Emirati President Mohamed Bin Zayed (right) and King Mohamed VI. from Morocco on Monday in Abu Dhabi. DRISS BENMALEK / MAP (MAP / EFE)
This Monday, Mohamed VI. his first official trip in five years, aside from foreign vacations, to the United Arab Emirates to seal funding for infrastructure projects that will shape Morocco’s future. Accompanied by eight ministers and numerous high-ranking officials, the monarch of the Alawite dynasty, together with the Emirati head of state Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed, signed a dozen memoranda of understanding to finance works such as the expansion of the high-speed network in Marrakech. Speed of his country, the first and only operation on the African continent or the construction of superports (on the Tanger Med line) in Dakhla (former Spanish Villa Cisneros) in Western Sahara and Nador near Melilla.
The Moroccan water sector was also highlighted in the principles of the financing agreements concluded with the Emirates. The Spanish company Acciona was only commissioned in November to build and operate the new mega desalination plant in Casablanca together with two Moroccan companies. The budget is estimated at 800 million euros and is intended to deliver between 550,000 and 820,000 cubic meters of water every day for the seven million inhabitants of the Maghreb country’s largest metropolitan region. The local partner companies are Afriquía Gaz and Green of Africa, both controlled by the family of Moroccan Prime Minister Aziz Ajanuch.
The Emirati investment program in Morocco between 2024 and 2029 also includes the modernization of the airports of Casablanca, Marrakesh, Nador and Dakhla. This also includes cooperation projects in the energy sectors, such as green hydrogen, and agriculture, in particular the construction of irrigation reservoirs. In the field of tourist real estate development, the Mediterranean coast of the Rif, the Atlantic coast of Tarfaya opposite the Canary Islands and that of Dakhla in the former Spanish colony of Sahara, which Morocco has administered since 1975, are specifically mentioned. Finally, Rabat is offering “strategic cooperation” to share fertilizer projects together with state-owned OCP, the world’s leading exporter of phosphates, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, with a view to the planned gas pipeline between Nigeria and Morocco.
Since his participation in the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War in Paris in November 2018, Mohamed VI. Apart from a protocol greeting last February in Bangui, no official visits were made to Gabonese President Ali Bongo, who was deposed six months later in a military coup. The Moroccan king vacationed in the same African country from late 2022 to March last year. At the beginning of September, a few days after his arrival, he had to interrupt his stay in Paris (where he spent about four months in 2022) to urgently return to Rabat after the strong earthquake that shook the Atlas region south of Marrakesh.
With around 12 billion euros, the United Arab Emirates is the second largest investor in Morocco after France. It was one of four countries, along with the United Kingdom, Qatar and Spain, authorized by their close ties to send rescue teams to help victims of the recent Atlas earthquake, which killed nearly three thousand people in rural areas .
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