Man-in-the-street view of the Russia-Africa Summit
As some of you know, my home base is Brussels. In fact, I live in the city center and so I am well conditioned by the word “summit” to expect road obstructions, police cars with sirens wailing that accompany heads of state and other VIPs to the summit events of European Union institutions, as well as enhanced surveillance, which usually means lots of helicopters hovering overhead to watch our movements.
These past two days of the Russia-Africa Summit I happened by chance to be in St Petersburg, and worse still, to be close to the epicenter of summit events which took place mostly in the RosCongress complex at nearby Shushary. That complex is known to the international community as the venue for the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place in June. Such proximity on one side would be bad enough, but it seems that President Putin yesterday spent time in Pavlovsk, a palace town two kilometers on the other side of Pushkin, where I live. And so there was super road congestion in our immediate area all day. The main thoroughfares leading to the city center were closed and the general public, myself included, was sent to the commuter trains if we wanted to get downtown.
This inconvenience was exacerbated by heightened security that included the shutdown of wireless internet for hours at a time and disorientation of GPS systems, meaning that the taxi services were heavily impacted, sending cars on call by App to addresses that in no way matched the location of clients.
That, in a nutshell is what the Russia-Africa Summit meant to the man in the street in St Petersburg.
But what about its meaning to political commentators?
As one could imagine, there has been a lot of air time and print media pages devoted to the Summit. Just on its eve, the prime discussion program on Rossiya 1, The Great Game, hosted by Dmitri Simes, gave the microphone to a great authority on African affairs from Soviet times, still very active professionally notwithstanding his pension age. This expert was overjoyed that his hour had come, that Russia once again is prioritizing relations with Africa in the tradition of the USSR. He insisted that closer relations would bring benefits to both sides. However, his enumeration of the economic and other benefits was very, very modest and the show finally was a bore. Yes, Africa should be of interest to Russia as a potential market for its goods and services, because it has the best demographic trends of any part of the world, that is to say, the highest percentage of young people. The African economy is fast growing, but not nearly as fast growing as China. Yawn…
And then on Thursday morning, during my breakfast catch-up on the news broadcasts of Business FM, I heard a much more dynamic analysis of the prospects for Russian interaction with Africa offered by a journalist who appears regularly on the station, Georgy Bovt. What he said is available in text by following the link https://www.bfm.ru/news/530513 - “How can Russia attract Africa?” [in Russian]
Bovt is not my favorite commentator, but here I take my hat off to him. He did his homework and brought to the discussion some very important comparative information about how Russia matches up with other European and global players active in Africa.
Bovt opens his discourse with enumeration of the significant achievements Russia has made in its business development efforts in Africa. Total trade with the Continent reached 18 billion dollars last year and there have been significant Russian projects underlying this turnover, including those involving bauxite mining (Guinée) and oil and gas extraction. Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Rusgidro, Alrosa, Lukoil and Rosatom are among the most active Russian concerns in Africa. Egypt’s first nuclear power station which is now being built by Rosatom will supply energy in excess of the output of the Aswan dam, which was the star engineering succes of the USSR in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser
However, the Russian economic activity in Africa pales by comparison with the European Union, which did 412 billion dollars in turnover last year. The trade volumes with Africa of Italy and France are each in excess of 70 billion dollars. Last year alone the EU trade with Africa grew by 100 billion dollars. China’s two way trade with Africa last year was 212 billion dollars. And U.S. trade was 68 billion.
Russia presently accounts for just1% of direct foreign investment in Africa. China is the current world leader in infrastructure development in Africa. But in terms of cumulative investments, Britain has the lead, with 60 billion dollars. Next come Holland and France, with 54 billion each, followed by the USA and China with 45 and 44 billion dollars respectively. But, comments Bovt, there is still so much to do in Africa to help it catch up with the industrial world, that it is not too late for Russia to increase its presence.
In Russia’s favor, per Bovt, is the current anti-colonial rhetoric coming from the Kremlin, which finds a sympathetic audience in Africa. But, he concludes as follows: “In any case, this is a very long term game. You can be sure there will be no quick pay-back.”
Good as Bovt’s analysis is, he has curiously overlooked a very relevant question, namely the distribution of Russian trade and geopolitical interests across the Continent, which is in fact highly differentiated.
What do I mean? It would be a safe guess that most of Russia’s trade today and in the near future is and will be with North Africa, namely with Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, whereas much of the political advantage in the United Nations and other international institutions that the Kremlin can gain in Africa going forward is in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yes, there are great possibilities for Russia to occupy a greater position in the extractive industries across Africa. But grain sales, the number one talking point at the Summit, are really concentrated in the North African countries.
The poorest African nations that will now receive between 25,000 and 50,000 tons of Russian grain free of charge - Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burkina-Faso and Eritrea - account for a drop in the bucket of Russian total grain exports on a commercial basis, very little of it sought by Black Africa.
Russian commercial involvement in Nigeria and other very large countries in central Africa is especially low, while these countries are heavily dependent on Western financing to keep their economies afloat. That by itself explains why the delegations of these largest countries were not led by a head of state or head of government. They were least willing to face punishment by their Western partners
Now let us take a brief look at the Declaration which attendees of the Summit signed at the conclusion of their gathering. I have found a useful list of the contents here: Принята итоговая декларация саммита Россия - Африка: О чем договорились участники. Главное - Российская газета
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Most of the points are in the political domain, namely staking out common positions in the United Nations and other international institutions, opposing imposition of unilateral sanctions and secondary sanctions, peace-keeping on the African continent, strengthening international law and resisting the notion of a ‘rules based order,’ developing cooperation to protect cultural values and to promote use of Russian and African languages in school programs.
The last named point is probably the most concrete and easy to implement immediately. In general, the Russians found support for a Soft Power move on the Continent with a view to shaping the mindset of future leaders. News programs on Russian television have spoken this week of plans to expand the number of Russian Cultural and Scientific Centers in Africa from the present five to many more. For the sake of facilitating cultural exchanges and tourism, Russia will be adding staff to its embassies in Africa.
What this means practically speaking is that Russian diplomats who have been booted out of Paris, for example, will now find themselves moved to French speaking Africa. Such is the fate of career diplomats…
Speaking more seriously, these measures mark a return to the practices of Soviet Russia, when there were a great many teachers of mathematics and other subjects sent to Africa and other parts of the Developing World like Cuba for long periods. And, of course, there will be expansion of the number of places in Russian military schools open to candidates from Africa.
Note that most of the African delegations departed right after the Summit wrapped up on Thursday or early Friday. But as I had anticipated the leaders of at least 5 delegations are staying on to join Vladimir Putin on the reviewing stand of the annual Russian Navy Parade down the Neva River. Who these leaders are will be a good tip-off on Russia’s next export contracts for military hardware.
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Before closing, I want to direct attention to another type of man on the street: taxi drivers. The taxi market in St Petersburg, and more generally across Russia has been evolving with amazing speed over the past several years. Consolidation was the overriding principle, with shift from salaried drivers to independent ‘service partners’ who rented their cars from an operating company and who, for a time, were enrolled in the dispatch systems of several operators, responding to calls to present their availability to each new client request. Small taxi companies either went bust, because they could not attract enough drivers to provide dependable service to the clientele or merged with others of similar size. The next step was when a very few large operators gobbled up all the others. And the latest very obvious development over the past year has been the emergence of one company, Yandex Go, as the biggest nationwide taxi operator.
Yandex is the Google of the Russian consumer market. What started as the nation’s most widely used search engine has become an e-commerce giant. My most recent hotel, intercity bus and train reservations for the trip around Northwest Russia that is now coming to an end was largely done online via Yandex travel subsidiaries. They are now the country’s equivalent to booking.com.
Yandex Go’s domination of the taxi market comes from its huge cash flows assured by the various Yandex businesses and also by Yandex being at the forefront of technological innovation. Yandex was among the first to offer taxi dispatching via its proprietary App that used geolocation to identify the address of callers and simplified entry of destination addresses based on its digital records of the given taxi rider.
But the App is at times frustrated by the state interference with GPS that I noted above. And so Yandex has recently moved to upgrade the experience of placing taxi orders by telephone. They have largely replaced human operators with Artificial Intelligence guided robot operators. The bots catch the addresses you give and repeat them back to you impeccably, much better than the humans in some central location far from your town or neighborhood could do.
And so it is no wonder that Yandex Go is now the logo you see on the vast majority of taxis on the city streets in and around Petersburg.
Who are the drivers? Don’t be surprised if there is at times a communication problem with them, because many are ‘guest workers.’ Twice in the past couple of days our driver turned out to be a Kirghiz. Yesterday’s driver was perhaps atypical in that he spoke perfect Russian and knew the city very well without resorting to his GPS ‘navigator’ except to see where there are traffic jams that can be avoided. But then he has lived here for the last 13 years. He flies back to Bishkek periodically. He explained to us that Kirghiz citizens enjoy real privileges in finding work in Russia thanks to state to state relations that are as close or closer than Russian-Belarus relations.
This is a useful reminder that Russia remains one of the biggest importers of foreign labor on the world scale. Their numbers fell sharply during COVID, but it is a safe guess that their presence in the Russian market is reasserting itself. Whether there will be room here for ‘guest workers’ from Africa in the future remains to be seen.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023