After months of talking about her ambition to turn Italy into the bridge that unites Europe with African economies, the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, yesterday presented her long-awaited Plan Mattei, a cooperation initiative with African nations that will have a initial allocation of 5.5 billion euros to invest in the continent and which aims to help control, in the last term, migratory flows towards Italy.
If Meloni won the 2022 election promising to slow the arrival of migrants, since taking power he has adopted a more realistic approach after seeing how in 2023 migratory pressure increased with more than 157,000 migrants arriving in Italy. For this reason, the Prime Minister gathered yesterday about 25 African heads of state and government, in addition to several ministers and institutional representatives, in the Italian Senate, the setting for the launch of the so-called Mattei Plan, named after the founder of the ENI energy, known for promoting the development of African countries.
“Illegal mass immigration will never stop, the traffickers will never be defeated, if we do not address the causes that push someone to leave their own home. This is exactly what we intend to do: on the one hand, to declare war against traffickers, and on the other hand to work to offer African peoples an alternative of opportunities, work, training and legal migration”, assured the leader of Brothers from Italy
The first pilot projects of this plan are a professional training center on renewable energy in Morocco, educational initiatives in Tunisia or for access to health in the Ivory Coast. In total, 3,000 million will be allocated from the Italian Climate Fund and another 2,500 million from the Development Cooperation Fund, including credits, donation operations and guarantees. “We believe that it is possible to write a new chapter in the history of our relationship, a cooperation between equals, away from a predatory or charitable imposition towards Africa”, added the Italian Prime Minister in the opening, to which the highest representatives of the European institutions also went to demonstrate the support of Brussels: the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen; that of the European Council, Charles Michel; and that of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola.
At first, the conference was supposed to be held in October, but it was postponed due to the tension in the Middle East, and it ended up being considered as the first major event in the framework of the Italian presidency of the G7 in this 2024. Von der Leyen, who in recent months has shown an obvious personal rapport with Meloni, expressed her delight with the Rome initiative, and assured that Europe must cooperate with Africa so that young people have more job opportunities and do not have to resort to human traffickers to reach Europe.
The leader of the Community Executive showed her willingness to offer more opportunities “to come to Europe legally so that people can travel, learn and take their new knowledge home”, defending that “mobility must be managed by the law, not by traffickers”. “And the better we are in terms of legal migration, the more convincing we will be in the prevention of irregular migration”, he postulated.
In contrast, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, applauded the intentions, but stressed that they would like to have been consulted during the preparations.
According to Italian Government sources, in a first phase, the Mattei Plan initiative will focus on these pilot projects, while later it will be extended to other nations on the continent. Rome wants to intervene in areas such as instruction and training; health, water and hygiene; agriculture; infrastructure and energy. In fact, Italy aspires to become a pole to transfer African energy to Europe on the road to independence from Russian hydrocarbons. Italy, Meloni remarked, wants to be “a natural center for the energy supply of the whole of Europe, a goal we can achieve if we use energy as a key to the development of all”.
According to the premier, Rome wants to help interested African nations to produce enough energy for their needs and to export the surplus to Europe.
