EU/Presidency: Josep Borrell expects it is ‘an African presidency’ – Interview

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EU/Presidency: Josep Borrell expects it is ‘an African presidency’ – Interview

9:43 CAT | 19 Jan 2021

Photo: Lusa

Josep Borrell, the head of EU diplomacy, says he hopes the Portuguese presidency “will be the presidency for Africa” after the pandemic has “lost a year” in the relationship between the two continents.

“I hope the Portuguese presidency will be the presidency for Africa”, said Josep Borrell in an interview with Lusa on Friday, on the sidelines of the Commissioners’ visit to Lisbon as part of the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.

He added that his “friend Augusto” Santos Silva, the Portuguese foreign minister, had assured him that “the presidency of Portugal is a presidency focused on Africa.

He regretted that the Covid-19 pandemic had caused the EU to “lose a lot of time in its relationship with Africa this year”, when “a very intensive work programme was planned, with meetings at all political levels, which could not take place”.

He stressed that the EU “does not just want to continue helping Africa” but “to move forward together”: “The future of Europe is with Africa”.

Asked whether there are conditions for a summit between the European Union and the African Union during the six months of the Portuguese presidency, Josep Borrell did not hesitate to say that “Europe should have a summit with Africa before China does”.

“It is not a question of who runs more or a problem of who does it a week earlier. Summits alone do not solve everything. […] The work has to be done first and the summits mobilise political energies that are very important because they provide the impetus”, he said.

Josep Borrell continued that the central issue is to mobilise resources, “channelling private investment”, but for this to happen, Africa “must have good governance, political stability and peace”.

“There will be no investment if there is no stability, wars are not won today if peace is not won”.

He also stressed that Africa’s population would be “ten times bigger” than Europe’s and that unless there is a leap in development in African countries, “migratory pressures will be unsustainable”.

“And unfortunately, so far, between the two sides of the Mediterranean, the wealth gap is not narrowing, it is widening. If the demography is unbalanced and so is the distribution of wealth, we can expect nothing more than very great migratory pressure”, he stressed.

Source: Lusa