As Emmanuel Macron and African heads of state convene the France-Africa Summit in Nairobi today, anti-imperialist movements from across the continent and the Global South have gathered in the same city for the Pan-Africanism Summit Against Imperialism (PASAI). Convened by the Communist Party Marxist Kenya and a broad Working Committee of anti-imperialist formations, PASAI is a direct political counter to the official summit, branded "Africa Forward: Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth." Where the official summit assembles heads of state and French corporate interests behind closed doors, PASAI brings together revolutionary parties, workers' movements, youth organisations, and progressive formations from across Africa and the Global South. This is the summit that speaks for Africa's peoples. PPF identifies fully with its purpose, its demands, and the movements that made it possible.
PPF stands in solidarity with the people of Kenya and with all formations gathered at PASAI. Having been driven from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger by patriotic and popular forces, France has pivoted to East Africa, with Kenya as its new strategic gateway. The official summit's language of innovation, green growth, and partnership is a mask over the same extractive logic that has defined French relations with Africa since colonialism. France does not come to Nairobi to offer anything. It comes to recover what it has lost.
PPF stands firmly with every movement challenging the Defence Cooperation Agreement in the courts and in the streets. The DCA is not a technical military arrangement. It is an instrument of entrenchment, one that places foreign military interests above Kenyan constitutional authority and extends imperial reach under the cover of bilateral cooperation. Resistance to it is inseparable from the broader continental struggle.
Africa's destiny will not be decided at the official summit. It is being decided at PASAI, and in the organised movements that made this counter-summit necessary.