Trump, Xi and Putin Are Planning a Deal Over Our Heads

Three men who between them command nuclear arsenals, trade empires and veto power in the UN Security Council are preparing to sit down in a single room. Africa's 1.4 billion people will not be in it. Nobody will ask us whether we want our future decided in a Shenzhen photo opportunity.

The meeting is pencilled in for November 18 and 19, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China. Washington, Beijing and Moscow have never held formal talks together, and now they are circling a three-way encounter. Russian officials say they hope it will be finalised within days. Chinese diplomats say they are "in communication with relevant parties." Donald Trump says that if Xi wants it, he will have it.

Read that again. "If President Xi wants to have it, I'd have it." That is how the great powers talk about the world now. Not as a question of law or principle. As a question of who is in the mood for a meeting.

The Old Map Is Being Redrawn in Our Absence

Analysts quoted in the reporting describe the possible summit in the language of history. A Russian parliamentary figure has already invoked Yalta, the 1945 conference where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill carved up postwar Europe. The comparison is revealing, and not in the way Moscow intends. At Yalta, not one African head of state sat at the table. The continent was still under colonial rule, its fate decided by the men who held its pen. We were the subject of the document, never its authors.

Eighty years later, the format has changed but the arithmetic has not. Even the analysts warn that a three-way meeting would treat allies and affected nations as "secondary players whose interests can be managed after the fact." Here is the uncomfortable truth they are circling: when great powers decide on trade, energy, arms control or security architecture without consulting the people who live with the consequences, the consequences fall hardest on those with the least power to refuse. Africa has been living that reality for centuries.

Look at what these three already do on our soil. Russia's Wagner Group and its successors have extracted gold in Sudan and the Central African Republic while the countries that host them have seen little of the wealth and much of the violence. China holds a commanding grip on the Democratic Republic of Congo's cobalt, a mineral at the heart of every battery in the electric cars the world is so proud of, while Congolese miners dig it out with their bare hands in conditions that would shame any labour inspector. The United States, for its part, lectures African governments about corruption and human rights in one breath and signs minerals and security deals with the same governments in the next, usually with little public scrutiny.

None of these actors is a benefactor. Each is pursuing influence, access and resources. The new scramble for Africa has more players than the old one did, and its rules are written in the same extractive grammar. What changes from one partner to the next is the sales pitch, not the outcome for ordinary Africans.

Who Gets Heard, and Who Pays

So who bleeds when the great powers strike their bargains? The answer is always the same. The farmer whose land is taken for a mine. The factory worker whose government signs a loan it cannot repay. The young man recruited into a militia that is armed by someone in a faraway capital who will never visit his village.

The analysts note that the leaders in this drama are the ones with domestic audiences to please. Trump needs a foreign policy win after the midterms. Putin wants a photo that he can sell at home. Xi wants to be seen as a peer of the Americans, and he is making it clear that he will not be pushed into nuclear talks on Washington's timetable. Every one of them is playing to a domestic crowd. Not one of them is playing to ours.

That is the scandal. We are not invited to the conversation, but we are the stage on which it is performed and the collateral when it goes wrong.

Africa Must Stop Being a Spectator

The answer is not to choose a side in this rivalry. Africa does not need a new patron to replace the old ones. We need a seat, and we need the institutions that make a seat meaningful.

Start with the African Union. The AU has long argued, through what is known as the Ezulwini Consensus, that Africa should hold two permanent seats on the UN Security Council with full veto powers. That demand has been sitting in a drawer for decades while the great powers reshape the world around it. African leaders should stop treating it as a diplomatic courtesy and start treating it as a red line. Any summit that touches global security, trade or minerals without African representation should be publicly rejected by the AU and its members.

Second, we must demand transparency in every deal struck on our continent. Mining contracts, port concessions, security pacts and loan agreements should be published in full, debated in parliament and open to audit. Botswana built one of the most successful economies in the developing world by managing its diamond wealth through transparent institutions, sound fiscal rules and a long tradition of relatively clean governance. Mauritius transformed from a sugar-dependent island into a financial and services hub by protecting property rights and building an independent judiciary. Senegal proved in 2024 that an opposition can win an election and that a government can hand over power peacefully when the people speak. These are not fairy tales. They are proof that when African institutions are strong, African countries negotiate from strength.

Third, civil society and the private sector must hold governments to account. Independent journalists, anti-corruption campaigners, bar associations and business chambers should insist on public disclosure of every concession, and should refuse to be bought with the crumbs of foreign investment. A country that lets its mineral wealth be sold in secret has already lost the argument.

Finally, African citizens must demand it. Ask your MP which bilateral minerals agreement they have read. Ask your president whether the country will sign a deal with a foreign power that excludes its own people from the table. Ask your media why a summit deciding Europe's security architecture is covered in six headlines while a mine collapse that kills forty workers gets two lines. Democracy is not a ceremony held once every five years. It is the daily habit of asking powerful people who gave them permission to decide what happens to our land, our children and our future.

The Call

Trump, Xi and Putin may well sit down in Shenzhen next month and produce nothing but a handshake and a press release. Or they may produce a framework that shapes trade, energy and security for a decade, with Africa filed under "managed after the fact." Either way, the lesson is the same. If we do not speak for ourselves, the great powers will speak about us, and they will do it in the language of their own interests.

So here is the demand, and it is not negotiable. The African Union must formally insist on a seat in any global security process that affects our continent. Our governments must publish every mining, port and security agreement they sign with the great powers, and parliaments must vote on them before they take effect. Citizens must refuse to accept that decisions about our future can be made in rooms we are not allowed to enter.

We have been the subject of other people's bargains for five hundred years. The age of sitting quietly while the powerful divide the spoils is over. Make your voice heard in your parliament, your newspaper, your union and your family WhatsApp group. The men in Shenzhen are counting on our silence. Let them count on something else.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA