Between white lies and true intentions: Unpacking what global leaders say about Africa

19 Jan 2025

Policies on Africa pursued by global powers, articulated at key forums like Davos, need to be underpinned by sound premises and fair representations. The costs of not doing so are too high – for everyone.

World leaders will gather in Davos, Switzerland from Monday, 20 January for the annual World Economic Forum. They will have a lot to say about pressing global issues, everything from climate change and economic inequality to geopolitical tensions and artificial intelligence.

The leaders of major global powers – of which fewer seem to be attending this year than at previous gatherings – might also say a few things directly about other countries.

Africa famously “is [not] a country”, but it’s a safe bet that the 54 countries that comprise the African continent will be spoken about more generally than any other region of the world.

It is partly for that reason that we should resist taking at face value almost anything that they say about Africa publicly at Davos.

Trying to unpack what global leaders say about Africa and assign clear meaning to their statements is a fraught enterprise. In the case of Western governments, there is a further muddying factor: the ruinous consequences of 20th-century European colonialism. However openly or obliquely it is acknowledged, historical guilt tends to soften their rhetoric on Africa.

In these circumstances, is it ever possible to discern world leaders’ true intentions when they speak about Africa?

Identifying key themes

A pioneering study commissioned by Africa No Filter and conducted by Hui Wilcox, Dean of the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at the US’s Macalester College, raised this thorny question in 2024.

Wilcox’s report analysed 124 speeches and public statements about Africa or specific African countries made by leaders of the G7 (Japan, Canada, France, United Kingdom, the US, Germany and Italy), China, and Russia between 2020 and 2023.

The study aimed to identify which frames, including negative or positive stereotypes of Africa, world powers communicate to domestic and international audiences. Connections between these speeches and African countries’ geopolitical status were explored. Based on the research, a table (see below) showing the frequency of themes – 22 distinct themes were identified – in political speeches was built. They included themes like “African problems”, “gender equality”, “food security”, “economic growth”, “innovation”, “trade and investment”, “climate change”, and several others.

partnerships africa (Table: Hui Wilcox)

In limiting the scope of the study to world powers’ political rhetoric rather than interrogating their actual policies, an intriguing set of questions emerged: do world powers “talk the talk, walk the walk” on Africa? If there are sharp contradictions between their words and actions, what might explain them? Has speaking about Africa on global platforms evolved in step with the continent’s changing geopolitical role?

Four key themes identified by Wilcox may hold the answers.

Partnership

The most recurrent theme in the speeches and statements examined by Wilcox is “partnership with Africa”, which featured in nearly 40% of the texts analysed. And not just “partnership”; in most, there was an emphasis on it being “equal” as well.

Where world leaders’ rhetoric differs is on the foundation of that partnership.

China’s leaders stress solidarity with their “African brothers and sisters”, on account of their shared experience of colonialism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, ignoring centuries of Soviet imperialism, deploys the same narrative, invoking Moscow’s support for “African peoples in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression” during the last century.

European leaders predictably stress a “paradigm shift” and a new “Africa-Europe alliance”, in the words of European Union (EU) President Charles Michel, mindful that focusing on the past only evokes the horrors inflicted on Africa by their colonial-era predecessors.

The weight given to partnership with Africa in statements by world leaders, whatever its putative origins, is starkly at odds with the continent’s actual power and influence in global politics. On most key measures, Africa is at the margins. The interests of great powers still prevail on issues of international finance, justice, security, energy, climate and so on. The continued marginalisation of African perspectives in international decision-making processes offers a salutary lens through which frequent talk of “partnership” must be viewed.

The current debate over the much-needed reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is a potent case in point. Despite Africa accounting for nearly one in every five persons on the planet, there are no permanent African members on the 15-seat UNSC. Decades of lobbying by African leaders and like-minded counterparts elsewhere pushing for a fairer distribution of power at the world’s top table, which was set in the 1940s and hasn’t changed since, have come to naught.

The key sticking point is the all-empowering veto held by the five permanent members, which they remain steadfast in denying to Africa. Two of the permanent members – France and the United Kingdom – together comprise less than 1.7% of the world’s population. And their share is declining.

Structural imbalances reinforce the perception that Africa is less an equal partner than an afterthought for world powers. The national budgets of roughly half of sub-Saharan countries are heavily reliant (30% or more of government spending) on foreign donors. At the continental level, the picture is even more skewed. Roughly 75% of the operating budget of the African Union (AU) is funded by international partners, especially the European Union and individual European countries; the remaining 25% consists of AU member contributions.

Without financial independence and sustainability, speeches about “partnership” with Africa ring hollow.

Migration

If the frequent invocation of “partnership” in statements about Africa strikes a discordant tone, it is instructive to examine what themes should feature prominently based on the resources and attention given to specific policies by major powers.

Migration is a central pillar of Western foreign policy towards Africa. In recent years, no other issue involving Africa has exerted greater influence on domestic politics within Europe than the management of irregular migration from Africa to Europe.

Efforts to control and regulate migrant flows from Africa to prevent acute crises, whether they occur at borders and sea-crossings or within local communities gripped by rising anti-immigration attitudes, are the daily diet of media in Europe and increasingly in the United States. Addressing the root causes of migration – such as poverty, unemployment, extremism and conflict – is the oft-unspoken aim of a considerable chunk of aid and investment to Africa.

In April 2022, the British government announced its so-called “Rwanda plan’ to send asylum seekers arriving illegally in the UK to Rwanda for processing. The plan, framed as a strategy to deter irregular migration to Britain, but widely seen as a viability test for other Western nations engaging with Africa on migration management, had a profound impact on public discourse around immigration and foreign policy. Although it was scrapped by Britain’s newly elected government in 2024, there remains a broader trend globally of rich nations seeking to externalise their migration management strategies by partnering with nations in Africa and beyond.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in the dataset of speeches analysed, all mentions of migration are in the European context. Especially in Britain and Italy, whose recently announced Mattei Plan, the cornerstone of Italy’s Africa policy, is to effectively stop African migrants from coming to Italy by improving the difficult economic conditions on the continent that give rise to them leaving.

Despite its centrality in most major powers’ domestic and international policy, “migration” features in only 18% of world leaders’ statements in the study, less than half as many times as the theme of “partnership”. If there is a disconnect between rhetoric and reality on migration, as it strongly appears, this might be part of a piece: a reticence to speak honestly in public fora about their key priorities on Africa.

Democracy

The findings about “democracy” in the study may speak to a different problem: not speaking truthfully about oneself. Although democracy features in less than 20% of the speeches on Africa examined, American leaders take up the theme more times than all other world leaders combined.

Historically speaking, this is to be expected. The United States – and especially its capital, Washington DC – sits at the heart of a vast ecosystem of democracy promotion organisations and programmes.

This includes initiatives under the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which works closely with key bodies like the International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democracy Institute (NDI) that focus on specific strands of democracy promotion (eg elections); development assistance programmes which are linked to governance and rule of law reforms, such as USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC); various multilateral political and security fora; and periodic signature efforts, like the Young African Leaders Initiative (Yali) launched by US President Barack Obama in 2013, to empower young leaders in Africa by providing training and resources to promote civic engagement and democratic values among youth.

With many African countries experiencing a regression in democratic practices, evident inter alia in the recent elimination or weakening of constitutional term limits by leaders in nearly a third of African countries and the surge in military coups (seven in the past 26 months), leading voices inside and outside the continent recognise the urgent need for democratic renewal.

But the authoritative – some would say condescending – way US leaders speak about democracy in Africa is increasingly misplaced. Most Americans – four in five according to a recent poll – believe that democracy is under threat in their own country. Polarisation, enmity and disinformation pervade US politics. Democratic norms – not least around elections – are eroding; democratic opposition is being criminalised; and the judiciary is being hyperpoliticised.

None of this is to say that US leaders are being disingenuous in their pleas and inducements to Africa on democracy. Nor is it surprising that US voices are loudest in Wilcox’s dataset of speeches: advancing democratic values and practices remains a fundamental tenet of American foreign policy interventions everywhere. But given the palpable backsliding of democracy in the United States, it is reasonable for Africans to question how long that will last and whether the US’s storied democracy still has purchase in the African imagination.

Trade and investment

Heightened competition among global powers for Africa’s resources has raised the spectre of a “new scramble for Africa”, evoking parallels with the colonisation of the continent by European empires that began in earnest exactly 150 years ago, when they agreed on rules for “dividing up” Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Except this time, brazen exploitation and territorial acquisition have been replaced by an emphasis on trade and investment.

Leaders of Great Britain, colonial power par excellence of the 19th century, distinguished themselves in the speeches analysed by Wilcox for their rhetorical gusto in proclaiming a new era of business partnership with Africa.

“Our businesses, our investors, our entrepreneurs, our mind-bogglingly innovative financial services sector are helping Africans from Casablanca to Cape Town to face the future with confidence”, enthused then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021.

The UK’s head of state, King Charles, excitedly told an African audience that he had “brought together more than 300 of the world’s leading business leaders, challenging them to find ways to release the trillions of dollars of funding that would feed the investment pipeline and create durable, thriving circular economies.”

Not to be outdone, in 2022, US Vice-President Kamala Harris talked up the vast US investment potential in Africa, stressing that the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation “includes a group of investors who collectively manage more than a trillion dollars in assets”.

The hyperbole evident in Western leaders’ statements is spurred primarily by one development: the exponential growth in China’s involvement with Africa. From 2000-2022, for instance, the import and export values of goods moving between China and Africa increased roughly twenty-five times, from $11.67-billion to $257.67-billion. Europe and the US are now playing catch-up.

The strengthening of Africa’s diplomatic and financial ties to other powers such as India, Russia, Brazil and the Gulf States relative to its American and European partners, who are struggling to maintain their traditional economic foothold on the continent, adds to the impression of a (more benign) “scramble”.

The theme of “trade and investment” featured in only 27% of the study’s texts. If related themes such as “economic growth” and the “African Continental Free Trade Area” are added to the mix, however, a picture emerges of a region in the global economic spotlight.

Yet scratch beneath the rhetoric and the numbers tell a different story: a stubborn reluctance by major powers to invest in Africa. In 2022, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa dropped to $45-billion, accounting for only 3.5% of global FDI, a share which has changed little over the past decade.

Various structural, economic and governance challenges continue to make Africa a risky destination in their eyes. As for trade, China’s soaring prominence reflects a broader surge in African trade with the rest of the world over the past two decades. That this trade remains heavily dominated by African commodities, such as oil, minerals and agricultural products, is the main reason that progress on economic diversification is slow and Africa remains highly vulnerable to resource price fluctuations globally.

Aligning rhetoric and policy on Africa

Public utterances on Africa by world leaders are not a reliable guide to their respective nations’ priorities on the continent. That much seems clear when Wilcox’s coding of their speeches is tested against their policies. Even accounting for the diplomatic exigencies that shape all foreign policy pronouncements, the lack of candour evident in speeches about Africa is striking and bears deeper scrutiny.

Intriguingly, this is probably least so with China. For all the criticism levelled against Beijing – principally by Western governments – for its so-called “debt-diplomacy”, exploitative business practices and support for authoritarian regimes in Africa, Chinese leaders’ rhetoric is more aligned with reality than other global powers’ statements. Conversely, it is hard to escape the conclusion that unresolved legacies of colonialism continue to distort how European leaders speak about Africa and to Africans.

Responsibility for building a more honest dialogue between global powers and Africa rests on both parties.

For Africa’s part, equal partnerships will remain unachievable unless the chains of donor dependency are broken. However complex and multifaceted that process might prove, it is no less urgent for it.

Nearly half of African Union members are negligent in fulfilling their financial obligations to the organisation, which is already massively reliant on external support. This situation not only structurally impairs Africa’s sovereignty, but also ensures that dialogues with and on Africa are so freighted with baggage that many become effectively meaningless.

Rebooting the dialogue also requires Africa to strengthen its own arguments when confronting inequalities of power and influence globally. This means speaking as one continent when required and not permitting donor interests to disrupt attempts to forge a cohesive African agenda.

Examples of regional organisations, such as the European Union or Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), successfully advocating for shared interests on the global stage abound. The AU’s failure to affirm a collective position on critical international issues and events has made it easier for African voices to be marginalised and its global influence constrained. Too much African energy is expended on managing relations with key donors and major powers. It would be more profitably spent on improving ties between African nations.

A glimpse of what’s possible occurred between 2021-2023 under Kenya’s presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), when the “3 + 1 Alliance” comprising Kenya, Niger, Tunisia and the Caribbean island nation of St Vincent and the Grenadines was formed. This coalition represented a strategic effort by these nations to amplify Africa’s influence and voice within the UNSC, especially around core issues affecting the continent. For a time, the 3+1 alliance effectively gave Africa a veto on the Council. Other members realised that if they wanted to get things done, increasingly they needed Africa on their side.

The traditionally dominant nations denying Africa a formal permanent veto need to accept that the global distribution of power is not static. The trend towards multipolarity and the diffusion of power away from states is bound to alter the core political and economic institutions that have framed international relations for more than 80 years. In this evolving process, Africa’s geopolitical significance is rising.

It is no secret that Africa is vastly endowed with key resources, is home to the planet’s most diverse ecosystems, boasts a population predicted to reach two billion by 2040 and is building the largest free-trade area in the world.

The experts who advise world leaders have read the tea leaves. In the past 25 years, for instance, the US government has shifted from proclaiming that “the US has very little strategic interest in Africa” [1996 US Quadrennial Defense Review] to declaring that “it is impossible to meet this era’s defining challenges without African contributions and leadership.” [2022 President Biden’s Africa Strategy]. And yet, the gap between rhetoric and policy remains wide.

Nearly 10 years passed between President Barack Obama’s trip to the continent in 2015 and the next visit by a US President – Joe Biden’s in December 2024, to only one country (Angola) for just two days, with only weeks remaining in his presidency.

The persistence of this gap is not an academic matter. When diplomatic words and deeds are misaligned, it erodes trust between countries and hinders cooperation on vital issues. It also damages public trust, increasing scepticism about what leaders say and helping to fuel the spread of disinformation. Policies on Africa pursued by global powers, articulated at key forums like Davos, need to be underpinned by sound premises and fair representations. The costs of not doing so are too high – for everyone. DM

Dr Terence McNamee is a non-resident Global Fellow of the Wilson Center in Washington DC and Moky Makura is the CEO of Africa No Filter, an advocacy organisation that is shifting stereotypical narratives about Africa through storytelling that reflects a dynamic continent of progress, innovation and opportunity.

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