By President of China Xi Jinping, having already made four tours in Africa – more than any of its predecessors – and trade between China and Africa growing at a dizzying pace, it is natural for other major regional “players” to see Chinese penetration in the Black Continent and… they are jealous, wanting to reap the huge economic benefits of the “pie” of development in developing countries.
One of these “players” who want something like this is Turkey, which favors the scenario that China is living today: while in the year 2000 China-Africa trade did not exceed 10 billion dollars, by 2019 it now amounted to 200 billion.At the same time, Africa’s trade with Europe and the United States has stagnated.
At the same time, the China’s direct investment in African countries, investing in public works, power grid expansion and health system modernization. Others African countries borrows huge sums of money from China to build iconic infrastructure, such as the rail link between Addis Ababa and Djibouti or from Mombasa to Nairobi, with the risk of political dependence growing.
This, of course, does not concern him at all Recep Tayyip Erdogan: on the contrary, it is the result expected of him Turkey. That is, to have put them Its “tentacles” very deep in the most economically developing region of the planet, this moment. And how will he achieve this? With the policy of selling Turkish drones, the so-called abroad “drone diplomacy».
it is about a a well-thought-out strategy that the Turkish president has been following since the end of the last decade. And he is, in part, justified, as the The volume of Turkish-African trade increased from $ 5.4 billion in 2003 to $ 25.3 billion in 2020. But also at the diplomatic level, Turkey has made remarkable progress: while in 2009 it had only 12 embassies in Africa, it now has 43. And the schools run by Turkish educational institutions, such as Maarif, have proliferated, with Turkish education being taught in total 17,000 students in 25 different African countries.
It is also indicative that the Turkish Airlines, the state-owned airline of Turkey, now operates flights to 39 African countries, as reported by the extensive AfricaNews report. However, the big business is done, as mentioned above, with drones.
Drone diplomacy
In late October, the Turkish president embarked on a major African tour accompanied by his country’s defense industry officials. diplomatic and trade “prelude” in view of the third Turkey-Africa summit to be held next December. Somewhere between cheese and pear, Erdogan managed to sell Turkish drones to all of sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisia, Morocco and Libya.
These poor countries, mentions another post, prefer drones made in Turkey because they are cheap and reliable – not as much as the American counterparts, but they are still a cost-effective solution for value for money.
The drone has also shown interest in these drones Somalia – where the Turks have established their most important military base outside their homeland. After all, the Mogadishu government is already the country’s second largest trading partner after Beijing.
Moreover, even after the partial withdrawal of the French from the Sahel, a field of glory is now opening for Erdogan in order to penetrate the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Mali and Ghana, also cites another recent report on behalf of the US Pentagon.
The growing Turkish expansion into Africa was pointed out in an article a few months ago by distinguished political analyst and sociologist Francis Fukuyama, arguing that in the last five years Turkey has become a major regional power mainly thanks to this very drone technology that it has developed.
“My hobby is drones and since I started using them a decade ago, I realized that this technology, which was then owned only by the US and Israel, would sooner or later be used by other countries as well. So what did Turkey do? It took drone technology from the Israelis, developed its own industry and then became involved in various conflicts. In Idlib, Syria, it blocked the Russian-backed Assad forces; in Libya, it bombed the air base of General Haftar, an ally of the United Arab Emirates; [σ.σ: προπερασμένο] “In September, Erdogan became involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the Azerbaijani side against Armenia,” Fukuyama said at the time.Turkish drones destroyed 200 tanks, 90 armored vehicles and 182 artillery pieces. “It simply came to our notice then.
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