The queue outside the Russian leader’s office told the story more plainly than any communique from the Third Russia-Africa Summit. Over two consecutive days in late October, eighteen African heads of state and government filed one by one into meetings with President Vladimir Putin. The ritual of deference raises uncomfortable questions about how the continent’s most powerful office-holders exercise their mandates, and to whom they answer.
The summit itself, held in Moscow, drew delegations from 48 of Africa’s 55 countries, including the Sahrawi Republic. Twenty-two countries were represented at presidential or prime ministerial level. That marks an increase from the 17 heads of government who attended the previous edition in St. Petersburg in 2023, but it falls far short of the 43 heads of state who gathered at the first Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi on 23-24 October 2019. The trajectory suggests waning enthusiasm among Africa’s executives for the Moscow format, even as attendance remains strikingly high by any diplomatic standard.
The choreography is what invites scrutiny of the leaders’ conduct in office. On 29 October, after the plenary session, Putin received six African presidents one-on-one: Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah of Namibia, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of Sudan, Michael Randrianirina of Madagascar, Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe and Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia. The following day, Friday the 30th, was reserved entirely for bilateral sessions. Eleven more presidents went in: William Ruto of Kenya, John Mahama of Ghana, Felix Tshisekedi of the DRC, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, Mohamed Ould Ghazouani of Mauritania, Assimi Goïta of Mali, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia, Azali Assoumani of Comoros, Faustin-Archange Touadéra of the Central African Republic, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Salva Kiir of South Sudan and Faure Gnassingbé of Togo. Critics of the summit saw supplicants filing before a confessor, the queue outside heaving as one leader exited and the next entered.
That deference, the argument runs, is not confined to Moscow. The same pattern holds at the US-Africa Summit, the China-Africa Summit, the France-Africa Summit and the UK-Africa Summit. There is even an Italy-Africa Summit, first held in Rome on 28-29 January 2024, attended by 46 African countries, 21 of them represented by presidents, and hosted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was 47 years old at the time. The contrast drawn by African commentators is pointed: leaders who have held power for decades sitting at the feet of a head of government born on 15 January 1977, just two years after some of them first took office.
The seniority of those office-holders is itself a governance datum. Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, aged 82, has ruled for roughly 42 years in total, serving from 1979 to 1992 and again from October 1997 to the present. That makes him Africa’s third longest-serving leader, after Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, in power for 47 years since 3 August 1979, and Paul Biya of Cameroon, in power for 44 years since 6 November 1982. Critics ask how leaders with such long tenures, and such ample opportunity to transform their economies, can justify repeated pilgrimages to foreign capitals in search of modest returns.
The returns are, on the evidence, modest indeed. At the last full US-Africa Leaders Summit, hosted by President Joe Biden in Washington, DC from 13-15 December 2022, 49 African heads of state attended and $55bn was pledged over three years, a sum that shrinks considerably when divided among 55 countries. Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, hosted a far smaller White House Africa Summit from 9-11 July 2025, to which only five countries were invited: Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Gabon. The agenda covered critical minerals, the Lobito Corridor, security and migration. No new aid was announced. By contrast, at the last China-Africa Summit, held 4-6 September 2024, 53 African countries attended, all except Eswatini and the Sahrawi Republic, with 51 heads of state present, a record, along with the AU Chair.
The accountability question underlying all of this is simple: what mandate do these trips serve, and what do citizens get in return? Africa is said to be the richest continent in the world by natural resources, yet its governments have failed to convert that endowment into prosperity, or even, as critics put it, to open their eyes and study how others did so.
The counter-example most often cited is China itself, the destination to which African leaders now routinely travel. In the 1960s China was a country of bicycles and poverty. After Deng Xiaoping set aside ideology for pragmatism, famously declaring that it does not matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice, China achieved economic gains faster than anyone in history. Crucially, China did not get there by attending Europe-China summits. It got there by studying what worked elsewhere.
Deng’s own account is instructive. He visited Singapore in November 1978 and, in a major speech in October 1979, reported what he had learned about how the city-state used foreign capital: foreign enterprises paid 35 percent of their net profits in taxes to the state, labour income went to workers, and foreign investment generated service sectors, all of it income for the state. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, whom Deng reportedly impressed as the most impressive leader he had ever met, a five-footer but a giant among men, later wrote in his book From Third World to First that what Deng saw in 1978 became a point of reference for the minimum the Chinese people should achieve. After that endorsement, several hundred delegations, most of them unofficial, came from China armed with tape recorders, video cameras and notebooks, studying Singapore under a microscope and reproducing what they found attractive, including even its legal system.
That is the lesson African leaders decline to learn, according to their critics. Every country that has achieved prosperity has emulated those that went before. Summits will not develop African countries; emulation, hard planning and implementation will. Lee Kuan Yew’s book, it is noted, is available for free. The humiliation, on this view, lies not in the bending of the knee itself but in returning home with a pittance and nothing learned.