By Adonis Byemelwa
President Hakainde Hichilema is on a mission to Nairobi with more than just Zambia’s diplomatic brown envelope; he carries the frustrations of a continent growing impatient with an international financial system it sees as rigged against Africa.
With leaders converging for the landmark “Africa Forward Summit,” Hichilema is likely to pitch debt reform, climate financing, and the pressing call for economic sovereignty in an ever-more consequential geopolitical environment.
The summit is not merely ceremonial diplomacy for Zambia. Furthermore, who can forget the pandemic-era sovereign default of Lusaka, Africa’s first, in 2020, which laid bare years of stalled negotiations for debt restructuring inside an international financial system frozen in crisis?
Zambia: A tortured tale of how $32bn public debt could keep an emerging economy between creditors, climate shocks and a sclerotic global system
Expect Hichilema to use Nairobi as a loudspeaker for escalating African calls for reform of the IMF and World Bank.
Even though many African economies have lower debt to GDP ratios than developed plans, they continue borrowing – but at interest rates several times higher than those in wealthy nations.
The gap is increasingly called the “Africa Premium” by economists, a credit tax which is less economic than psychological.
Climate disaster adds to the urgency for Zambia. The country is experiencing perhaps the most severe drought in its recent history, with hydropower generation plummeting and agricultural output collapsing across large areas of its farming heartlands.
In Zambia alone, some 6.3 million people are said to be suffering food insecurity exacerbated by climate-related weather disruptions associated with El Niño, furthering calls for grant-based support (rather than more debt) on the climate front.
Nevertheless, Nairobi is more than just Zambia’s summit. The meeting is becoming a lens through which to observe the geopolitical metamorphosis of Africa and the gradual collapse of the Françafrique model that has long sustained France’s preeminence across much of the continent.
The choice of Kenya, an Anglophone economic powerhouse with no longer any colonial ties to Paris, as the venue for the summit updates is a deliberate repositioning currently underway.
The summit, for President Emmanuel Macron, reflects a strategic adjustment to France’s weakening grip over its former dependencies in the Sahel.
For Paris, this [the competition] means forging new partnerships in East and Southern Africa following military and political ruptures with Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to maintain relevance on a continent that is becoming ever more influenced by multipolar competition.
Nairobi gives France a chance to show itself more as an ally on technology, green energy and industrial investments rather than merely a former colonial power.
The optics of the summit have been meticulously managed. As he did in Los Angeles, Macron will be joined by others, including Kenyan President William Ruto and business leaders like Aliko Dangote, helping cement the feel of a largely private-sector model for partnership.
The message from Paris is unambiguous: influence in Africa can no longer depend solely on military accords and elite political networks.
That economic reality is why France is changing tack. Today, French trade with Africa accounts for less than 3 per cent of its global commerce, while Sino-African trade has recently surpassed $280 billion annually.
Meanwhile, Gulf nations, including India and Turkey, are expanding their footprint across African infrastructure, agriculture, and technology sectors, intensifying competition for influence.
Nevertheless, scepticism hangs over the pledges made at the summit. Activists in Nairobi are cautioning that the discourse of “green industrialisation” is simply a contemporary recycling of an old extraction politics.
Others reply that African countries remain “price takers” in the export of raw minerals, leaving the richer economies with all the profits from manufacturing, technology, and value addition.
Such fears ring especially loudly in Zambia, which is home to some of the planet’s most critical copper deposits needed for electric vehicles and renewable-energy systems.
Safa Sofyane for The Guardian Fears: Activists worry the global green transition could create a new dependency cycle, with African resources driving foreign industries even as local economies remain structurally fragile. The alternative would be not to restore but to repaint the financial structure.
There are further questions about whether anything of substance can really impact institutions like the IMF and the WB in Nairobi.
Although France is presenting itself as a reforming bridge-builder, numerous African policymakers are unconvinced that Western powers will support genuine change to voting arrangements or lending frameworks. The more profound concern is that reform rhetoric might achieve little in terms of structural change.
The summit thus serves as a crucial test for both Africa and Europe. For leaders like Hichilema and Ruto, it is a moment of destiny to harness global rivalry to secure the best terms for financing, climate, and industrial partnerships from a competitive international order responding to an impatient youthful populace demanding economic gains.
It was a risk for France, as much as it is about how much the country can remain influential on the continent going forward, if it is limited to little more than an historical frame of reference, for Africa is increasingly negotiating on its own terms.
The fate of the final Nairobi declaration as historic or symbolic will therefore depend on what happens after the summit.
African leaders no longer gauge partnerships merely by speeches and family pictures, but by lower borrowing costs, debt relief, greater manufacturing capacity, and more jobs. Nairobi no longer speaks about what Europe can give Africa; it now speaks of how Africa will call upon the world.
