Rome’s bid to make Africa an offer it can’t refuse
Europe needs Africa’s fossil fuels. Its people? Not so much. Now Italy thinks it can square that circle with a new spin on the good old-fashioned Sicilian protection racket
Sipho Kings
In a rare turn of events, Italy finds itself with a stable government, albeit one rooted in conservative and anti-immigrant fervour. This means Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s once-fringe governing party can try to deliver on its promises to stop illegal immigration and make Italy great again.
The pitch is that Italy will invest an initial $5.5-billion to help African states grow, so people won’t want to leave. That’s essentially offering to pay Africa to leave them alone. Meloni phrased it as “guaranteeing the right [of Africans] to not be forced to emigrate”.
A small group of African leaders, led by African Union Commission head Moussa Faki, crossed the Mediterranean this week by plane to hear all this in Rome – a city built in no small part on plunder from Africa.
Faki noted that African countries hadn’t been consulted before the “Mattei Plan” for the continent was unveiled. He called for a “partnership” instead of the way EU states currently operate in Africa.
The Mattei plan is named after the founder of Eni, Italy’s state-owned oil and gas company. Behind the rhetoric, the meat of the plan is for Africans to pick Italian energy firms instead of Chinese or French competitors as their partners of choice for oil rigs off the coast of places like Mozambique and Côte d’Ivoire.
With Russian gas off the EU menu, Meloni wants to make Italy an energy hub.
Being right-wing helps her gloss over the fact that fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis, which is already hitting Africa hard, driving mass (mostly internal) migration.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was also in Rome to talk up the “intense and renewed cooperation” between the two continents.
And if that doesn’t work, Europe can keep to its current playbook: Give authoritarian leaders money to make the immigration problem disappear. That’s the plan with the likes of Kais Saied in Tunisia and Hemedti in Sudan.