For Osvaldo Mboco, it was prudent for African countries to go to the Brussels summit, with a common African agenda where priorities would be defined, fundamentally to curb inequalities in access to covid-19 vaccines.
The African continent is struggling this Tuesday with the "inability to vaccinate its population and Europe basically has its population almost all vaccinated, and they are now going to the third dose", recalled the specialist, considering "fundamental the strengthening of relations in that domain".
"In order to allow more vaccines to reach the African continent, because we are talking about a pandemic that is a global problem whose solution must also be global, so that is one of the questions", said this Tuesday Osvaldo Mboco in an interview. to Lusa.
The 6th European Union/African Union (AU) Summit will take place in Brussels, Belgium, on the 17th and 18th of February 2022, bringing together heads of state and government, within the scope of a common agenda for the establishment of the Europe alliance-Africa.
Equality in the distribution of covid-19 vaccines, underlines Osvaldo Mboco, "does not only depend on African political strategy and resourcefulness, but also on the political will of these European States" and the private sector.
"It also does not depend only on the political will of these States, because (...) those who produced the vaccines are the private companies that invested a lot of money in it and if the patent is broken overnight they will have to have a counterpart", he explained.
"Now, even if patents are broken, we have to look at which African countries would be able to produce vaccines, South Africa has already started to take a step in that direction, maybe Egypt too, because if we have South Africa producing in a continental scale can also reduce costs", he stressed.
The vice-president, Bornito de Sousa, representing the president, João Lourenço, will head the delegation that will represent Angola at this meeting.
Mboco points out that meetings of the kind "are always of paramount importance" because they are there, "as a rule, where the Heads of State and Government establish contacts of a different nature" and sometimes they produce more effects on the sidelines of the summit with contacts bilateral.
The "quite close" relationship between the EU and the AU, which involves historical and cultural factors, "should be strengthened" at this summit, but in the economic field, he noted, "the relationship needs a new approach".
"Because we relate to Europeans much more with the raw material and then that raw material returns to Africa as a finished product, while there is also a need to look at what is the transfer of "know-how" to the continent African", he argued.
The transfer of knowledge to the African continent "will allow Africans to start producing in their own territory and export finished products, this has a great impact".
Osvaldo Mboco also considered that Africa's various problems, "such as terrorist attacks, can directly impact the world, particularly for Europe, by putting European interests and investments in the continent at risk."
"All this is an unstable climate that always ends up worsening and creating some embarrassment. There is also in the African continent the issue of underdevelopment, wars and the need to rebuild the continent and also build new projects", he noted.
Hence, "these partnerships are extremely important in these meetings to define the 'modus operandi' and also our future from the point of view of development for the continent", he defended.
The Angolan expert also believes that the EU will try to gain greater influence in Africa to try to "counter the growing dominance" of China on the African continent, considering there is a "strategy for this purpose, led by the United States of America (USA)".
"There is a Western strategy, which is led by the US and its allies, largely European states, to reduce as much as possible Chinese influence in other areas and also to reduce as much as possible that which is the expansion of the Chinese economy and its projects, mainly in Africa", he pointed out.
For Osvaldo Mboco, European countries, allies of the US, may define clauses to cut some lines of Chinese financing, "taking into account that there is a discriminatory approach that considers that there is a new process of colonization of the African continent headed by China".
Financing for growth, health systems and vaccine production, agriculture and sustainable development, education, culture and training are some of the topics that will be discussed at the Brussels summit.
