Billions of oil dollars have been poured into hotels, oil companies and infrastructure across the continent, writes JODY CLARKE, in Nairobi
BEYOND THE jagged skyline of Kampala’s concrete office blocks, glinting through the city’s squalid smog, stands the largest mosque in Africa south of the Sahara.
Holding up to 15,000 people, it is called the Gadafy Mosque in honour of the man who not only paid for it, but promised to foot its maintenance costs for at least 10 years.
Whether that money will keep flowing into the Ugandan capital is anyone’s guess. However with Tripoli’s financial tentacles stretched across the continent, from agricultural programmes in Niger to hotel chains in Rwanda, what happens in Libya over the coming weeks is bound to shake the continent,
Spurned by the rest of the Arab world in his quest for pan-Arab unity in the 1990s, Gadafy turned his attention to Africa over a decade ago, declaring that “We Libyans are Africans” and proposing the idea of a “united states of Africa” with a million-strong army.
It was not long before he made his ambitions clear, proclaiming himself Africa’s “king of kings”.
A $5 billion Libya Africa Investment Portfolio was established in 2006 and billions of dollars in oil money were poured into hotels and oil companies from Zambia to Ethiopia.
Mosques were built as far apart as Liberia in west Africa to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, while infrastructure projects in Liberia and Kenya got massive boosts in investment.
A new $300 million pipeline between Uganda and Kenya is supposed to be built by Libya’s state owned oil company, while the portfolio took significant stakes in telecommunications companies such as Uganda Telecom and Rwandtel.
It is little wonder that eight regional leaders turned up to the opening of the Gadafy Mosque in 2006. In search of much needed investment, though, some of them may come to regret relying on funds from Libya.
“If Gadafy was to fall I can see repercussions for a couple of countries,” said Isaaka Souare, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.
“The new government in Guinea, for example, had banked quite heavily on Libyan funding for some of its development projects, particularly in the tourism and agriculture industries which it depends on. If the Gadafy funding does not go through it could have a serious impact. I imagine other countries are in a similar situation.”
From Liberia’s Charles Taylor to Sierra Leone’s Foday Sankoh, there was a time when Gadafy financed every African rebel without a cause. Now he promises “huge financial support” to those countries he once destabilised with guns and money.
Sierra Leone got the country’s largest mosque and a $50 million investment in a new mobile network and the Malian capital Bamako got a new ministerial and diplomatic quartier, known as the Cite Administrative Muammar Qaddafi.
This after he armed Taylor to the teeth in a war that killed 250,000 people and meddled with a decades-old tribal conflict in Mali, giving refuge to Touareg rebels in 2008 and 2009.
Despite this persistence to meddle, African leaders have been slow to condemn Gadafy’s actions over the past two weeks, in part it seems because “they do not want to burn their bridges”, Dana Moss of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said.
The African Union, which depends on Gadafy for 15 per cent of its budget, has remained almost silent on his brutal crackdown while only tiny Gambia has come out with a strong line, its president slamming the AU for its “unacceptable silence”.
Africa’s leaders never took his vision for a “united states of Africa” seriously, but they are still keen to appease him, especially since he promised over $90 billion in investment for the continent last year.
Twenty-nine countries are now members of the Libya-based Community of Sahel-Saharan States, but most of them see it as a way to tap into Libya’s oil wealth, according to David Shinn, a former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, “rather than a precursor for a united states of Africa”.
Meanwhile, businesses and countries that rely heavily on cash injections from Tripoli are waiting nervously for developments from the North African country.