When Al Mansour Holding — the investment fund of Sheikh Mansour bin Jabor bin Jassim Al Thani, a cousin of Qatar's Emir — toured ten African countries in late 2025, including the DRC, CAR, Angola and Gabon, pitching aviation, energy and real estate partnerships, it was following a trail already blazed by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Three Gulf states are now competing for influence across Central Africa simultaneously, and each is playing a different game.
The UAE moved fastest and most visibly. AD Ports Group is building a $200 million container terminal at Pointe-Noire and holds a 30-year concession at Douala's dry bulk terminal. In the DRC, Abu Dhabi signed a $1.9 billion deal with state mining company Sakima in 2023 to develop four critical mineral mines — two years before Washington made Congo's cobalt and coltan a foreign policy priority. The Emirati approach is consistent: control the ports, control the corridors, control the pricing on everything that moves through them.
Saudi Arabia is playing a longer game. Riyadh's interest in Central Africa runs through food security and minerals — the Kingdom imports roughly 80% of its food and has been acquiring agricultural land across the continent for two decades. The Public Investment Fund expressed interest in Congolese critical minerals via Maaden in 2023 and has been expanding steadily since. Saudi state carriers Saudia and Flynas are adding Central African routes, making connectivity the soft infrastructure that precedes harder investments.
Qatar's entry is the most unusual. Doha cannot match Emirati infrastructure capital or Saudi sovereign wealth scale, so it is trading in something neither rival has: diplomatic credibility. Qatar mediated the DRC-Rwanda framework that produced the Washington Peace Accords and continues to run the Switzerland-based M23 track. As analysts at African Business noted in April, Doha is "leveraging its mediation role between the DRC and Rwanda to get preferential access to Congolese mineral reserves." Its $103 billion Africa investment pledge in 2025 confirmed that the diplomacy and the economics are the same strategy.
GCC states collectively channelled nearly $113 billion in FDI into Africa in 2022-2023 alone — more than in the entire previous decade. For Central African governments, the competition between Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha is producing something they have rarely had: real negotiating leverage. Kinshasa has used UAE mineral interest to attract US attention, US attention to extract better terms from Chinese operators, and the Chinese relationship as a counterweight to Washington's M23 pressure. At Pointe-Noire, the Congolese government deliberately awarded competing terminal concessions to Turkey's Albayrak and Abu Dhabi's AD Ports — maintaining competitive tension rather than granting any single operator a monopoly.
The risk in all of this is not that any one Gulf actor gains too much. It is that three competing powers pursuing access agendas in a conflict-affected region creates its own instabilities. The UAE's documented support for Sudan's RSF is the regional precedent nobody in Kinshasa or Yaoundé is ignoring. Capital flows and infrastructure are arriving. The question of what they will cost — measured in concessions, dependencies and political obligations — is still being negotiated, one 30-year contract at a time.
