The arrival of over 7,000 migrants on the tiny island of Lampedusa in recent days shows how Africa has "already exploded", Italy's foreign minister Antonio Tajani said outside the United Nations building in New York.
"The situation in the powder keg of Africa is not explosive, it has already exploded," Tajani told reporters as he arrived for the UN General Assembly.
"There is an ongoing movement of millions and millions of people and there are no walls that hold," Tajani added.
The exodus of migrants from Africa to Europe is an issue that requires the intervention of the UN, Tajani said.
The presence of European Parliament president Roberta Metsola at the UN General Assembly is a sign of solidarity with Italy and an acknowledgement of the scale of the problem, Tajani argued.
"I interpret her presence this evening as a sign of closeness to Italy with regard to a problem over which Italy cannot be left on its own and which cannot be resolved Europe alone either. I will tell the UN this," he said.
There have been military coups in seven sub-Saharan countries - Gabon, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea - since 2020.
