Three capitals in a few hours for a “new relationship” with Africa. Emmanuel Macron puts the turbo on Friday March 3 in his African tour, intended to show the new face of French diplomacy on the continent. The French president arrived late Thursday evening in Angola from Gabon, where he had just attended a summit on the preservation of tropical forests.
On Friday, he will successively meet his Angolan counterparts, Joao Lourenço, in Luanda, then Congolese, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, in Brazzaville, before joining Kinshasa in the evening, the last stage of his tour. With always the same red thread: definitively turning the page on “Françafrique”, with its opaque practices and its networks of influence inherited from colonialism, and putting in place a new “software”, based on “humility” and pragmatic partnerships, from environmental protection to health.
“This age of Françafrique is over,” he said Thursday from Libreville, which has long embodied these excesses under the presidency of Omar Bongo. “In Gabon as elsewhere, France is a neutral interlocutor”, he hammered, while the Gabonese opposition accused him of supporting President Ali Bongo Ondimba, son and successor of Omar Bongo, in full election year.
Emmanuel Macron participated in the morning in Luanda, capital of Angola, in an economic forum focused on agriculture, in which more than 50 French companies participated, before meeting his Angolan counterpart João Lourenço. “It corresponds to the idea that I have of this economic partnership between the African continent and France”, explained the Head of State in front of a good hundred participants.
Namely “responding to the challenges of Angola with the actors who are ours, the solutions which are ours rather than coming and dumping ready-made solutions and doing so by defending our interests on both sides in a respectful but determined”. France has been present in oil for decades in the Portuguese-speaking country in southern Africa, which is one of the two leading crude producers on the continent. But the president’s visit is an opportunity to explore collaborations in other sectors.
A cooperation agreement has been concluded to strengthen the Angolan agricultural sector, in particular its “climate resilience and water security”, as well as support to revitalize its coffee sector, Emmanuel Macron announced.
Angola, which imports a large part of its food products, wants to strengthen its “sovereignty”, underlined the French presidency, assuring that France can provide it with “know-how” from production to processing and marketing. The French president was accompanied by representatives of major cereal groups, as well as specialists in infrastructure development such as Meridiam, and Total.
Emmanuel Macron will then stop for a few hours in Brazzaville, where Denis Sassou-Nguesso has reigned with an iron fist for almost forty years, a meeting which there too risks appearing against the current of his new software. On the eve of his arrival, Congolese human rights organizations raised their concerns and asked the French president to relay them. They notably pleaded for the release of General Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and André Okombi Salissa.
Respectively former chief of staff of the armies and ex-minister, these two personalities were sentenced to twenty years in prison after the presidential election of 2016, which they lost and whose result they contested. Emmanuel Macron will then join the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony on the other side of the Congo River, for a visit focused on cultural and health cooperation.
He will visit the National Institute for Biomedical Research on Saturday and meet there Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who was responsible for the discovery of the Ebola virus. He will also meet artists and entrepreneurs from the world of culture and creation. This step can be tricky as France is accused in the DRC of supporting Rwanda rather than Kinshasa, which is facing a rebellion in the east of the country.
A few dozen young people, waving Russian flags, demonstrated against his arrival in Kinshasa on Wednesday. Thursday, a dozen of them burned a flag of France in front of the French Institute in Goma, in the east of the country, noted a correspondent from Agence France-Presse.