2023-11-08 17:06:36
The damaged trust between Africa and France must be restored “urgently”, to prevent distrust from spreading on the African continent, which is increasingly courted. This is the recommendation of a French parliamentary report published Wednesday November 8 on relations between France and Africa, led by MoDem deputy Bruno Fuchs, and Les Républicains deputy Michèle Tabarot.
After having carried out dozens of hearings with African and French actors, they drew up a harsh observation: France has difficulty “adapting” to African changes, is “deprived of a detailed knowledge of the continent, and it” now refuses to adopt a real African policy”. The authors of the report point out an often “illegible” strategy. The Africans, they assert, “are demanding another policy from France” and “we must act to emergency to avoid a risk of contagion and loss of confidence.
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From military relations to soft power
“This groundswell unfavorable to France passed quickly in the Sahel countries, generally in French-speaking Africa […] where we have ways of operating in a pre-square which have not completely disappeared”, added MP Bruno Fuchs, this Wednesday, at the microphone of RFI Afrique.
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Since his arrival at the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron has attempted a change of course in Africa, with a less military approach and centered on relations with civil society and “soft power”. The Ouagadougou speech in 2017 marked the start of a long series of promises and initiatives, ranging from memorial work (Algeria, Rwanda) to the restitution of works of art, including the increase in public development assistance and new partnerships outside its French-speaking territory.
But “beyond the renewed vocabulary and the accumulation of initiatives, often welcome, the essential is perhaps missing: a precise and long-term strategic offer which makes African countries want to maintain nourished links and more egalitarian with France”, judges the report.
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The end of an era
In the meantime, coups d’état, in Mali in 2020 and 2021, in Burkina Faso in 2022, then in Niger in 2023, precipitated the divorce with Paris. The military juntas pushed out the French army, after a decade of anti-jihadist intervention. Concerning Operation Barkhane, launched in 2014 in Mali under the presidency of François Hollande, “it was rather a military success”, believes Bruno Fuchs. “But there are many errors. There was no political vision […] and our posture gradually became illegible. We also left the field […] we have lost our knowledge of the field, and we are acting as we think we should act from Paris,” judges the author of the report.
The French government has been criticized for many inconsistencies in recent years. Before condemning the coup d’état in Niger, he notably accommodated the first putsch in Mali in 2020, and the following year dubbed Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, who succeeded his father at the head of Chad without process constitutional. “These blunders have aggravated tensions and maintained the perception that French leaders still show a certain condescension towards Africa,” said the founder of the West African think tank Wathi Gilles Yabi.
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In West Africa there is also the idea that Paris is seeking above all to maintain its market shares in the face of the arrival of competitors with more neutral and uninhibited relations such as India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Russia, but above all China, which has supplanted France as the leading trading partner in its former colonies over the last 20 years.
Priority to consultation
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To take care of this link and ensure a healthier relationship in the long term, the authors of the report recommend a “change of style”: “stopping big speeches, often carrying ultimately disappointed expectations, and preferring concrete actions”. But above all, focus on “greater consultation” through “more transparent and institutional” exchanges of decisions.
To do this, the report proposes “in-depth” reform of public development assistance, to better adapt it to local needs with more donations, fewer loans, as well as the visa policy to put an end to “inconsistencies” and daily “vexatious situations” while France “deprives itself of many talents”.
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