It’s become a fashion, or an epidemic: leaders, mostly from the North, individually summon all African heads of state to a summit, during which the latter face a single interlocutor, which doesn’t stop them from rushing off to the venue chosen to host the meeting, sometimes without even knowing what’s on the agenda!
It’s called a Summit. So there was a US-Africa Summit, a Russia-Africa Summit, a France-Africa Summit, a China-Africa Summit… Perhaps there will be a Luxembourg-Africa Summit or, why not, a Monaco-Africa Summit. The latest of these unbalanced summits was held in Rome, and the hostess of the meeting was none other than the president of the far-right, conservative nationalist party Frères d’Italie! Who would have thought that Giorgia Meloni’s Italy would come to Africa’s rescue? Indeed, there’s a certain indecency in African heads of state accepting an invitation from the figurehead of Europe’s triumphant populism, a sort of Éric Zemmour in skirts and less wrinkled, whose party motto is “God, Family and Country” and who admits to having “a serene relationship with fascism”. Mrs. Meloni proclaims herself to be “Italian and Christian”, and her favorite themes during the election campaign that brought her to power were stopping “the ethnic replacement that is underway in Italy”, the naval blockade of immigrant boats from Africa and, of course, the fight against the Islamic invasion. Pure Zemmour! Can African heads of state respond to his summons without first demanding a few explanations? Can they reasonably hope to obtain generous, disinterested help from a government that has declared a state of emergency because a few thousand of their fellow citizens, clueless, unarmed and without luggage, have landed on its shores after travelling the world’s deadliest migratory route? Would the red carpet being rolled out in their honor have no other purpose than to enable Italy to secure a better place for itself in the exploitation of their countries’ fossil fuels, and to promote the establishment of its companies in Africa? Isn’t this simply a vast operation of manipulation and swindling? How, in general, can we understand that African heads of state, who often drag their feet when it comes to taking part in major meetings organized on the continent by the African Union or regional organizations, obey at the drop of a hat the injunctions of their Western counterparts to take part in marches in support of a newspaper, worldly events or conferences that are often nothing more than fruitless talk?
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