UAE’s Growing Footprint in Africa

On the runway of a remote and dusty airbase in Sudan a cargo plane stood abandoned.

It was August 2023. The war in Sudan had been raging since 15 April, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, launched an attack on Sudanese army positions across the capital Khartoum.
The RSF had been part of the army, part of the state since 2013, when Sudan’s longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir turned the notorious Janjaweed militias that had killed hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur into a paramilitary.

Back then Dagalo, known as Hemeti, had been Bashir’s “protection”. But after a democratic revolution took hold in December 2018, Hemeti and Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan had been moved, just a few months later, to remove Bashir from power.

But having enacted a military coup together in October 2021, the rivalry between Burhan and Hemeti grew, with their different sources of power and wealth leading to an inevitable collision.

That white Beechcroft cargo plane, sitting on the runway at Hamrat al-Sheikh in North Kordofan state, told a story about one of those main sources of power and wealth, and about a network that spreads from Sudan to Libya, Chad, Uganda and over the Red Sea to the United Arab Emirates.

It is there that the main patron of Hemeti and the RSF can be found. The UAE has fuelled the war in Sudan, supplying arms and much more to the paramilitary through a regional web that has included Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar, the Wagner Group and the now compromised government of Chad.

The UAE’s interest in Sudan is longstanding, just as its ruling elite’s relationship with Hemeti and his brothers is. The Dagalo family controls gold mines in Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan that serves as the RSF’s powerbase, and from there the gold is taken to the UAE, where it is washed through the markets of Dubai.

The UAE is now the leading recipient of illicit gold smuggled out of the African continent, receiving over 2,500 tonnes of it – with an estimated value of $115bn – between 2012 and 2022.

US sanctions imposed a couple of months after Sudan’s war began targeted two Dagalo family companies connected to the UAE: Al Junaid, a gold trading firm headed by Abdul Rahim Dagalo, Hemeti’s brother and deputy; and Tradive, which is based in the Emirates and is controlled by one of Hemeti’s younger brothers, Algoney Hamdan Dagalo.

While the UAE’s involvement in Sudan’s war – which it continues to deny, however half-heartedly – is now the subject of United Nations reports, its ever-growing entrenchment in other African countries is less hotly discussed.

This brings us to Uganda. In control of the East African country since 1986, President Yoweri Museveni was described to me by a British intelligence analyst as “buyable”, a man who has seen the value in letting the UAE use his country as a “Lilypad” for sending weapons and other supplies to the RSF in Sudan.

This business is conducted, as I have written before, with the help of the cargo planes of Bar Aviation, a company owned by the Israeli Barak Orland, a close associate of Museveni’s son, army general Muhoozi Kainerugaba. Several sources, including Ugandan human rights lawyer Nicholas Opiyo, described Orland as an arms dealer.

Kainerugaba, who is being groomed to succeed his father, is known for his erratic behaviour, once tweeting that it would take two weeks for him and his men to conquer Kenya – a comment Museveni then had to apologise for. The army general has posted pictures of him and Orland together on social media and has thanked him publicly for his work as vice president of Uganda’s Federation of Motorsport Clubs.

The UAE is using Uganda as a staging post for supplies heading to Sudan. But it is also embedding itself in Uganda for many of the same reasons it’s embedded in Sudan.

Uganda is not, like Sudan, a Muslim country and an icon of the wider Islamic world. But it is in a key position in East Africa and it has, in Museveni, a man who is instantly familiar to any state run by a royal dynasty.

Crown prince of Abu Dhabi since 2004, Mohammed bin Zayed, the shrewd Emirati ruler known as MBZ, is a fierce opponent of democratic forces – particularly ones aligned with political Islam – in what he sees as the UAE’s region. The UAE has backed anti-democratic and anti-Islamist forces in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Sudan, among other places.

But as China and western powers pull back from Africa, the UAE is looking to spread its influence across the continent, while also securing its post-oil and gas future, as well as buying up vast amounts of arable land to feed its population, which is confined to a small slice of desert in the Arabian Peninsula.

Over the past decade, the UAE has invested over US$60 billion in Africa, dwarfing the $25bn provided by its larger neighbour Saudi Arabia.

Even more astonishing is what’s coming next. In 2022 and 2023, the UAE pledged $97bn in new African investments across renewable energy, ports, mining, real estate, communications, agriculture and manufacturing — three times more than China, according to fDi Markets, an FT-owned company tracking cross-border greenfield projects.

While analysts do not believe all – or even most – of these projects will materialise, the UAE has consistently been one of the four biggest external investors in Africa over the last decade.

The strategy of the Gulf state, which owes its vast wealth and regional significance to oil, now echoes the words of Ghana’s founding president Kwame Nkrumah: “We face neither east nor west, we face forwards.”

Like Nkrumah, Emirati leaders can cut a deal with Washington one day, while helping Moscow evade its economic sanctions the next. Unlike Nkrumah, the UAE’s ruling elite has trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds and its disposal and has faces no immediate coup threat. At home, any form of resistance is rendered comatose by a life of luxury – not to mention a powerful security state. Abroad, movements seeking to overthrow autocratic rule often face opposition armed by the UAE.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the UAE’s investment plans in Africa, one that is typical – perhaps even definitive – of the way global capitalism operates right now. Abu Dhabi is planning for a post-oil future. Just 16.8% of the UAE’s gross domestic product came from oil and gas in 2019, down from over 40% in 1980. This is a strategy that African oil producers, including Uganda, want to replicate.

But while on the public stage, the UAE talks up a game worthy of the best greenwashing oil companies, privately its rulers fend off any serious efforts to cut fossil fuel subsidies, which the IMF has estimated at $7 trillion a year. This has gone down well in Uganda and across Africa. It was also beautifully exemplified by the UAE’s hosting of COP28, a greenwashing performance of epic proportions that acted more like a trade fair intended to bring energy companies together.

A key Uganda-UAE fossil fuel project has been the oil refinery at Kabaale, in the Hoima District of western Uganda. The Ugandan government’s partner on the project has been Alpha MBM, the investment vehicle of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Maktoum Bin Juma Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family.

In June, Museveni conferred a heroes medal on al-Maktoum for his “exceptional contribution to Uganda’s socio-economic transformation”. Speaking to journalists after arriving in Uganda on a private jet, the prince, who has invested $4bn in Uganda, said the East African country had “become my second home and the people of Uganda are my second family”.

“We want to build an oil refinery in Uganda that will help the country to benefit from her oil wealth,” he said. “We are also working to revive the Uganda air cargo, the first aircraft has arrived today… others will be arriving soon. There are different opportunities here in Uganda, and we are looking for other projects.”

Al-Maktoum’s investments in Uganda are described by the Nile Post as “diverse and far-reaching”. Alongside the oil refinery and air cargo, there is a fruit processing hub in Bukalasa, a logistics hub at Entebbe airport and a gold refinery and freezone complex.

At the end of November, though, it was announced that the Uganda government would fund the oil refinery project through government equity, though Alpha MBM remains a partner in the project.

Museveni is now 80, though he shows no signs of giving up and the plan is still for his son to succeed him. In need of investment, countries across Africa will continue to look to the Gulf, where oil and gas have made countries that were for much of history peripheral to the events of the world, richer than god. And where riches go, power follows.