit from international financial institutions and direct loans whereby the creditor imposes socio-economic and political requirements which limit a country’s sovereignty,” it adds, proposing a discussion on how to restore economic sovereignty and accelerating African national development.

By contrast, Russia’s own unconditional approach to working with Africa is perhaps illustrated by the fact that Zimbabwe’s minister of mines and mining development is scheduled to participate in a discussion on “Russian-African Collaboration in the Diamond Industry”.

Western countries have largely shunned Zimbabwe’s diamond industry because of allegations of human rights abuses by the ruling Zanu-PF party in extracting the country’s diamonds.

Judd Devermont, head of the African programme at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), recently told ISS Today that Russia was capitalising on the Trump administration’s retreat from Africa.

He said Moscow’s renewed engagement “ranges from amateurish disinformation campaigns to sophisticated influence operations to court partners and extract resources. It smacks of Kremlin opportunism, but that doesn’t make it less problematic.”

He noted Russia’s trade with Africa had almost trebled from $6.6- billion in 2010 to $18.9-billion last year. Other analysts believe one major selling point for Russia in Africa is arms. Russia sells more arms to Africa than any other country and the supply is rising, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, quoted by Associated Press.

It also cited Paul Stronski, senior fellow for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as saying:

Weapons exports to Africa facilitate Russia’s broader diplomatic efforts to cultivate military, political, and security ties and expand its influence in Africa” to compete with the US, France, and China.

Russia’s military presence is also growing in Africa through the provision of military training and deployment of peacekeepers and private military soldiers, most notably, recently, in Central African Republic and in northern Mozambique to help Maputo fight a growing jihadist insurgency.

Security analysts claim two Russian soldiers were killed, alongside several Mozambique troops, in an attack on a jihadist base last week.

The prominence of military co-operation with Pretoria is being emphasised this week as “the air arsenal” of the Russian military has landed at South Africa’s Waterkloof airforce base, the SA National Defence Force announced.

The Russian military aircraft that are visiting South Africa include two TU-160 Blackjack strategic bombers, the SANDF said. These aircraft have never before seen in Africa, according to the African Defence Review. The SANDF said the two airforces would discuss co-operation in combat and search and rescue operations.

Similarly, the first joint naval exercise between SA, Russia and China is to take place in November, according to defenceWeb. It reported on Monday 21 October that senior officers of the three navies had just met at SA Navy fleet headquarters in Simon’s Town to plan Exercise Mosi to practise joint actions to ensure the safety of shipping and maritime economic activity through improving inter-operability
and other relations among the navies.

Though Putin is to co-chair the summit and economic forum with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who is also currently the chairperson of the African Union, diplomatic sources told Daily Maverick that the AU was not the co-organiser of the meetings.

They said if it had been, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) would have been invited, which it has not been. This was almost certainly at the insistence of Morocco, which does not recognise the SADR as the government of Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Morocco regards as its southernmost province.

The Sochi meeting takes place at a moment when the AU is reconsidering the nature of these big summits which Africa has with other regions and powers, the Peace and Security Council Report of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies wrote this year.

The report said that the AU Commission had proposed that instead of such loose gatherings of all of Africa’s leaders with one partner country, the commission itself should take the lead and represent the continent – supported by whichever national president is in the rotating chair of the AU and perhaps the immediate past and immediate future chairs, known as the troika.

The AU feels that in their current format, these summits reflect the interests of the partner countries rather than Africa’s own interests and that gathering all of the continent’s leaders to meet – usually – just one leader of a partner country, reflected poorly on Africa’s dignity.

Moscow has been reported as saying it wants to repeat these summits every three years – not coincidentally, perhaps, also the interval of other summits such as those with China, the EU and Japan. DM

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