Keynote: Hili Regional Dialogue, UAE-Africa Dialogue: Advancing Shared Futures

Good morning. My thanks to the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research and to the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, and to the Institute of Foreign Affairs here in Addis, for this invitation and for building the Hili Forum into a serious conversation.

Excellencies, Director General Al-Nuaimi, Director General Mladenov, Executive Director Bedru, and Director General Aweke — thank you. Excellencies, honorable ministers and distinguished participants, and of course my fellow speaker Mr. Rashed Al Shehhi, Chargé d'Affaires of the Emirates in Ethiopia, distinguished colleagues from across Africa and the Emirates. I am sorry to be with you by screen rather than in the room with you in Addis, but I am still grateful all the same to be able to participate.

I want to start my brief address by looking back a few decades. In 1945, with the end of World War 2, the global institutions were established to manage coexistence. Their design was to prevent World War 3. While the Cold War was a very tough period for Africa and the Gulf, the major powers of the day did not go to war. The end of the Cold War around 1990 ushered in an age of unprecedented power in the United States and the West at large, and their standard on how to organize politics and economics reigned supreme. The moment is now over, but we are not in a wilderness. I believe we are resetting to co-existence.

However, while change is at hand, many of the global institutions still speak and act on the assumptions of the last three decades — the world that history has a single direction and that every society was traveling toward the same destination. The institutions have evolved to manage that journey. Within its dialogues Africa was told to wait its turn to converge. That assumption no longer holds. However, as I have said, we have returned to an age of coexistence, a world of many centers that will not necessarily agree on the destination and have to cooperate anyway.

I believe that a confident middle power like the UAE and a rising continent of Africa are no longer the periphery of someone else's order. They are central actors who must depend on their own abilities and resources to find their way to the destination they dream of.

Convergence held that order comes from agreement on a single model. Coexistence accepts that we will not agree on the model, and it builds order from restraint and from shared interest instead. We do not need to become like one another to build a port, a processing plant, a power line, or a peace. We need a common interest and the habit of keeping our word. The UAE and Africa are well suited to that. Neither is asking the other to become something else.

So let me be precise about the kind of partnership this moment demands. Africa holds much of what the global economy needs with the greatest urgency: the minerals, the energy, and the largest young workforce in the world. Its path can involve capital coming in to take the resource and leaving without its people feeling the positive impact of the investments, which is the oldest story on the continent. Or it can become the base on which Africans build work and income at home.

I have come to call the second outcome developmental sovereignty, and I would ask both sides to treat it as the test of everything we do together. The test is one question. After the deal is signed, is the African state and its people more capable than before, or less.

This is not only economics. The African state is still a young construction, building legitimacy on ground that empire left badly prepared. Whether African citizens find work, whether the budget of the state can stand, whether the young people can see a future at home rather going abroad, these are the questions on which the state itself stands or falls.

Economics and business are therefore not a side department of the African project. They are near the center of it. A partner who strengthens that strengthens the state, or a partner who hollows out a country for a single resource weakens the very order we all say we want.

For two generations the development conversation ran on aid, on transfers from the OECD economies meant to close a gap. That order is finished. The aid budgets are shrinking, the political support for them is weakening, and even at their height those transfers were a supplement, not an engine. What builds a modern state is business. It is firms that hire, invest, pay tax, and compound, and the jobs they create are what give a young African a stake in the country and a government a budget to govern with. The UAE comes to Africa as an investor and a builder, not primarily as a donor, and that is the relationship Africa needs. The future of the African economy is commercial, not charitable.

The world is full of capital, and the UAE holds a great deal of it. What is scarce is the capacity of a place to take capital and return it as growth that lasts. I call that simply investability, which rests on trust, on capability, and on predictability. As you know, capital follows confidence, not need. So, the real work in front of us is to build investability inside African economies, so that a resource creates jobs at home and becomes a blessing. The wrong kind of partnership is familiar. It builds an enclave with its own road, its own port, and its own power, sealed off from the country around it, and it calls the export figure development. The country ends poorer in everything except a profit line on someone else's balance sheet.

We have seen it for many years, and we should say plainly that it is not to be repeated. This is why I take the UAE seriously as a partner. It faced this exact problem and solved it for itself. In one working lifetime, it turned an endowment in the ground into an economy the world wants to invest in, in logistics that move the world's goods, in finance, and in clean energy it chose to lead rather than follow. What the UAE did, the decisions it made, are the kind of decisions Africa needs to make. A country that has made itself investable can help another country do the same. The capital is always welcome, but the know-how to build investability is the real prize.

The four sessions later today will put a lot of color and content into some of the words I am laying out this morning. The question, in trade, is whether African producers move up the value chain, and whether this partnership strengthens the African Continental Free Trade Area. In ports, whether the infrastructure carries African production out to the world or carries the world in across Africa without benefit to the African people. In minerals and technology, whether the processing and the skills will grow at home in Africa. In agriculture and energy, whether Africans eat and power their own lives first. This is really the vision we have, and I believe it is a vision we share with the UAE. It is only a question of thinking better about how to implement it.

Some of the ground we share is at war, or very close to it, in the Horn and around the Red Sea. In those places, prosperity and peace are a single project. Money that arrives without a political settlement cannot sustainably get to profit, and a peace settlement that arrives without investment is only a delay before the next round of war.

Where the UAE and African states find themselves in these theaters of war, we should let mediation and investment move together. As government mediates the peace, the businesspeople must be organized so that they can enter that peace in the stable way they expect and create the hope and opportunity that holds war at bay. A population with a stake in the peace is the most durable security there is, and it guards your capital better than any contract can.

There is a simple measure for a partnership in the age of coexistence we have returned to. It's for our partnerships to leave us stronger and more sovereign than we were before we built them up. If we hold to that, then this Hili Dialogue will indeed be the basis of changing both the UAE and African countries. And it will become a working model of how a multipolar world can build something better than a scramble for resources that leaves Africans or Emiratis worse off as citizens. I believe Africa is ready to build it with the UAE on those terms, and I want to thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to participate.