On Saturday in Sharm El-Sheikh, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is scheduled to inaugurate a two-day conference on investment in Africa.

Several head of states and governments from the continent and a large number of business delegations are expected to take part in the event, which aims to promote trade and investment across the continent but especially in eastern and southern Africa.

“This conference offers an excellent opportunity for all those interested to build new opportunities in Africa because it is not about the official presence but also about the presence of entrepreneurs and the mechanism that is there to ‘match-make’ businessmen with similar interests,” said Ambassador Mona Omar, formerly assistant to the foreign minister on African affairs.

Speaking to Ahram Online, Omar said that the “fact that the president himself is taking the time to inaugurate this conference and to be there with other African leaders shows a genuine official wish to encourage closer relations and deeper cooperation with Africa.”

Omar, however, added that it does take much more than good intentions for Egypt to consolidate its relations with Africa through business channels.

“Listen, we have exceptionally good historic relations with Africa since the heydays of liberation movements on the continent that Egypt strongly supported in the 1950s and the 1960s, but unfortunately we never managed to build on those relations,” Omar argued.

Africa drop 

According to the ambassador, Egypt under Anwar Sadat during the 1970s all but fully dropped Africa – “had it not been for the sincere efforts of Boutros Boutros Ghali, whose eyes were always on Africa.”

“Sadat was very consumed with the war to liberate Sinai and then with the peace talks and with the Middle East story; he also seemed to see no great strategic interest from investing in relations with Africa. This caused a drop, a serious drop,” Omar said.

She suggested that the early years of the rule of Hosni Mubarak were also busy with Arab relations but then “there was some attention given to relations with Africa.”

This attention, she agreed, was “intercepted” with the attempt on the life of Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995 that “forced security restrictions on the presidential visits.”

This was not helpful to the attempts that the foreign ministry was conducting at the time to encourage Egyptian entrepreneurs to pursue Africa – “not just for business interests but also to help reconsolidate relations through the creation of common interests.”

“The issue here is that the business interest in Africa was limited due to the unfortunate and very unfair stereotypes that many in the business community have about Africa,” Omar said.

“And while so many countries from across the world were going to seek business opportunities and closer ties with Africa we were losing out; today it takes a serious and sustainable determination from the business community to actually expand their presence in the many lucrative African markets that are being targeted by so many other non-African countries,” she said.

Omar argues that there are some Egyptian entrepreneurs who already have a strong presence in several African countries, but the numbers are few.

She agreed that there is “of course a role for the government in encouraging the members of the business community to go to Africa by proposing specific targeted markets for exports and specific targeted countries for investment – but the business community has to have the will and it has to bypass its old-fashioned ideas about Africa.”

'Coordinate scheme' 

“There are bits and pieces of economic cooperation here and there across Africa but what we need is to have a more coordinated scheme to make sure that we are working systematically to expand in Africa,” she argued.

Omar agreed that there might actually be a need for a certain official body to be created and be annexed directly to the presidency to make sure that a serious momentum of cooperation with Africa is kept on track.

“Yes, I think this might be one of the ways of coordinating efforts and securing high-level support to this endeavour,” she accepted.

Without “a sustainable approach towards Africa,” Omar warned, Egypt’s share of investment in and trade with Africa is bound to remain insignificant compared to the big shares going to other countries like China, Turkey, Iran and Israel.

“We have to abandon the on-and-off efforts; we need to realise that our friends and brothers in Africa are skeptical about whether we seriously want to build strong ties of cooperation for the joint interests of everybody or if we are just showing interest now given that we are going through intense negotiations with Ethiopia over the issue of the Renaissance Dam,” Omar said.

According to Omar, these two matters should not be made to overlap – because while the path of negotiations seems to be taking a tough curve, the avenues for economic cooperation seem endlessly open.

“There are big markets in Africa and there are many financial institutions that are willing to join developmental projects in the continent – we should not let this go by confusing business deals with water negotiations that require hard work in explaining the Egyptian position to the world to garner support for a fair deal with Ethiopia,” Omar stated.

The former assistant minister argued that while cooperation among the Nile Basin countries “is certainly a priority,” Egypt has been too focused on these countries at the expense of other parts of the continent, “for example the Sahel and the Sahara which is crucial for Egypt because it is also concerned with the combat of the expansion of terror organisations in the continent.”

However, Omar argued that “going to Africa” for economic reasons is not just a task for the entrepreneurs to assume – “we have to take in mind the handicaps that face the keen businessmen in terms of regulations and the hard currency crunch.”

“I think a special attention and serious incentives should be accorded to those who are actually willing to do business in Africa,” Omar said.

She mentioned several bilateral agreements that Egypt had signed for the promotion of trade and business with a number African countries and also of its membership of COMESA whose full capacity has never been fully explored.

“Our cooperation with the countries of the COMESA has certainly increased over the years since we joined in the mid-1990s but what we could do is much more than what has been done,” she argued.

Meanwhile, Omar said that Egypt should also invest more in expanding its diplomatic and cultural presence in Africa.

“There have certainly been steps with the foreign service but much more surely needs to be done,” she argued.

Omar also said that more needs to be done to better bring Africa to Egypt “in the sense that we have so many volumes of African literature translated into Arabic but they are never brought to the attention of the public who are still held hostage to some really very old images about Africa – and of course the business community is not privy to a better understanding of the situation.”

“Africa is a matter of strategic national interest to us – all of Africa and not just the Nile Basin countries; and the Saturday conference is one window for us to look through and see what we could do about this very rich and promising continent – despite the problems and conflicts it faces,” Omar argued.