G7 meet a missed chance
US President Joe Biden (left) talks with France's President Emmanuel Macron during a plenary session at the G7 summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall on June 13, 2021.
The G7 summit promised a lot for Africa. The host, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, pledged to ‘vaccinate the world’ from Covid-19 this year and craft a ‘green Marshall Plan’ to tackle the climate crisis. But Africans will be disappointed with the weak, vague and half-hearted outcome; it will end in many deaths in Africa.
More than 100 former presidents and prime ministers had written to the G7 to bankroll at least two thirds of the $66 billion (Sh7.1 trillion) needed for Covid vaccines by low-income countries. But instead of the $44 billion, they offered a measly $7 billion.
Former UK premier Gordon Brown criticised Mr Johnson’s broken promises, saying, the summit will be remembered as an ‘unforgivable moral failure’.
225 million doses
Covid cases in Africa rose by 25 per cent last week. To vaccinate just 10 per cent of the most vulnerable, the continent would need 225 million doses at the current infection rate. But the UK offered five million doses — just two per cent of those required.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for less than one per cent of the billion vaccines given. Oxfam says that at this rate, it would take 57 years to rid the world of Covid-19 — a mockery of the G7’s promise.
The summit unveiled a focus on investment in Africa’s private sector and the Building Back Better World, a strategy to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has increased Chinese influence in the Global South. If they really wanted to help Africa, they would honour their promise to pay $100 billion in climate finance by 2020 as promised in 2009.
Climate crisis
PM Johnson even drew comparisons with the post-war Marshall Plan, which helped to rebuild war-torn Europe. But this is not what Africans living on the frontline of the climate crisis need, and it’s going to undermine the COP26 UN climate summit scheduled for November, also in the UK.
With its wind and solar, Africa has the potential to be a clean energy superpower. But we need investment to harness this energy to extend power to the remotest areas and leapfrog dirty fossil fuels.
This is what Johnson and the G7 should deliver.
