J. Kayode Fayemi *
Visiting Professor, King’s College, London, UK | Former Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria | Former Minister of Mines & Minerals Resources Development, Nigeria

 

It is both a privilege and an urgent necessity that we gather here, under the auspices of ACCORD, to speak plainly about a relationship that has shaped our continent for centuries — and that is, right now, at a genuine inflection point.

The post-Cold War settlement — in which Africa was largely a recipient of rules written elsewhere — is visibly dismantling. A new geopolitical architecture is being assembled, and the question before us is whether Africa will help design it or merely inherit it.

Let me be direct: we have been here before. We have gathered in elegant rooms and produced eloquent communiqués. And then the world moved on, and Africa remained in the same structural position. So, the burden of this moment is not just analysis — it is commitment to action that changes the terms of engagement.

Understanding the Turning Point

Three convergent forces are reshaping the global order in ways that create genuine leverage for Africa — if we choose to use it.

First, the return of strategic competition. The West — Europe and North America — no longer operates in a unipolar comfort zone. China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, the assertiveness of the Global South: these have reminded Western capitals that Africa’s 54 nations, 1.4 billion people, and disproportionate share of the world’s minerals are not a charity case but a strategic asset. That shift in perception matters. It means Africa now has suitors, not just donors.

Second, the resource reality. The green energy transition has placed Africa at the centre of the global economy in ways the extractive economy of the 20th century never did. Cobalt, lithium, manganese, coltan, copper — the raw materials of the clean energy future are largely concentrated on this continent. Having already surrendered the oil century with little to show for it, Africa must not repeat that mistake with the minerals of the 21st century. At least now we know that the world cannot go green without first going African!

Third — and perhaps most consequentially — is Africa’s demographic weight. By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African. The continent’s working-age population will exceed that of China and India combined. In an ageing world, Africa is the growth engine. That is not rhetoric. That is arithmetic. And it changes the negotiating calculus entirely, particularly as it concerns the migration discourse — if we build the institutions to leverage it and retool the young ones for the inevitable change.

The Honest Reckoning: What the West Has Gotten Wrong

Let me speak about the Western side of this relationship — not to lecture, but because an honest reset requires honest diagnosis.

For too long, Africa-Europe/West relations have been organised around a paternalistic logic: development aid as generosity, conditionalities as wisdom, and African instability as a justification for continued tutelage. The frameworks have been built in Washington, Brussels, and London — and Africa has been expected to comply rather than co-design.

The trade architecture has been particularly damaging. Africa exports raw materials and imports finished goods. We are rewarded for poverty and penalised for aspiration. Every African government that has tried to add value to its own resources — to process its own ore, to refine its own oil, to manufacture its own goods — has faced trade barriers, financial headwinds, or political pressure.

The debt architecture has compounded this. African governments are charged risk premiums that bear no rational relationship to actual default rates. The cost of capital for infrastructure in Africa is three to four times what comparable projects cost in Europe. This is not a market outcome — it is a structural imposition that keeps Africa in a permanent state of fiscal vulnerability.

I want to be fair: there are genuine partners in Europe who understand this and want a different relationship. And many steps initiatives hint at a re-ordered relationship. Only last November, the EU – Africa Summit held in Luanda, Angola and Europe reaffirmed its commitment to Africa as a strategic partner. Before then, EU has come up with many strategies and plans – the Global Gateway Strategy, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (on serious concerns regarding the adverse impacts of this policy on Africa discussed during the AU-EU summit check here and here), the Critical Raw Materials Act and the various National Action Plans, to name a few. Indeed, speaking a few days ago at the annual conference of EU ambassadors in Brussels, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed that Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old-world order and opined that radical changes are inevitable. But good intentions within a flawed architecture produce flawed outcomes. That is why structural reform, not incremental goodwill, must be the goal of any serious reset.

Africa’s Non-Negotiables

As we approach any new bargain, Africa must be clear about what is non-negotiable. Let me name five out of the many that came out of our reflection yesterday.

The first is value addition and beneficiation. Africa should no longer accept arrangements in which our resources leave our shores as raw commodities and return to us as expensive imports. Any new partnership framework must be anchored on industrialisation, local processing, and technology transfer. Our own Global Gateway must now recognise the place of an African Minerals Consortium, primarily modeled on the global south hydrocarbons consortium – OPEC and preserving the rights of mineral endowed countries to harness their endowments for inclusive growth, fair pricing negotiations, unlocking investment in exploration, promoting local community participation and supply security on a fair and equitable basis.  This is not anti-Western sentiment — it is basic economic logic that the West itself applied during its own development.

The second is sovereign debt restructuring and a fair cost of capital. The current credit rating system penalises African countries in ways that are empirically unjustified. Africa is not capital starved; Africa is capital trapped. On illicit financial flows alone, over $88 billion was trapped in 2024. And yet, when the Africa Group at the UN took the Mbeki report on illicit financial flows and capital flight to the United Nations in pursuit of the global tax reform agenda, it was European countries alongside the United States that opposed the reform of the global financial architecture. We need a fundamental reform of the Bretton Woods credit architecture, new mechanisms for development finance, and an end to the punishing premiums that make it cheaper to borrow in Paris than in Lagos.

The third is genuine technology partnership. Artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and the platform economy are already reshaping global productivity. Africa cannot be a passive consumer of technology built elsewhere and governed by rules written without us. We must replace the extractive capitalism masquerading as untrammelled artificial intelligence with data sovereignty, capacity for digital industrialisation, and a voice in the governance frameworks that will define the next technological epoch.

The fourth revolves around labour migration. True, Africa as a continent is experiencing a significant shift in migration flows, both within our continent and towards Europe. Evidently, well managed migration holds a substantial positive impact both for countries of origin as well as significant benefits to destination countries, and more importantly for global stability and security. EU and the African Union need an honest conversation and a coordinated plan on population flows and labour dynamics considering the evolving geopolitical dynamics in the world.

The fifth — and most foundational — is the right to determine our own development pathways. Africa is not asking to be left alone. We are asking to be treated as equals in designing the frameworks that govern our participation in the global economy. Development conditionalities that make aid contingent on policy choices Africa has not made must give way to genuine partnership in which African institutions lead African solutions, one that is focused on domestic resource mobilisation and not overseas development assistance.

What Africa Must Change

I would be less than honest if I placed all the responsibility on Europe and the West. Our reflection yesterday also looked inward.

The truth is that Africa’s negotiating weakness is partly self-inflicted. We arrive at global tables divided, speaking in fifty-four competing voices, making it easy for partners to play us against each other. The African Continental Free Trade Area is an extraordinary achievement on paper — but its implementation is still slow, and intra-African trade remains embarrassingly low as a share of our total trade. We cannot demand to be treated as a bloc if we do not act as one.

Our institutional capacity for strategic economic negotiation is inadequate. The European Union arrives at trade talks with battalions of economists, lawyers, and technical experts. Many African delegations are outgunned before negotiations begin. Building that institutional depth — the analytical capacity, the negotiating expertise, the legal architecture — is not optional. It is the precondition for sovereign agency.

And we must address governance. Weak rule of law, and institutional fragility are not just moral failings — they are economic costs that our people bear and that undermine our credibility at the negotiating table. The new bargain with the West is inseparable from the new bargain we must strike with our own citizens.

The Architecture of a New Bargain

What would a genuinely new bargain look like in practice?

On trade, it means a fundamental renegotiation of Economic Partnership Agreements — moving from market access frameworks that entrench Africa’s commodity dependence to industrial partnership agreements that incentivise manufacturing, value addition, and skills transfer. Europe should welcome African processed goods, not just raw materials. Europe should reform lopsided partnership agreements such as the ones signed by many coastal states that deplete our oceans, marine life, and community livelihoods, compounding the migration crisis. Europe should accept reforms to global tax rules. That is the test of genuine partnership.

On finance, it means a reformed development finance architecture in which African-led institutions like the African Finance Corporation and the African Development Bank have greater capitalisation and mandate, in which sovereign debt carries risk-adjusted pricing that reflects reality rather than perception, and in which climate finance arrives as grants and concessional lending — not additional debt for countries that contributed least to the problem.

On security, it means an end to arrangements in which African countries pay for security cooperation with political compliance. Security partnerships must be transparent, mutually accountable, and consistent with African sovereignty and the decisions of the African Union.

On governance of the global commons — AI, digital infrastructure, climate rules, pandemic response — it means Africa having a genuine seat at the design table, not just the implementation table. The G20, the IMF, the WTO: all of these must be reformed to reflect the actual weight of the Global South in the 21st century world and Europe must support reforms to the UN Security Council to ensure greater African representation. Our European friends must also eschew the notion that only European values are central to defining new partnerships. We must also acknowledge that Europe has interests, and it’s important to understand and engage these.

And on restoration of dignity, Europe must acknowledge historical atrocities against the African continent and agree on reparations – including the return of looted African assets and artifacts and genuine rebates on African diaspora remittances.

From Dialogue to Compact

Mama Graca, we joyfully celebrated your 80^th birthday last night. In your lifetime, you have seen Africa at its most oppressed and at its most liberated. You have seen what is possible when Africans refuse to accept the terms handed to them and insist on writing their own. That spirit — the spirit of agency over victimhood, of bargaining from strength rather than dependency — is what this moment demands.

Let me close with this: the turning point we face is not a gift from the changing global order. Turning points only become transformations when they are seized. They need not just the right analysis but the right institutions, the right leadership, and the right collective will.

Africa has the resources. Africa has the population. Africa has — at long last — the geopolitical leverage and the critical mineral advantage. What we need now is the strategic coherence to convert that leverage into a new bargain: one in which partnership replaces patronage, co-creation replaces conditionality, and African agency is not a talking point but a lived reality.

The generation watching us right now — the 400 million young Africans who will enter the labour market in the next decade — cannot afford for us to produce another beautiful document that changes nothing. They are watching. Let us make this turning point count.

 

* Address delivered during the high-level dialogue of African leaders organised by ACCORD and hosted by Graça Machel, Chairperson of the Board of ACCORD held on 13-14 March at Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.