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Britain and Africa in the Twenty-First Century
Paul D. Williams
George Washington University pauldw@gwu.edu
DRAFT VERSION: NOT FOR CITATION
Contemporary Africa contains huge variations across its many states: while some are relatively stable others have endured war for decades; while some have rapidly expanding economies others are in reverse gear; and while some are stable democracies others are among the most authoritarian on the planet. As a consequence, it is unhelpful to assume that the British government has a single Africa policy. Instead, it has engaged with many different
“Africas” and adopted a wide range of policy instruments from military operations to providing budget support to some of the continent’s better performing governments.
And yet for all the variation, there has been significant continuity in the broad objectives of British policy. Since the election to power of the New Labour Party in May
1997, Britain’s policies toward Africa have been accorded greater prominence and have been articulated with persistent reference to promoting the three core objectives of peace, good governance and prosperity (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2001; Williams 2004, 2005a).
These objectives are officially codified in public service agreements (PSAs) – the Treasury’s attempt to devise targets intended to measure the impact and value for money of UK policies.
The 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review set 30 PSAs for the period 2008-2011. These applied across the UK Government as a whole rather than on a department by department basis. In relation to Britain’s Africa policies arguably the two most important are PSA 29:
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Reduce poverty in poorer countries through quicker progress towards the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs); and PSA 30: Reduce the impact of conflict through enhanced
UK and international efforts.
1
This chapter provides an overview and analysis of the UK Government’s attempts to achieve these goals during the first decade of the twenty-first century. After setting out some of the main contextual factors shaping contemporary UK-Africa policies the chapter then examines Britain’s policies in relation to the three areas of peace, good governance and prosperity. I conclude that although successive Labour governments have paid greater attention to African issues than their predecessors, particularly in the field of development, they have also over-estimated the amount of leverage Britain can exercise over local African politics and have failed to come up with a coherent strategy to reform Africa’s most poorly governed states.
Context
Before assessing the UK’s attempts to promote peace, good governance and prosperity in
Africa, it is important to understand the salient features of the context within which these policies have been formulated and conducted. These contextual factors can be crudely divided between domestic and international.
Domestically, the first point to note is the fact that the Labour Party has been in power for over 12 years. This has helped ensure a significant continuity of objectives and a relatively stable institutional machinery of policymaking.
2
Not surprisingly, African affairs have involved many arms of government but the central players have been the Prime
Minister’s office (especially during Tony Blair’s premiership), the Department for
1 Other relevant PSAs include PSA 3: Ensure controlled, fair migration that protects the public and contributes to economic growth; PSA 26: Reduce the risk to the UK and its interests overseas from international terrorism; and PSA 27: Lead the global effort to avoid dangerous climate change.
2 It is notable that the Conservative Party does not appear to be departing dramatically from Labour on any key issues related to African affairs (see Hague 2009).
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International Development (DFID), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the
Ministry of Defence (MOD). Other actors have also had important niche roles including the
Treasury, the Stabilisation Unit,
3
the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(DEFRA),
4
the Department of Health, and the intelligence services. With so many bureaucracies involved it was perhaps inevitable that conflicts exacerbated by differences in organizational culture and priorities would hamper the implementation of policy on a regular basis.
The second domestic factor was that the biggest issues on Britain’s foreign policy agenda have not focused on Africa. Although during New Labour’s years in office Africa has attracted unprecedented levels of interest from some senior British politicians, compared to the struggle against al-Qa’ida, the wars in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, and efforts to counter nuclear proliferation, African issues play only a bit part in the UK’s overall foreign and security policies. It is only in the area of development policies that Africa can be said to be at the forefront of UK concern (see below). One recent example of this hierarchy of priorities was the June 2009 publication of the Commission on National Security’s document,
Shared Responsibilities: A national security strategy for the UK . Out of 109 recommendations, Africa was mentioned explicitly in only two of them (IPPR 2009).
5
This is not to say that Africa is invisible on the UK’s national security radar; rather the continent is not the most crucial for achieving Britain’s ‘overarching national security objective’: to protect ‘the UK and its interests, enabling its people to go about their daily lives freely and with confidence, in a more secure, stable, just and prosperous world’ (Cabinet
3 This was created in December 2007 by renaming the joint FCO/MOD/DFID Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Unit.
4 Since 2006, the DEFRA, not the FCO, is supposed to play the leading role on the UK’s international work on climate change.
5 The two recommendations were vague: the UK should increase its engagement and support for the African
Union (AU), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the African Peer Review
Mechanism (APRM); and in its dealings with North African governments Britain should apply more pressure to promote human rights.
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Office 2008: para.1.9). Accordingly, only parts of the continent feature prominently in the
UK’s first ever National Security Strategy (NSS): north and east Africa because of concerns about the threat of transnational terrorism (para.3.7); failed and fragile states because of their susceptibility to organized crime, such as the drug trade in West Africa (para.3.21); and states suffering under the continent’s ‘prevailing political system’ – autocracy – because of the potential for instability (para.3.44). Overall, therefore, the UK’s security strategy has focused on ‘those parts of Africa suffering from conflict … or extremism’ (para.4.51). The 2009 update of the NSS continued this trend of seeing parts of Africa as significant because they posed maritime security challenges (especially around the Horn and Gulf of Guinea) and offered sanctuary for al-Qa’ida (especially in North and East Africa (Cabinet Office 2009).
A third significant feature of British domestic politics was the increasing prominence of various non-state actors. These included development and humanitarian organizations such as Christian Aid and Oxfam as well as advocacy groups such as International Crisis Group,
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. There were also broader social movements such as the Jubilee campaign to cancel odious debt in developing countries, the effort to
“Make Poverty History,” and the activities of various citizen groups trying to “save Darfur.”
There are also now significant African diaspora populations within the UK, especially in
Greater London. Indeed, the over 500,000 migrants from Africa within Britain have long represented the fastest-growing black and minority ethnic group in the UK, many of whom come from outside the continent’s Anglophone states (Styan 2007: 1185-6).
In the international realm, recent debate about the UK’s Africa policies has taken place against the backdrop of four crises concerning climate change, the global recession, energy supplies, and transnational terrorism. The first of these presents humanity with arguably its biggest medium- and long-term problem: how to deal with the consequences of a hotter planet with more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. Africa has featured
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Draft Sept. 2009 prominently in these debates because its states do not bear much responsibility for bringing about these changes and because Africans are predicted to suffer a disproportionate share of the negative effects of climate change in terms of human suffering, environmental degradation, and political instability (see Toulmin 2009).
The second crisis – the global recession – posed a more immediate set of concerns for
Africans and the UK Government alike. At home, the subsequent pressure on budgets raised the spectre that the UK might not stick to its commitments in relation to aid and militaryrelated issues. As for its effects on Africa, the British Government’s analysis suggested that there were four ways in which Africa was badly hit by the economic downturn (Malloch
Brown 2009). The first was the declining demand for and prices of a number of key commodities, the only real exceptions being gold and cocoa. Second, remittances fell by at least one twelfth across the continent. In addition, those sent home by Africans were expected to drop by $800 million in 2009 (DFID 2009b: 24). Then there was the reduction in international private capital flows, including foreign direct investment and portfolio investment. Finally, aid flows fell, in part because of currency fluctuations. Although there were no easy solutions, the UK’s minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, Mark Malloch Brown
(2009), suggested that the antidote to the recession lay first and foremost in greater regional integration – of markets, infrastructure and institutions – across the continent (see also DFID
2009b: 40-41).
The third crisis revolves around the growing anxiety among industrialized states that there will be increased competition for energy supplies, especially oil, natural gas and water.
While the search for sustainable alternatives to oil and natural gas continues, Africa’s relative abundance of these and other crucial commodities such as coltan, diamonds, gold, uranium, cassiterite and wolframite, means that the continent is increasingly being framed as the site of
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Draft Sept. 2009 competition between the major seekers of resources such as the US, China and India but including Britain and other advanced industrialized states.
The fourth crisis – fear of transnational terrorism – has abated somewhat since the
9/11 attacks but continues to exercise a significant influence on British policies, including with respect to Africa (see Abrahamsen 2004, 2005). Not least because the four men convicted of the abortive 21 July 2005 bombs in London were all born in the Horn of Africa
(Styan 2007: 1172). Overall, the UK’s approach to African affairs has certainly not been as militarized as that of either the US or French governments but London has continued to view parts of the continent primarily through the prism of counter-terrorism, notably North Africa and the Muslim belt running from the Horn through the Sahel to West Africa. Taken together, these four crises have produced an increasingly complex and uncertain international context.
Peace
Managing Africa’s most destructive armed conflicts has been a central objective of UK policy. As PSA 30 concludes, ‘Where conflict exists, achievement of any other UK
Government objective is harder to achieve. So preventing and managing international conflicts is core UK Government business’ (HMG 2007b: para.1.2). More precisely, Britain’s core goals are to reduce the number and impact of armed conflicts and build more effective international institutions and UK capabilities, better able to prevent and manage conflict and build peace (HMG 2007b: para.2.1). Of course, not every African war has attracted significant UK engagement but the government has deployed various conflict management techniques in a range of settings, including mediation, peacekeeping, peacebuilding as well as unilateral military enforcement measures in the case of Sierra Leone (see Williams 2005a: chapters 4 and 8). Even in areas where it has undertaken significant conflict management initiatives, the UK Government has been well aware that it ‘cannot determine outcomes on its
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Draft Sept. 2009 own’ and must therefore work ‘with and through our international partners’, especially the
UN, the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) (HMG 2007b: paras.3.45, 3.35).
According to the International Development Secretary, UK policy in Africa’s war zones is to ‘build peace and to build functioning states’ (Alexander 2009). This means supporting lasting political settlements; addressing the underlying causes of conflict and building institutions to resolve them; establishing effective states that can survive on their own; and helping states to deliver growth, jobs and those basic services to meet the expectations and demands of their citizens. In practice, however, the UK Government has tended to frame its short-term goal in war zones as stabilisation: ‘the summary term for the essential processes (military, humanitarian, political and developmental) that are required to establish peace and security and put in place a political settlement that produces a legitimate government in states that have experienced (and sometimes still are experiencing) violent conflict’ (Stabilisation Unit 2008: 8).
With regard to mediation, the UK has played significant roles in peace processes in some of Africa’s most destructive conflicts, including Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Arguably the most impressive diplomatic achievement was the UK’s role in the peace process that ultimately produced the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed between the government of Sudan and the
Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in early 2005. Whether this will survive the complicated implementation process is yet to be seen but it did succeed in stopping one of
Africa’s most deadly wars. The downside of this agreement appeared most visibly in the
Darfur region of Sudan where in 2003 rebels who were not involved in the negotiations leading up to the CPA felt compelled to take up arms in order to try and gain a say in the process of deciding Sudan’s political future. In relation to this war – between the government and two main rebel movements, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation
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Army – Britain’s mediatory role was less impressive. Here, the UK played a backseat role until the final stages of the seventh round of peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria. At this late stage the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, was rushed to the negotiations along with the US Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Zoellick. By all accounts, Benn and Zoellick presided over a rushed agreement that was signed by the government and only one rebel faction (see de Waal 2007: chapters 8-11). The so-called Darfur Peace Agreement of May
2006 quickly collapsed and another agreement has yet to be concluded. Critics have maintained that this type of problem is indicative of a general failure by the UK Government to devote sufficient attention and resources to working out specific strategies which could support more effective peace processes in the world’s war zones (Barnes 2007).
With regard to peacekeeping, Britain has rarely sent many of its troops to Africa.
Indeed, in the twenty-first century it has never deployed more than 50 uniformed personnel to
UN peacekeeping operations on the continent (see table 1). This is in spite of the fact that almost all of the UN’s missions in Africa have been significantly under-resourced. Nor has the UK been a major contributor to EU operations on the continent. It has instead played a distinctly backseat role when compared to France and Germany. It contributed only 88 soldiers to the French-led Operation Artemis which deployed to help protect civilians in the eastern DRC town of Bunia during 2003 (Ingram 2003). Although Britain did contribute personnel to the EUFOR RD operation in the DRC during 2006 it is unclear how many and certainly UK personnel were not a major presence in the mission. A similar story was evident in relation to the more recent EUFOR Chad/Central African Republic mission: as of
December 2008, the UK was contributing just 4 personnel and by May 2009 this figure had dropped to just 2 personnel out of the authorized total of 3,700. It is also notable that in the wake of the crisis in the North Kivu region of the DRC in late 2008, the UK was strongly
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Table 1: UK uniformed personnel in UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, 2001-2009
Source: UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/contributors/
Mission 31 July
2009
31 Dec.
2008
31 Dec.
2007
31 Dec.
2006
31 Dec.
2005
31 Dec.
2004
31 Dec.
2003
31 Dec.
2002
31 Dec.
2001
MINURCAT 0 0 0 --- --- --- --- --- ---
UNAMID
UNMIS
UNOCI
UNMIL
ONUB
UNAMSIL
MONUC
UNMEE
0
---
---
6
---
2
2
0
3
---
---
5
---
6
3
0
3
---
---
6
0
1
5
0
3
---
---
---
3
0
6
0
2
0
---
---
3
0
6
0
3
0
21
---
---
0
5
0
3
---
32
---
---
---
5
3
---
---
21
---
---
---
6
3
MINURSO
UK Total
---
10
0
17
0
15
0
12
0
11
0
29
0
43
0
30
0
27
87,160 86,161 80,380 49,576 54,646 59,871 47,731 30,631 27,431 UN Total
(authorized)
Beyond the usual concern with “body bags,” official justifications for this poor
---
---
22
---
---
---
5
0 showing have tended to express concerns about command, control and competency within
UN peace operations, and emphasized that the UK regularly places personnel in key strategic management positions within these missions. The main reason, however, is that the UK’s strategic priorities have lain outside Africa: specifically, in the Balkans, Iraq, and increasingly in Afghanistan. Instead of contributing uniformed personnel, the UK has focused on placing advisors in strategic positions within the continent’s regional organizations, and
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Draft Sept. 2009 has set about helping to train, equip and fund peacekeepers throughout the continent. It has also been playing a leading external role in supporting the Eastern Brigade of the African
Standby Force and has contributed funds and materiel to the AU peacekeeping missions in
Burundi, Darfur and Somalia.
At the far end of the conflict management spectrum, the UK has also made some significant contributions to peacebuilding activities. By far its most intensive engagement has been in Sierra Leone where, among other things, it has tried to retrain the army and police in the aftermath of West Africa’s interrelated series of wars. Britain has also been one of the most generous funders of the UN’s Peacebuilding Commission established in late 2006. As of
31 August 2009, the UK had deposited nearly $53 million in the Peacebuilding Fund, more than any other state except Sweden which had deposited approximately $54.5 million. Rather worryingly, however, despite the investment of a relatively large amount of time and resources in Sierra Leone since 2000, according to the UN Development Programme’s latest
Human Development Index (2008), the country continues to rank dead last of the 179 states included.
At the other end of the spectrum, conflict prevention has been taken more seriously than before, as evidenced by the establishment of the Africa and Global Conflict Prevention
Pools in 2001 – mechanisms funded jointly by the FCO, DFID and the MOD – the use of regional conflict advisors across the continent, and the publication of an important document on preventive techniques by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (Cabinet Office 2005).
However, the differences in organizational priorities and the plethora of ongoing crises on the continent have meant that it is difficult to point to concrete successes of wars that have been prevented. The UK Government has, however, been a strong supporter of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) principle which aims to prevent governments committing the four crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes against their citizens.
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The UK has also endorsed the three-pillar approach to R2P set out by the UN Secretary-
General which emphasizes the preventive aspects of the agenda (UNSG 2009).
Good Governance
Since it was first used by the development community in the 1980s, governance has become an umbrella term covering a variety of issues related to the appropriate rules by which groups decide who rules and how they are to do so legitimately. For the UK Government, when focused on the national level, governance is usually understood as referring to the institutional governing architecture including the management of public funds (and sometimes service delivery), the transparency of governing procedures, the legal and judicial frameworks, the quality of a country’s representative institutions, and the behavior of enforcement agencies (FCO 2004). Understood in this manner, the UK Government has regularly identified good governance as an essential ingredient in building a peaceful and prosperous continent, not least by Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa (2005).
Rather than lecturing African regimes on how to govern, the UK has challenged
African governments to live up to their own commitments. This was made significantly easier after the NEPAD was concluded in 2001. Under NEPAD, African governments have accepted their primary responsibility for delivering better governance to their people. Some
African states have also signed up to the voluntary APRM, which is supposed to promote better governance in African states by having external panels review the self-assessments and plans of action made by the regime in question and determine whether they are being followed.
The UK Government’s attempts to promote good governance in Africa have revolved around several issues and mechanisms but at the heart of the matter lies the nature of the contemporary African state and the neopatrimonial networks at its core. Indeed, as Tom
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Porteous rightly noted, the very fact that donor governments such as the UK focused on governance ‘was a polite way of saying that African governments were themselves at the heart of the problem’ (2008: 18). In particular, British policymakers have had to engage with severe cases of incumbent regimes manipulating domestic law, instances of extraordinary and deeply rooted forms of corruption, and many deeply flawed elections.
Outside donor governments like the UK faced a particularly difficult challenge when incumbent regimes changed the law to suit their own political purposes and weaken their opponents. This took all sorts of forms but arguably the most fundamental was the rewriting of constitutions in order to remove or extend limits on the length of time an incumbent president or prime minister could hold office. This was especially troubling when such manipulation was carried out by an incumbent who was receiving considerable support from the UK. In Uganda, for example, President Museveni, a long time favorite with many bilateral and multilateral donors including Britain, gradually rolled back the democratic safeguards set out in the 1995 constitution culminating in the 2005 amendments that repealed the ban on a third elected term in office for the president.
Another persistently contentious issue has been the extent to which multiparty elections should serve as a marker of good governance. In sum, while many African countries have now held lots of elections opposition victories have been almost non-existent thus emphasizing the point that elections are not necessarily a reflection of genuine democracy.
For British policymakers, the major headaches came when incumbent regimes in states considered to be important business partners or political friends engaged in intimidation and electoral fraud. According to Richard Dowden (2008), this problem has been exacerbated by the fact that most African elections operate on a winner-takes-all basis. Instead, Dowden suggests that what is needed is some form of African proportional representation. The paradigmatic example of “unfree and unfair” elections is Nigeria where neither the 2003 nor
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Draft Sept. 2009 the 2007 elections could be classified as even remotely resembling a free and fair choice by the population. Nevertheless, the British government continued with business as usual, not least because Nigeria is an important source of oil and peacekeepers and because of concerns about exacerbating possible links between some of its Muslim population and transnational terror networks.
The issue of systematic and widespread corruption also raised important governance challenges. Not least was the problem of how to tackle it – a pressure that was felt particularly strongly in countries where Britain provided significant amounts of aid. Some of the difficulties of dealing with high-level corruption were evident in the case of former
Zambian President Frederick Chiluba. In 2007, Zambian prosecutors won a London High
Court civil case in which Judge Peter Smith ruled that Chiluba was guilty of stealing $46 million from Zambian state coffers during his ten years in office. The case was pursued in
British courts because some of the money was allegedly laundered through British banks.
Judge Smith ordered Chiluba to pay back 85% of the money but Chiluba did not make any such repayments (Mwanagombe 2009). In August 2009, however, a court in Lusaka found
Chiluba not guilty in what was widely considered a watershed case for African justice: the first to see a former president tried on criminal charges of corruption with respect to his own state’s funds. After his release, Chiluba was quick to blame “imperialists” for bringing such charges against him while anti-corruption campaigners within Zambia worried about the negative signal the verdict would send to potential investors (Smith 2009).
In cases where incumbent regimes continued to govern badly, Britain and other
Western states began to fund more civil society organizations in the hope that they might be able to tame some of the government’s excesses. Although this approach had some successes, as Richard Dowden (2008) observed, civic groups were generally ‘not strong enough to hold governments to account when it comes to the big battles for power at election time.’
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In several respects, the disastrous developments in Zimbabwe exemplified the whole gambit of governance challenges including an autocrat unwilling to leave power but keen to manipulate his country’s laws, elections characterized by violence and fraud, elite corruption both within and beyond the country’s borders, and a relatively sophisticated and vibrant mix of opposition and civil society groups that were still largely unable to blunt the state’s power.
Given the close historical and contemporary ties between the two countries, the British
Government could hardly have ignored the terrible effects of ZANU-PFs policies. But nor did it have the power to change them: indeed, the harder and more publicly it tried the more it played to Mugabe’s depiction of Blair’s Government as imperialists and the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change as a tool of British policy. In this sense, Zimbabwe demonstrated the limits of the UK’s leverage, not only with respect to the ZANU-PF regime but also because it failed to convince the other members of the Southern African
Development Community to take a common stand against Mugabe’s excesses. To make matters worse, Britain’s efforts to isolate Mugabe’s regime, in part through financial and travel boycotts involving the EU, were also undermined by China’s decision to provide the country with a $1 billion credit line.
Prosperity
Despite the general global trend whereby more people have escaped poverty than ever before, in sub-Saharan Africa 92 million more people were living on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 than in 1990 (391 million compared to 299 million) (DFID 2009b: 22). According to the UK
Government, this can in large part be attributed to two main factors: poor governance and the negative effects of armed conflicts in Africa since 1990. As well as trying to address the problems of war and bad governance, British policymakers have attempted to promote a more prosperous Africa through two principal mechanisms: business and development.
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In relation to business opportunities, Africa continues to provide knowledgeable investors and firms with excellent returns. Traditionally the UK’s major commercial relationships have centred on South Africa (representing by far Britain’s biggest African source of exports and imports), Nigeria and other members of the Commonwealth. With growing concerns about energy, however, firms such as BP and British Gas have sought opportunities beyond these countries, perhaps most notably in the energy rich states of
Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Algeria and most recently, Libya. [More on business promotion?]
With regard to development, beyond the effort to increase commerce, the UK has made use of several instruments, most notably various forms of aid and debt relief schemes.
The biggest obstacles have been how to promote development in conflict zones and in authoritarian states where the incumbent regime has little desire or incentive to care for its people.
Like Blair’s Government before it, Gordon Brown’s administration has continued to see development as important for both moral and security reasons. In Brown’s words, we should live up to our development responsibilities ‘because it is morally right. But also because our prosperity, security and health are increasingly inseparable from events far beyond our borders’ (cited in DFID 2009b: 5). The UK’s overarching international development objective is to ‘promote accelerated progress towards the Millennium
Development Goals’ (HMG 2007a: para.1.1). In most cases, this is to be achieved by building
“effective states” (HMG 2007a: para.3.36). DFID clearly assumed the leading role in this process but it has been supported by other government bodies, notably the FCO, DEFRA, the
Treasury and the Department of Health. Indeed, one former UK official observed that
Britain’s Africa policies were gradually ‘taken over by a department whose main mission was not diplomacy but development policy’ (Porteous 2008: 20-21).
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In substantive terms, at least 90% of Britain’s bilateral aid is earmarked for lowincome countries (currently 30 of the 43 states classified by the World Bank as low-income are African) (HMG 2007a: para.1.5). DFID has made it clear that its biggest challenges lie in what it calls “fragile states,” defined as countries ‘where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people’ (HMG 2007a: para.3.6; see also HMG
2007b: para.3.52). As the current International Development Secretary, Douglas Alexander
(2009) has argued, ‘fragile states don’t just need more money, they need a different approach to help them tackle the root causes of their fragility.’
DFID’s most recent White Paper was released in July 2009 under the shadow cast by the global recession, concerns about climate change, and worries about the need to ensure a pro-development global trade deal (DFID 2009b). Its central theme was the complexities raised by increasing levels of international economic, security and even climate interdependence (DFID 2009b: 15-17). The main lesson DFID drew from the economic downturn was that ‘If countries do not grow, and grow consistently, they cannot reduce poverty sustainably’ (DFID 2009b: 14). A particular priority for Britain is to double agricultural production in Africa over the next 20 years (DFID 2009b: para.2.72). Britain’s minister for Africa, Asia and the UN summarized the point by saying, ‘it is jobs, business and growth that will ultimately haul people out of poverty’ (Malloch Brown 2009).
This diagnosis has left the UK Government looking for ways in which the instruments of aid and debt relief can support sustained and sustainable growth. In relation to debt relief, the major developments occurred at the end of the 1990s with the World Bank’s Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, the stimulus for which was provided by the extraordinary efforts of the Jubilee 2000 campaign (see Dixon and Williams 2001). More recently, i n 2006 the G8’s Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) was implemented with the aim of cancelling 100% of the remaining debts of HIPCs to the World Bank, IMF and
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African Development Bank. Under the MDRI, the IMF, World Bank and African
Development Bank have cancelled the debts of 19 African states (DFID 2009a: 147). The largest single recipient was Nigeria. In this case, the UK Government played a leading role within the G8, which was important given that it held 25.5% of Nigeria’s Paris Club debt.
As far as aid is concerned, the International Development Act (June 2002) stipulates that the primary purpose of the UK’s aid programs is to reduce poverty, including the achievement of the MDGs. The other two objectives (ostensibly shared with the recipient state) are respecting human rights and other international obligations and strengthening financial management and accountability in the recipient state (HMG 2005: para.1.3).
Between 1997 and 2009 the UK’s aid budget has more than tripled (DFID 2009b: 13).
In absolute terms, by 2007/08, DFID’s bilateral assistance to sub-Saharan Africa was £1,302 million and accounted for 46% of DFID’s bilateral program, up from 36% in 2003/04 (DFID
2009a: 8, 26-7). These large sums partly disguise the fact that the UK is not among the world’s most generous donor states: in 2008 it ranked 14 th
of the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee members in terms of net overseas development aid (ODA) as a percentage of GNI (at 0.36%). The Labour
Government has promised to reach the UN’s declared target of ODA totaling 0.7% of GNI by
2013, a commitment which has also been endorsed by the Conservative Party (Hague 2009).
In deciding how to allocate aid, the UK Government says it will consider the extent of poverty in a country and its ability to use aid effectively (HMG 2005: para.1.4). UK aid is also supposed to be guided by five principles: developing country ownership, participatory and evidence-based policy-making, predictability about how much aid will be given and the basis on which funds will be reduced or stopped, harmonization with other donors, transparency and accountability (HMG 2005: para.1.6). Table 2 shows the top recipients of
DFID’s bilateral aid budget during 2006/07, much of which went to states which were poorly
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Nigeria’s aid came in the form of debt relief (see above).
In terms of sectors, over 40% of the UK’s aid has been spent on humanitarian assistance and health, which in 2006/07 accounted for 22% and 21% of the total respectively
(DFID 2007: 125). In recent years, Sudan and the DRC have been the major recipients of UK humanitarian assistance. During 2007/08, for example, Sudan and the DRC received £91 million and £46 million respectively out of a worldwide total of £431 million (DFID 2009a: viii). Under Labour, the UK has also significantly increased its funding for health issues and is now one of the top donors in this area within the OECD’s Development Assistance
Committee. This is a crucial part of Africa’s underdevelopment problem given that sub-
Saharan Africa is home to only 3% of the global health workforce but suffers from about
24% of the global disease burden (WHO 2006). Major areas of concern are HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, maternal health and infant mortality. Since its launch in September 2007, the
UK Government has framed its efforts within the International Health Partnership. While the increased spending on health is generally good news, the UK Government has been urged to do far more to prevent the significant flow or “poaching” of skilled health workers from
Africa to Britain.
Table 2: DFID Bilateral Expenditure in Top-Ten African States, 2006/07
(Source: DFID 2007: 27-29)
Bilateral Aid Net Bilateral ODA Bilateral Aid excluding
Humanitarian Assistance
Tanzania
Sudan
£112m Nigeria
£110m Tanzania
£1,731m Tanzania
£119m Ethiopia
£111m
£88m
Ethiopia
Nigeria
Uganda
£90m Sudan
£82m Uganda
£78m Malawi
£117m Nigeria
£117m Ghana
£93m Zambia
£81m
£68m
£61m
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DRC
Ghana
Kenya
Malawi
Zambia
£75m Cameroon
£69m Ghana
£65m Ethiopia
£63m DRC
£61m Kenya
£92m Malawi
£91m Uganda
£89m Mozambique
£76m Kenya
£59m Sierra Leone
£61m
£60m
£56m
£52m
£38m
As the UK Government strove to develop “enhanced partnerships” with certain
African states, it began dispersing a significant amount of its aid program through what it calls poverty reduction budget support i.e. direct financial support provided through the recipient state’s own public finance and budgetary systems. By March 2004, Britain was providing budget support to Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
Tanzania and Uganda (FCO 2004). Today, budget support accounts for approximately a quarter of all UK aid.
There are three main reasons why this is preferred over traditional forms of aid dispensation (Barkan 2009: 68). First, it is based on the notion of partnerships between donor and recipient rather than donor-imposed conditions. Second, it is viewed as an efficient form of lending by reducing transactions costs. Third, when administered selectively it is viewed as supporting “good” performers while denying or reducing aid to “poor” performers.
Of course, when aid is deposited directly into the coffers of the recipient government local financial accountability is crucial. As Joel Barkan correctly observed, budget support amounts to ‘an expression of trust’ on the part of the donor government that the recipient regime will live up to its stated objectives with regard to poverty reduction and financial accountability (2009: 72). This leaves this form of aid susceptible to a number of limitations and problems. First, although promising macro-economic conditions are an important part of ensuring poverty alleviation they are not sufficient on their own. Second, such support can perpetuate aid dependency by reducing incentives for the recipient regime to generate other
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Draft Sept. 2009 sources of revenue such as through local taxation. This is more likely when the amount of aid constitutes a significant portion of the recipient’s GDP. The third major problem occurs when the recipient regime does not live up to its promises i.e. donor trust is betrayed. When this occurs, budget support programs are left hostage to the local political context (Barkan 2009:
75). Thus where the commitments to democratic reform made by recipient regimes are genuine, as in Ghana and Tanzania, budget support can facilitate development. But budget support can also help sustain bad governance. In Uganda, for example, budget support helped facilitate Museveni’s gradual roll-back of democracy. When, in 2005, Uganda’s constitution was amended to repeal the ban on a third elected term in office for the president, the UK shifted a portion of its budget support funds to conventional project assistance. This was in line with the UK’s stated position that it will consider reducing or interrupting aid if African governments move away from their poverty reduction commitments, are in significant violation of human rights or other international obligations, or if there is significant breakdown in the state’s financial management and accountability (HMG 2005: para.1.7).
Britain was put in a similarly awkward position in 2005 with respect to Meles Zenawi’s regime in Ethiopia. Here, the regime underestimated how unpopular it had become with its own population and in the subsequent post-election violence approximately 200 people were killed and thousands imprisoned for opposing the incumbent regime. It did not help the UK that Meles was at the time a member of Blair’s Commission for Africa. After the postelection violence the UK stopped budget support and instead provided aid through the
Protection of Basic Services grant aimed at supporting the provision of essential services to the poor.
Conclusion
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Draft Sept. 2009
As the preceding discussion demonstrates, Britain has deployed a wide range of instruments to promote its overarching foreign policy objectives with respect to Africa. This is not surprising given the continent’s huge diversity. Nor is it surprising that the record of success has been distinctly mixed. While it would be unfair and unhelpful to draw a simple general conclusion about Britain’s Africa policies in the twenty-first century, it is worth concluding by reflecting upon what was, by far, the most high-profile of the UK’s attempts to come up with an overall strategy to achieve its objectives in Africa: Blair’s Commission for Africa.
Published in early 2005 – dubbed by Britain as “the year of Africa” – the
Commission’s report was supposed to provide leverage for the UK’s ideas at a time when
Blair’s Government occupied the chairmanship of both the G8 and the EU (see Williams
2005b, Brown 2006, Porteous 2008: 61-80). At its heart was a call for international society, especially the G7, to provide Africa with a massive increase in aid, debt relief, trade and investment – an additional $75 billion of resources by 2010 – as the primary means of stimulating economic development. As the Commission put it, what was required was ‘a big push on many fronts at once’ (CFA 2005: 61). In return, African governments promised to do their part in pursuing better governance. Although the Commission succeeded in gaining a good deal of media attention, in several respects it exemplified some of the problems and limitations of Britain’s approach to Africa.
First of all, the way the Commission was put together was problematic. Not only did it sideline the FCO and rely far too heavily on econometric studies but it was, as one respected analyst observed, ‘far too dominated by the British government to have any credibility as an independent assessment of Africa’s needs’ (Clapham 2005: 277). In hindsight, it was also rather unfortunate to have the Commission represented by Ethiopian
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi – touted by Blair as one of Africa’s new breed of leaders – at the same time as his troops were shooting civilians in Addis Ababa. Second, the UK’s leaders
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Draft Sept. 2009 were unable to ensure that the other G8 members lived up to their part of the bargain, especially when the photo opportunities stopped and the difficult job of implementation began. This was the Commission’s third problem, a lack of sustained follow-up on the many recommendations and commitments made in its report. This should not have been a problem for the UK given that Gordon Brown was one of the commissioners and one of his top economic advisors, Nicholas Stern was the Commission’s director of policy and research.
While UK aid flows did rise there was much less success with regard to improving Africa’s terms of trade with the Western world, especially in relation to the subsidies provided to
Western farmers. The fourth problem was that it failed to spell out a strategy for how to tackle the central problem of bad governance. Nowhere did the report go into detail about how badly governed states might be reformed. Britain’s prevarications with Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe suggest that there are no obvious answers, at least in the short-term. Nor did the
Commission address the central contradiction at the heart of its approach, namely, how to ensure accountability without undermining African ownership of the reform process
(Porteous 2008: 71). The net result was that for all the good intentions, Blair’s Commission represented a misguided push for “big aid” rather than “smart aid” (see Joseph and Gillies
2009, Taylor 2005).
In one way or another, similar issues have regularly appeared in Britain’s other dealings with Africa. Although there has been greater attention paid to the problem of
Africa’s underdevelopment, successive British governments have often lacked sufficient leverage to fundamentally change the local political context on the ground. Moreover, the convergence of the four international crises identified above – concerning climate change, economic recession, energy supplies and terrorism – may well mean that this task only becomes more difficult, especially as the zenith of Africa’s time in the international spotlight
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Draft Sept. 2009 may already have past. If so, British policymakers are likely to revert to a longstanding tradition of damage limitation: preventing the worst problems over there ending up over here.
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