Президент Кении Руту заменил главу ЮАР на саммите G7 и призвал к геологической разведке континента

Only two presidents from the African continent — William Ruto of Kenya and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — attended the recently concluded G-7 summit in Evian, France. Their countries are not among the seven most industrialised economies in the world, nor are they part of the G-20. But because the summit traditionally accommodates non-G7 countries as guests, French President Emmanuel Macron included el-Sisi and Ruto on the list of invited non-members. Kenya eventually made the list because President Donald Trump of the United States protested South Africa’s intended participation. In recent times, the United States and South Africa have experienced diplomatic spats following the latter’s enactment of domestic economic and land reform policies such as the Expropriation Act. Trump vowed to boycott the summit if South Africa attended. This left Macron with no choice but to replace Cyril Ramaphosa with Ruto. Macron and Ruto share a bromance; they have held multiple engagements and co-hosted the 2026 Africa-France Summit in Nairobi. While Ruto’s participation at the summit represented Kenya and the collective interests of the African continent, Egypt’s attendance was premised on el-Sisi’s indispensable role in mediation efforts in the Gaza ceasefire and Iran-related negotiations. Expectantly and eventually, the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates coordinated efforts with Egypt at the summit to address Middle Eastern stability and negotiate lasting resolutions to regional conflicts. In short, el-Sisi was in France to discuss stability in the Middle East, while Ruto advanced new paradigms that he implicitly believes could help Africa become a consequential net contributor to global GDP. I have been keeping an eye on Ruto since he spoke at the annual Mo Ibrahim Governance Summit in Nairobi in April 2023. There, he won me over by emphatically denouncing the dehumanising way Western leaders treat their African counterparts in the name of summits. It is disturbing and utterly absurd, Ruto said, for more than 50 African heads of state to converge on Washington, DC, to meet a United States president and discuss African problems. I was beginning to see Ruto as a reasonable leader who could genuinely champion the cause of the continent and provide astute leadership to his peers until a Kenyan friend cautioned me not to be beguiled by his eloquent speeches and the unrealistic demands he makes at such fora. “Check his record at home, and you’ll find it dismal,” my friend suggested. Upon closer examination, I found that Kenya is grappling with a severe cost-of-living crisis driven partly by aggressive domestic tax hikes. Other troubling indicators include blatant government extravagance despite public austerity, widespread corruption, and state crackdowns on political and civil dissent. Anyway, part of Ruto’s talking points at the summit was the need to shift Africa from aid dependency to investment-driven partnerships based on sovereign equality. While advocating global reforms in finance, debt architecture, and governance to give Africa a fairer voice and lower borrowing costs, the Kenyan president also canvassed for derisking, arguing that global credit rating agencies exaggerate the risks in Africa and often misjudge the continent’s economic potential. On international trade dynamics, he pushed for an end to the export of Africa’s natural resources and a transition toward domestic industrialisation, declaring that “extraction is no longer acceptable or tenable.” A few points are worth making. First, Ruto is drunk on fantastical pan-Africanist ideologies that are hollow in economic realities. One of his submissions should have included the discontinuation of agricultural subsidies in the West, which have been shown to undercut local farmers in developing economies. A 2025 World Bank Group publication titled “Unfair Advantage: Distortive Subsidies and Their Effects on Global Trade” stated that “developing countries are especially vulnerable to the trade-distortive effects of subsidies. Their production and trade tend to be concentrated in agriculture, where distortions caused by subsidies are greatest. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, products for which subsidies are found to be particularly trade distortive — such as fresh fruits and vegetables, pulses and legumes, nuts, cotton, and meat — represent more than 20 per cent of goods exports”. Western and Chinese subsidies have been harmful to many African farmers because they distort price mechanisms and prevent African producers from earning fair market prices for their labour. Four West African countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali — have a strong interest in the global cotton trade and currently earn 60 per cent of their total crop revenue from cotton. Despite collectively producing only three per cent of the world’s cotton, they are markedly more efficient than China and the United States, whose combined production stands at over 50 per cent. An Oxfam study reported that eliminating cotton subsidies in the United States would raise the global price by between six per cent and 14 per cent, translating into a significant increase in West Africa’s yearly revenue. Ruto announced in an interview with Reuters from the sidelines of the summit that Kenya is close to sealing a critical minerals deal with the United States under which it would process its own resources domestically. “We’ve agreed with them on what is mutually beneficial between Kenya and the United States, and President Trump and the American administration are happy with it,” he explained. While details about the case he submitted on critical minerals for Africa are still fuzzy, blanket statements credited to him, such as “natural resources in Africa can no longer be exported and processed elsewhere” and “they would have to be processed in-country and in-continent”, defy the current realities of things. Except for a few, the geological surveys of many African countries are still being carried out with outdated mapping technologies and insufficient high-resolution geophysical data. Therefore, these countries need to update both their geophysical and geological surveys if they aspire to enhance mutually beneficial trade relations and integrate their mineral producers into the emerging supply chains of North America, Europe, and Asia. Frequent reports state that the continent is home to 30 per cent of global critical minerals reserves, making it vital in manufacturing and meeting the technological needs of industries such as clean energy, defence and semiconductors. With the launch of ‘Project Vault’, created by President Donald Trump to stockpile critical minerals, Africa needs to position itself to effectively utilise this opportunity, given that the United States heavily relies on importing 40 of its 50 critical minerals, while at least 35 African countries are richly endowed with the same elements. After the participation of seven African countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Kenya, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Angola) at the inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial Summit on February 4, 2026, much has yet to be heard regarding the concrete progress the continent is making in partnering with international agencies regarding critical minerals. One fact is unassailable: without comprehensive subsurface mapping, knowledge of what lies beneath Africa’s territory is inadequate and negotiating on that basis amounts to signing an exploitative contract. “It is very important that African governments prioritise and elevate geological capacity building because it is part of the critical scarce skills and human capital of a country that can contribute to better control of critical mineral resources,” stated the President of the African Academy of Sciences, Prof. Lise Korsten. Ruto should have leveraged his attendance at the G-7 summit to push for more African partnerships with government agencies like the United States Geological Survey, Geological Survey of Canada, and France’s Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières for the update of the continent’s geological mapping and training of its geologists, miners and engineers in subsoil data, modelling software and advanced mineral knowledge. - Olaniyi writes via [email protected]