The government is examining the possibility of setting up new representative offices in Africa, following a suggestion by a lawmaker earlier in the week that such a move would have multilateral benefits, a senior foreign affairs official said yesterday.
Over the past eight years, Taiwan has established two new representative offices in Africa — in Somaliland in 2020 and Ivory Coast in 2022 — bringing the total number on the continent to six, including an embassy in Eswatini, its only UN-recognized African ally.
“We will continue to explore the possibility of establishing a new presence in major countries in different parts of Africa, while maintaining our ongoing efforts to build strong ties with Eswatini” and the other four countries in which Taiwan has offices, Chen Yung-po (陳詠博), deputy head of the Department of West Asian and African Affairs under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a news conference yesterday.
Photo: Taipei Times
His comment followed Monday’s launch of the Taiwan-African Countries Parliamentary Friendship Association in the Legislature, headed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chiu Chih-wei (邱志偉), who said its purpose was to promote parliamentary and people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and African countries.
The new legislative friendship group is to seek to help Taiwan achieve the goal of setting up an additional four representative offices in Africa over the next four years, with a focus on central and northern African countries, Chiu said.
When asked to expand on the initiative, Chen said it was part of the “Africa Project” that was launched by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2018 to help build closer exchanges with countries on the continent, but he did not give any further details.
Taiwan’s six representative offices in Africa are in Eswatini, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, South Africa and Somaliland, which also has an office in Taipei.
Taiwan previously had many more representative offices on the continent, as it had about a dozen formal diplomatic allies there, but since 2000, it has lost all its African allies, except Eswatini.
During the presidency of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) from 2000 to 2008, Taiwan severed official ties with allies Liberia, Senegal, Chad and Malawi.
When the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was president from 2008 to 2016, another African ally, The Gambia, severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Since outgoing Tsai took office in May 2016, Burkina Faso, and Sao Tome and Principe have cut ties.
It was reported in March last year that Taiwan was hoping to open a representative office in Ghana, but there has been no further information, and when asked yesterday about that report, Chen was noncommittal.
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