US President Joe Biden plans to hold a summit with African leaders to show US commitment to the continent, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Friday.
“President Biden intends to host the US-Africa Leaders Summit to drive the kind of high-level diplomacy and engagement that can transform relationships and make effective cooperation possible,” Blinken said in the Nigerian
capital Abuja.
Blinken, who is on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa as secretary of state, did not give a date for the summit.
The move comes as China steps up engagement with Africa including through a major meeting this month in Senegal, where Blinken heads later Friday.
US allies France, Britain and Japan have also been holding regular summits with African leaders.
However, on Friday, delivering a speech to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Blinken vowed an overhaul of the US approach to Africa that will treat the continent as a “major geopolitical power” and that will boost development without the “strings” often attached to such deals.
“Too often, international infrastructure deals are opaque, coercive. They burden countries with unmanageable debt,” he said. “They’re environmentally destructive. They don’t always benefit the people who actually live there.”
While the US has increasingly focused on countering China’s engagement with the continent, Blinken did not reference the superpower, which will hold a China-Africa cooperation summit later this month in Senegal, by name.
Instead, he said Washington did not want to make African countries choose between the US and other partnerships.
“We want to give you choices,” he said.
Blinken also warned against “Democratic backsliding” across the world, saying that leaders need to “show how democracies can deliver what citizens want, quickly and effectively”.
He added that African nations are too often “treated as junior partners – or worse – rather than equal ones”.
“And we’re sensitive to centuries of colonialism, slavery, and exploitation that lead to painful legacies that endure today,” he said.
The speech comes as some observers have said Africa has lagged behind the administration’s other foreign policy priorities.
On Thursday, Blinken met Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama.
Nigeria, the most populous country with the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, has long been plagued by rampant corruption. In 2020, security forces were accused of unleashing disproportionate and deadly violence during massive protests against police brutality.
Meanwhile, objections in the US Congress have held up the sale of 12 US Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria amid calls to probe whether the military is doing enough to prevent civilian deaths in its two-decade-long fight with the Boko Haram group in the country’s north.
In Kenya on Wednesday, Blinken met President Uhuru Kenyatta and discussed the spiralling conflict in Ethiopia as well as the military takeover in Sudan.
Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK