When Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, jetted several hundred friends into a private airport in the Eastern Cape province to celebrate Eid last year, it showed both the promise and pitfalls in dealing with a new cash-rich player in Africa.
Ahead of a stay at his private resort in one of South Africa’s poorest regions, the UAE ruler was reported to have donated R20mn ($1mn) to upgrade the runway at the backwater airport, which the authorities made an international port of entry for the occasion.
But despite the mutual display of goodwill, South Africa had failed to convince the UAE to turn over the Gupta brothers, accused by South African authorities of looting the state. The Guptas had fled to the Emirates in 2018 but around two weeks before Sheikh Mohammed was touring the Eastern Cape, a Dubai court refused to extradite two of the brothers citing incorrect paperwork, a ruling South Africa’s justice minister described as “shocking”.
The fact that South Africa nevertheless rolled out the red carpet for Sheikh Mohammed and his entourage is a sign of just how influential the UAE has become there and across the continent — and an illustration of the complexities this new alignment can sometimes bring.
As China pares back loans to Africa, the oil-rich Gulf state has become an increasingly important source of foreign investment. In 2022 and 2023, the UAE pledged $97bn in new African investments across renewable energy, ports, mining, real estate, communications, agriculture and manufacturing — three times more than China, according to fDi Markets, an FT-owned company tracking cross-border greenfield projects.
A UAE official tells the FT that its total investments into Africa amount to $110bn, reflecting “the country’s commitment to facilitating sustainable development and growth across the continent.”
The UAE is now “going toe to toe with Beijing”, says Ken Opalo, an associate professor at Georgetown University in the US, of the nation’s presence in Africa. While many of these investments will not materialise, he says, the Emirates has consistently been a top-four investor on the continent over the past decade.
Companies from the UAE have embraced projects in Africa that more risk-averse investors have avoided. Africa has much “to offer in terms of commodities and minerals,” says Hamad Buamim, chair of Dubai’s main trading hub the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, despite the “challenges when it gets to policies and politics”.
This wall of money is allowing the UAE to help shape not only their countries’ economic destinies, but in some cases the political fortunes of some African leaders. When fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front were threatening Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021, the UAE provided military drones to the government, according to a senior US official and Tigrayan leaders. The UAE official says it “supports the institutions and people of Ethiopia rather than any particular parties or individuals”.
When Sudan’s generals deposed Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the UAE stepped in to bail out the new regime, later lending some support to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the civil war that erupted last year, according to a UN panel of experts. The UAE strongly denies backing either side in the conflict and has publicly advocated for peace.
Murithi Mutiga, Africa Programme Director at Crisis Group, a non-profit, says the UAE’s engagement in places like Sudan is partly motivated by its desire to counter Islamist extremism. But, he says, it has also seized the chance to diversify its economy with investments in food security, critical minerals and renewable energy.
All of that makes its impact ambivalent, Mutiga says. “China is a status quo power, Russia is a revisionist power and the UAE veers between the two,” he adds, referencing two of the other major foreign players in Africa.
Western officials say the growing influence of the UAE and other Gulf countries in Africa adds a new layer of complexity. “This is the new world we’re in, where you have middle powers and global powers operating on the continent,” says one former official in the Biden administration, who did not want to be named.
While the influence of Abu Dhabi — the UAE’s oil-rich capital and foreign policy setter — has risen in recent years, Dubai, the region’s financial and trading hub, has long been an important financial centre. African companies are choosing to base themselves there to trade with the rest of the world, says Buamim. “This is where Dubai really played its cards quite well: to be the gateway to Africa.”
The number of African companies registered in Dubai has increased dramatically in the past decade, reaching 26,420 by 2022, according to the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. “Dubai is New York for Africans now,” says Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, a professor of international politics at Oxford university who has studied Africa-UAE links.
The UAE official says that its engagement in Africa, from trade to food security and counterterrorism, was in pursuit of “fostering a prosperous future based on mutual benefit”. But some see the UAE’s inroads into Africa as part of a larger vision to wield more power on the world stage.
Saad Ali Shire, finance minister of Somaliland, the breakaway republic in which Dubai-based logistics business DP World has invested heavily, has no doubts about the Emirates’ growing clout. “The UAE is a new superpower in Africa,” he says.
Emirati engagement with Africa fits into three broad, if overlapping, categories. The first is purely commercial, the second strategic and the third is a financial role, traditionally played by global centres such as London or Zurich, in which Dubai has become an attractive jurisdiction for Africans to trade, do business and park offshore money.
“What’s driving this for the UAE, and of course for other Gulf countries as well, is the energy transition and the hard push for economic diversification,” says Anna Jacobs, Crisis Group’s senior Gulf analyst. “Africa really is this huge untapped market [with] minerals and agriculture.”
Commercially, clean energy is one area of interest. Over the past decade, Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy investor, has built infrastructure including five wind farms in South Africa, a battery energy storage system in Senegal and solar power facilities in Mauritania. Masdar is leading UAE plans to invest $10bn to increase sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity-generation capacity by 10GW.
But UAE companies are also investing in fossil fuels. In May, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company bought a 10 per cent stake in Mozambique’s Rovuma gas basin, acquiring it from Portuguese energy company Galp for around $650mn.
In real estate, Dubai Investments, a listed conglomerate whose biggest shareholder is Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund, this year announced it would start work on a 2,000-hectare property development in Angola. The Abu Dhabi-based telecoms company formerly know as Etisalat, now e&, operates in 12 countries across Africa.
UAE companies have begun to make a splash in mining too. International Resources Holding, a unit of International Holding Company, the $240bn Abu Dhabi conglomerate chaired by UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, last year paid $1.1bn for a majority stake in Mopani, a Zambian copper mine previously owned by Glencore. IHR has also expressed interest in investing in mines in Angola, Kenya and Tanzania.
Last year, Primera, an Abu Dhabi-based gold trader, was granted a 25-year monopoly by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for all small-scale “artisanal” gold supplies in the country. Much African gold, both legal and smuggled, passes through Dubai, according to experts and African government officials.
Peter Pham, a former US special envoy to the Great Lakes region for President Donald Trump, describes UAE African mining ambitions as “relatively benign” and in line with Washington’s interests. “They dilute the Chinese and they provide an alternative supply chain,” he says. “If they can pull it off, I’m all for it.”
Not all UAE investments are free of controversy. In Tanzania, authorities have been accused by human rights groups of violently forcing thousands of Maasai off their land to make way for a safari and hunting project linked to a UAE company. Blue Carbon, a Dubai-based private investment vehicle, has been accused by activists of seeking to grab millions of hectares of African forests in what they deem a greenwashing exercise after signing preliminary agreements in Liberia, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe aimed at generating carbon credits.
Still, many countries welcome the Emirates’ interest. “The UAE is a very good partner to Kenya and many other countries,” William Ruto, Kenya’s president, tells the FT.
Perhaps the biggest difference UAE money has made is in logistics where Emirates’ commercial and strategic ambitions overlap.
DP World is present in nearly a dozen African countries after pouring some $3bn into the continent. It now operates ports from Mozambique on the Indian Ocean in the south to Algeria on the Mediterranean in the north and Angola on the Atlantic, virtually encircling the continent.
“Our entry into these markets is not driven by political agenda. It’s driven by a business agenda that may derive other benefits,” said Mohammed Akoojee, DP World’s chief executive for sub-Saharan Africa. He acknowledges an overarching strategy of connecting Dubai to the continent via trade. “There’s definitely that vision from the Emirates,” he says. “The government of Dubai uses companies like DP World and Emirates [the airline] to build a global presence.”
AD Ports, an Abu Dhabi logistics company majority-owned by sovereign investor ADQ, operates fewer ports in Africa than DP World, but there are signs it wants to catch up. Last year, it won a 30-year concession to run Pointe Noire port in the Republic of Congo and in April it secured a 20-year concession to manage Angola’s Luanda terminal, initially committing $250mn to its modernisation.
“If the government is investing in its trading partners . . . then naturally you need the private sector to come in and invest,” says Ross Thompson, AD Ports group chief strategy and growth officer.
The place where the UAE’s port investments are most obviously strategic is Berbera, the main port of the breakaway republic of Somaliland, located on the Gulf of Aden, where UAE flags can be seen fluttering in the desert landscape. DP World has invested $300mn in the port and an adjacent free-trade zone, while the UAE has been refurbishing the coastal city’s airport. Somaliland has also granted the Emirates a 25-year concession for a naval base.
The political ramifications go further. DP World took over Berbera port in 2017 shortly after the company was ejected from Djibouti, which accused it of “colonialism”, allegations denied by DP World. Since its move 250km south to Berbera, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development has spent almost $90mn building a smart new paved road linking Berbera with the capital Hargeisa and, crucially, on to the Ethiopian border.
This year, in a move that enraged Somalia, which rejects Somaliland’s claim to independence, Addis Ababa signed an agreement with Hargeisa. In return for recognising Somaliland as a legitimate state, landlocked Ethiopia would gain access to a stretch of coastline on the Red Sea where it could develop a port and naval base.
Many see the hand of the UAE behind the bold play. “When it comes to the UAE government, they are seeking to have political influence in the region,” says one senior Somali official.
The UAE’s most controversial alleged actions in Africa have taken place in war zones. In 2019 and 2020, it actively supported General Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan warlord, after he launched an attack on Tripoli to oust the UN-backed government. The UAE has denied breaking an arms embargo on Libya.
Even more controversial is the UAE’s alleged fuelling of the Sudanese civil war by helping to arm General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, an accusation the UAE has repeatedly denied. A former camel trader with previous links to the Emirates, Hemeti now runs the RSF paramilitary force fighting for control of the country. The RSF has been accused by Human Rights Watch of committing ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
Despite the UAE’s denials, an independent panel of experts for the UN says there is some evidence it was supplying arms in the guise of humanitarian aid through Chad. “The UAE is not playing by any rule book in Africa,” says Cameron Hudson, a Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They’re chaos agents in Sudan.”
Albadr SS Alshateri, professor at the National Defence College in Abu Dhabi, says he has no knowledge of the UAE’s alleged backing of Hemeti. But the UAE does suspect that the Sudanese army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, may be closely linked to Islamists. As a general rule, “the UAE sees itself as pursuing stabilisation,” Alshateri says.
The third role that the UAE is playing in Africa is that of freewheeling financial hub.
Oxford’s Soares de Oliveira says western legal firms, investment banks and wealth managers all offer services in Dubai — including arbitration over disputes — that companies from Africa and elsewhere have traditionally sought in London and Geneva.
“Dubai is the ideal ecosystem: it offers the same blue-chip world-class services that are essentially Anglo or Swiss, but it is lawless enough to be a free for all,” he says.
Dubai is still considered a more flexible jurisdiction despite being removed from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “grey list” this February after two years on the naughty step, he says, although centres like London are still conduits for suspicious transactions.
Many of the 26,000-plus African companies registered in Dubai are “letterbox companies”, says Soares de Oliveira. “That allows Africans to keep dollars away from African economies. You pay suppliers in Dubai and the money never comes back.”
Wealthy Africans, including politically exposed persons, also find a safe harbour in Dubai where they can buy property and enjoy a world-class lifestyle. Other high-profile residents include Isabel dos Santos, the billionaire daughter of Angola’s former president, who moved to the city in 2020 days after the new Angolan government froze her assets.
The expanding presence of the UAE and other Gulf countries in Africa and vice versa presents a quandary for Washington.
The US does not approve of everything the UAE is doing there, says the former Biden administration official, but it regards it as a vital global ally, including in the Middle East. “It’s such a challenging actor,” he adds. “In Africa, they’re both investing in positive ways and acting in destabilising ways at the same time.”
Hudson at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is more sceptical. “It may be OK in the near term,” he says. “You let me do what I want in Sudan and I’ll give you what you need in Gaza. That’s a very transactional relationship, but it’s not a friendship.”
Alshateri at Abu Dhabi’s National Defence College says the UAE’s rise is tied to Washington’s declining influence in Africa: “They had to pick up the slack because the US is backsliding on its security commitment.”