Africa-Press – Mozambique. French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday urged “new solutions” for cooperation in security and defence matters in Africa, pointing to the support provided by Rwanda to Mozambique in the fight against insurgents in Cabo Delgado as a good example.
Speaking as President-in-Office of the Council of the EU at the opening ceremony of the EU-Africa summit that began yesterday in Brussels, Emmanuel Macron remarked on the various thematic round tables of European and African leaders scheduled to take place over the course of the two days, including the one devoted to “Peace, Security and Governance”, being held today.
“We must complete what we are doing in the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea, as we announced this morning [at the Elysée], but we must also help to build new solutions. Rwanda, in cooperation with the Southern African Development Community (SADC), have helped, for example, to provide an unprecedented response to the situation in Mozambique,” he said.
The French head of state added that it is also necessary to secure and agree “the financing of such operations” and to promote them, pointing out that it is necessary to “convince the other nations within the United Nations to follow this movement”
The leaders of the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) meet between today and Friday in Brussels at the VI EU/Africa summit, successively postponed due to the pandemic, with the participation of nearly 80 delegations at the highest level from the member states of the two organisations, including Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP), with Mozambique being represented by the President, Filipe Nyusi, who last week, on a visit to Brussels, appealed precisely to the EU for the need to fund the Rwandan and SADC military forces which are on the ground supporting the Mozambican armed forces in fighting the insurgency.
Also in view of the strong attendance, this VI Summit has an unprecedented format, with diplomatic sources explaining that it was decided to organise not the usual “long plenary session with so many delegations, which would hardly produce results”, but rather several thematic round tables, moderated by the leaders themselves (one or two heads of state and government of each party, EU and AU).
The seven round tables are devoted to the themes “Financing for sustainable and inclusive growth”; “Climate change and the energy, digital and transport transition”; “Peace, security and governance”; “Support for the private sector and economic integration”; “Education , culture, vocational training, migration and mobility’; ‘Agriculture and sustainable development’; and ‘Health systems and vaccine production’.
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