By Guy Winter
The Arabian Peninsula and Africa go way back- Zanzibar and the East African seaboard were plied by Arab dhow traders, long before Europe’s colonial ‘Scramble for Africa’. These days, Emirates airline is the flag bearer transport solution, with a wider reach and a broader smile. Emirates SkyCargo has 27 freight points all over Africa (including scheduled freighter services to Djibouti, Eldoret, Kano, Lilongwe and Ouagadougou) as well as 23 passenger destinations, including Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Accra and Entebbe.
Out in the Arabian Sea, Dubai-based port behemoth DP World rules the waves, with container-shipping marine terminals in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and as far down the East African seaboard as Maputo in Mozambique. It won’t have escaped any of the GCC logistics players’ attention that Oil & Gas analysts are already calling Mozambique the “Qatar of Africa”, with more than a trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas resources discovered in a series of offshore gas gushers in the Rovuma Basin. With the potential to ship LNG either north to Europe or across the Indian Ocean to lucrative Asian markets, Mozambique- and the international infrastructure investors who fund and operate its deepwater ports- have the opportunity to benefit from the same price arbitrage that has made Qatar’s Ras Laffan one of the LNG capitals of the world.
That’s part of the reason we spent much of this week in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Muscat with our GCC partners, talking to clients and contacts about Africa- the mind-boggling demographic and economic growth the continent is poised to experience, its desperate need for the energy infrastructure to power that and Dubai’s pivotal role as a hub to finance and connect it all. At our joint breakfast seminar at the Capital Club in Dubai on Wednesday, EY explained how the UAE’s carefully-negotiated network of double tax treaties with African nations is starting to make UAE holdco structures a preferred choice for energy, infrastructure and natural resources investment vehicles in a cluster of African nations. Add that to the Emirates’ extraordinary capital liquidity, well-established energy and infrastructure sectors and resident professional services knowhow and bench-strength, and it makes Dubai a genuine launchpad and entry-point for inbound investment into Africa.
Just today, the Financial Times reported the conclusion of the Africa Progress Panel (chaired by former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan) that Sub-Saharan Africa “is the only region in which the absolute number of people without access to modern energy is set to rise”. But according to the International Energy Agency, it is also the region in which 30% of all new Oil & Gas discoveries since 2009 can be found. If Dubai can feel like a regional hub without a region big enough to satisfy its ambition, Sub-Saharan Africa is certainly a burgeoning economic power-house without enough power to fuel its own. Time for the great logistics city to make the connection.
Source: Linkedin
