UAE issues rare denial of 'imperial ambitions' in Africa

The UAE has pushed back against a Financial Times (FT) article charting the Gulf state’s growing military and economic footprint in Africa.

In a rare rebuttal published by the FT on Monday, the UAE’s director of strategic communications, Afra al-Hameli, said Abu Dhabi was “disappointed” that the newspaper portrayed it as pursuing an “imperial ambition” in Africa.

“To describe partnerships negotiated with sovereign African governments as evidence of ‘imperial ambition’ is deeply patronising,” Hameli wrote. “It relies on a stereotypical and outdated narrative portraying African states as passive recipients of foreign influence incapable of identifying priorities that serve their national interests”.

The article came in response to a series of FT articles that have examined the UAE’s expanding footprint in Africa, often corroborating Middle East Eye’s coverage of Abu Dhabi’s activities.

An FT article published earlier this month exposed how the UAE has built up a network spanning ports, logistics, agriculture, mining, finance, and security interests in Africa.

A follow-up investigation by the FT revealed that a UAE-based security company with links to the government recruited and deployed Colombian mercenaries to fight alongside Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s civil war.

Though the UAE continues to deny it, there is now widespread evidence supporting the claim that the UAE supports Sudan’s paramilitary RSF, which has been accused by the United Nations and the US of committing genocide during the war in Sudan.

UN experts, human rights groups and reporting from MEE has documented arms transfers to the RSF facilitated by networks based in Libya, Chad and the breakaway region of Somaliland.

The FT investigation published on 4 August opened with the RSF pilferage of 1.5 tonnes of gold bullion, worth roughly $100m, from the state-owned Khartoum gold refinery at the onset of Sudan’s war. The report said the UAE supplied military and civilian cargo planes to remove the gold, which transited through Chad and South Sudan.

The investigation also documented the network of Emirati airstrips, naval bases, and military facilities instrumental to mercenary deployment and the illicit gold trade in Sudan, alongside evidence gathered by UN experts, flight-tracking specialists and human rights organisations concerning arms-trafficking networks sustaining the counterrevolutionary war.

On the commercial side, the UAE has expanded throughout Africa with groups like DP World and Abu Dhabi Ports, securing port concessions and logistics infrastructure across the continent.

DP World now operates or is developing ports, inland terminals and free zones in 13 African countries, while its distribution networks extend into more than 25 African states.

Emirati entities have committed billions to mining copper in Zambia, gold in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Mali, iron ore in Mauritania, and tin in eastern Congo. The FT said the UAE has become the most “consequential foreign power to stamp its mark on the continent in the past decade”.

Cameron Hudson, a former US intelligence official and expert on Africa, said the UAE’s rebuttal contained “a flaw [in] logic”.

“Two things can be true simultaneously: UAE can make mutually beneficial, strategic economic investments AND harbor imperial ambitions that leverage those investments for political and strategic gain. In fact, they are both true,” he wrote on X.