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Africa: British Policy, 2
Africa: British Policy, 2
Date distributed (ymd): 020213
Document reposted by Africa Action
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africaaction.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
Among rich country leaders, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has
taken the lead in calling for increases in development aid, opening
Western markets to African imports, support for the "New
Partnership for Africa's Development" framework presented by
African leaders, and greater attention to addressing global
and African poverty. In meetings of the G-7 Finance Ministers and
other fora, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has
delivered the same message.
This message, contrasting to the indifference to Africa displayed
by Blair's and Brown's counterparts in Washington, won applause on
Blair's recently completed trip to West Africa. But commentators
also raised many hard questions about British policies.
This posting contains:
(1) a critical analytical commentary from African scholar Mahmood
Mamdani, originally published in a shorter version in The Guardian
(Feb. 8, 2002). It is reposted with permission of the author, and
includes several paragraphs that were dropped from the Guardian
version for reasons of space.
(2) a statement by Tanzanian civil society groups on the $40
million sale to Tanzania of a militarily capable radar control
system from the UK firm BAe, and
(3) several additional links with commentary on the Blair trip and
related issues.
A related posting also sent out today contains excerpts from the
pamphlet Tackling Poverty: A Global New Deal, published this month
and based on recent speeches by Gordon Brown.
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Misrule Britannia
It's good news that Tony Blair wants to help heal the scars of
Africa, says Mahmood Mamdani, but first he needs to realise how
they got there
Mahmood Mamdani
The Guardian
February 8, 2002
As you spend your second morning in Africa, Mr Blair, I hope you
are beginning to recognise one fact above all else: the predicament
of Africa is a consequence of failed policies. A turnaround will
require a new policy consensus, not just more cash.
Your recognition that "mutual interest and self-interest
increasingly walk hand in hand" is surely the beginning of
political wisdom in a globalised world. Just as sure, however, is
the need to recognise that oneness is not sameness. True, places
such as Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone symbolise the
current African crisis, but each is an outcome of a blend of
processes: some specific, others illustrating a shared African
history and relationship with the rest of the world. The time is
right to draw lessons from both action and inaction, in Rwanda and
Sierra Leone.
[If there is a single event that stands for both the contemporary
African tragedy and a callous global indifference in its face, it
is the Rwandan genocide. When I began to do research on the
buildup to the Rwandan genocide, I could find no evidence of
political violence that pit Hutu against Tutsi before the colonial
period, even though there had been differences in wealth and power
between the two for centuries.
I thought the big change began with Belgian colonialism. It
debased the Hutu as indigenous and uncivilized and exalted the
Tutsi as foreign and civilized. Instead of coming to grips with
this legacy, the nationalist revolution of 1959 built on it: Hutu
revolutionaries were determined to turn the tables and create a
Hutu nation in which the Tutsi had at best the status of resident
aliens.
The genocide in Rwanda was not an inevitable outcome of this
history. Besides the colonial heritage and the nationalist failure
to transcend it, there were two other contributory factors. The
civil war was regional in making. When armed Tutsi refugees
crossed the border into Rwanda in August, 1990, they were
exercizing the final option in a postcolonial context where the
right of citizenship was tied, not to individual residence, but to
group ethnic identity. The final contributing factor was global:
had it not been for the callous indifference of the so-called
civilized world, the civil war would not have ended up in genocide.
The genocide turned Rwanda into a smoldering volcano. The postgenocide
state considered itself morally responsible for the fate
of every living Tutsi anywhere. The next time a Tutsi minority was
denied citizenship rights on grounds of ethnicity -- this time in
Kivu in eastern Congo -- the Rwandan state intervened. You are
right, Mr. Blair, that the Congo crisis demands the world's
attention but you need to remember the ageold wisdom that the best
way to contain a fire may not be to rush to its center.
Of the constellation tied together as the African Great Lakes, the
only knot loose enough to be untangled is Burundi, why Britain will
do well to urge Western nations to focus their energies on Burundi,
so as to set an example that may be followed elsewhere in the
region.
The time is right to draw lessons from both action and its
inaction, in both Rwanda and Sierra Leone. It has not been easy to
shed the legacy of the Cold War. Recall how Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan held a protective umbrella called 'constructive
engagement' while apartheid South Africa moved from a policy of
'd‚tente' to one of 'total onslaught', unleashing terror in
Mozambique and Angola through local proxies. Think of the British
response to January 6, 1999, when R.U.F. gunmen maimed and raped
their way across Freetown, Sierra Leone, killing more than 5,000
civilians in a day. The response then was to pressure the
government of the day to share power with the rebels. Even if the
Cold War had ended, the high tolerance for local terror had not.
Fortunately, the end of the Cold War meant that it was possible to
learn local lessons in local places. British inaction in Sierra
Leone did turn into action.]
The lesson of action in Sierra Leone is no different from the
conclusion drawn by the UN commander in Rwanda: a few thousand
well-armed and disciplined UN troops would have prevented massacres
from turning into a genocide. That lesson, Mr Blair, needs to be
etched in our historical memories: zero tolerance for terrorists,
for those who target civilians and the infrastructure of civilian
life.
But just as many in Africa have been quick to note the difference
between the shift of British policy in Sierra Leone and continuing
western indifference to developments in the African Great Lakes
(Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda); they have also noted the
difference in the British response to recent developments in
Zimbabwe and Zambia.
What, many Africans ask, is the difference between the stolen
election in Zambia and the election that may be stolen in Zimbabwe?
Why heightened British concern for Zimbabwe and cold indifference
to Zambia? Could British preoccupation with one previous colony,
and not another, reflect a narrow concern for the future of British
"kith and kin" in Zimbabwe?
It may be wise to take into account African sensibilities and apply
the same standards to Zambia and Zimbabwe. You are right to speak
of the need to come to terms with "failed states" before they
fester. But to really tackle this problem, you must understand its
genesis. The ethnic conflicts in the Great Lakes, as in many other
places, are not between the resource-rich and the resource-poor;
they are between those who have a right of citizenship and those
who don't.
The sad fact is that the form of citizenship which exists in
contemporary Africa has been bequeathed by the colonial experience.
The idea that citizenship for Africans should be a group and not an
individual right, and that only members of those groups recognised
as indigenous should be granted citizenship, is an idea whose
vintage goes no farther than the colonial period. The plain fact,
Mr Blair, is that before colonialism ethnicity was a cultural
identity. It was not a political identity, the basis of belonging
to a political community.
The core political legacy of British "indirect rule" in Africa was
the absence of a modern state. Britain ruled its middle African
colonies through a range of "native authorities", each of which
dispensed with the rule of law in the name of "tradition". The
colonial fiction was that African tradition, particularly political
tradition, was ethnic. The result was to disenfranchise those
considered ethnically not indigenous to an area, even if they were
born there.
The social legacy of indirect rule, meanwhile, was the absence of
a national intelligentsia. When Frederick Lugard, the British
colonial administrator, moved from India to Nigeria, he was
determined that Britain's new African colonies would be immunised
against "the Indian disease", by which he meant the creation of a
westernised native intelligentsia. The sober fact is that it was
not the colonial interlude, but nationalist independence, that laid
the basis of a university-educated intelligentsia in middle Africa.
Despite current belief, the story of independent Africa is not one
of unremitting decline. The first two decades of independence were
decades of moderate progress. Between 1967 and 1980 more than a
dozen African countries registered a growth rate of 6%. This
included not only mineral-rich countries such as Gabon, Congo,
Nigeria and Botswana but also countries such as Egypt, Kenya and
Ivory Coast. To be sure, there was a downside. That was the failure
to transform agriculture, and thus to bring the vast majority of
the population into the development process. This shortcoming in
economic policy went alongside and was sustained by a political
authoritarianism.
This downside provided an opening for a dogmatic assault by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank calling for
so-called structural adjustment at the height of the cold war.
Whether intended or not, its effect was to scupper the
state-building project undertaken with modest success by
nationalism.
Structural adjustment called for an all-round and drastic reduction
in state involvement. Growth up to 1980 had been sustained mainly
by domestic savings: close to a third of African countries had
savings rates higher than 25% by 1980. Today, the rate of savings
is closer to 10%. The difference is larger than the entire aid flow
to the continent.
The assault on social expenditure - including university funding -
combined with an emphasis on importing expatriate intellectuals
through technical assistance programmes. Together, the two
devastated the national intelligentsias, the most competitive of
whom fled to the west. No wonder there are more expatriates in
Africa today than in the heyday of colonialism.
Finally, there was the promotion of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs). Said to be a measure to bolster democracy in newly
independent Africa, this initiative ended up undermining whatever
democratic traditions had been built up in civil society. If truth
be told, the proliferation of NGOs has been central to the creation
of a begging-bowl public culture. Contemporary Africa has not been
ignored; it has been wronged. What Africa needs immediately is not
a pile of cash, but a changed policy context.
Without a consensus on a policy shift, there will be no way ahead.
You are right, Mr Blair, to think that contemporary Africa shares
the dilemma of Afghanistan: it is a victim of the cold war and the
subsequent self-righteous walking away by western powers. As in
Afghanistan, in Africa the prerequisite to recovery will be the
construction of state independence. To achieve this, we need to
shed the cold-war dogmatism designed to trim the state and liberate
the market - whose one consequence has been to contribute to state
collapse throughout Africa.
Recognise that history gives us only two ways of building a public
power: through waging war and through the provision of social
services. By undercutting the role of the state as a provider of
social services, structural adjustment turned the relationship
between the state and the population into one of naked coercion
through security and armed services.
Recognise also that without an active state role, the historically
weak classes in Africa - entrepreneurs and intellectuals - will not
thrive. Before you increase aid, you may consider sharply
curtailing technical assistance - that self-motivated subsidy given
by western countries to their own largely unemployable cadre and
passed off as aid. Employ African technical personnel on projects
in Africa and hold them accountable to African constituencies, not
just to donors.
Finally, you should stop promoting a non-accountable NGO culture
and try to strengthen local democracy instead.
It is true, Mr Blair, that Africans must determine their own
destiny. But Africans must first have the chance to shape their
destiny - an enabling policy context - before they can be held
responsible for it.
* Mahmood Mamdani is director of the Institute of African Studies
at Columbia University.
Civil Society's Common Statement
on the Government of Tanzania / BAe Radar issue
26th January 2002
Recently the Government of Tanzania (GoT) concluded a deal to buy
a sophisticated radar air control system from the UK firm BAe
Systems worth US$40 million. The issue only came to light in
Tanzania after major differences of opinion within the British
cabinet were leaked to the British press. To date, both Tanzanian
and British governments have failed to clarify (albeit the attempt
by Tanzanian government in the 'Daily News' yesterday) the military
or commercial nature of the equipment, or the rationale for the
large price tag, when adequate equipment for civilian purposes
costs one quarter of the price, and can be obtained through grant
aid.
Given that Tanzania is a highly indebted poor nation which has just
qualified for debt relief under the HIPC initiative, it is very
shocking to learn --from external sources-- that the Tanzanian
Government has secretly committed the nation to an additional $40
million of commercial debt to add to its existing unsustainable
debt stock.
We, Tanzanian civil society organizations (CSOs) note with concern
that the negotiations for the radar system have been going on
secretly for a number of years, and a down- payment made, during
which time we and other like-minded organisations have been
campaigning for debt cancellation in order to improve access to
basic services for the majority of Tanzanians.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is concerned about protecting the
jobs of 250 BAe workers in the Isle of Wight, while ignoring the
cost of the radar to Tanzanian citizens, who on average earn US$250
a year. We strongly condemn the decision by the UK Government to
issue a license to BAe for the radar, an act that is inconsistent
with their international aid, debt relief and sustainable
development policies. It is most unfortunate that the progressive
work of Gordon Brown and Clare Short in terms of promoting these
noble objectives should be undermined by such an unwise deal.
It is ironic that the UK gives budgetary support to Tanzania worth
US$40 million a year, thus giving vital support for debt relief
with one hand and taking it back with the other.
We Tanzanian CSOs are convinced that the BAe radar is too expensive
for Tanzania to afford, and that we do not have the military
capacity to make good use of the equipment in question, if indeed
it is a military system.
The Tanzanian public deserves answers to the following questions:
On whose authority and with what internal scrutiny in the cabinet
and parliament has this deal been negotiated? Have MPs ever had the
opportunity to deliberate on it? Has it been the subject of
discussion under the Public Expenditure Review and other financial
policy bodies? Why was there no tender floated by the Government
for such a big transaction? Why does the government insist on
buying such expensive equipment when there is a cheaper alternative
available under grant aid? Why is Barclays Bank extending a loan to
the GoT at lower than commercial rates? Have we been informed of
the total cost of the deal or just the first installment of
something much more expensive, bearing in mind that when the radar
deal was originally proposed the price tag was more than œ100
million? How was it possible for BAe to proceed to assemble the
radar equipment without formal government approval?
We are thankful to the Bretton Woods Institutions for showing
concern for the people of Tanzania by opposing the deal. We would
like to see the demands for public interest scrutiny such as the
radar extended to all major investment projects, including those
financed by soft loans from the IFIs themselves.
We urge our government to forthwith suspend the deal to purchase
the radar, pending a full public enquiry into the issues raised
above.
We also demand that, in future, any acquisition of multilateral,
bilateral or commercial debt should be made public and involve wide
participation of people, including parliament, where we believe the
people's interest should be protected.
We urge Clare Short, U.K. Minister for Overseas Development, to
instruct the Department for International Development (DfID) to
withhold the budgeted $40 million (œ28 million) in budget support
for the GoT for 2002/03 pending the results of the public enquiry
into the deal.
Lastly, we Tanzanian CSOs urge the governments of Tanzania and the
UK and the donor community in general to take seriously their
collective commitment to open government and pro-poor policies,
which will fail miserably if such murky deals are allowed to
proceed unsanctioned.
SIGNED: TCDD (Tanzania Coalition for Debt and Developoment), TANGO
(Tanzania Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, TADREG
(Tanzania Development Research Group), PELUM (Participatory &
Ecological Land Use Assocation) Tanzania, ACTIONAID Tanzania,
The Leadership Forum, National Youth Forum, TGNP (Tanzania Gender
Networking Project), IGODENI and OxfamGB Tanzania.
Additional Recent Articles and Links
Note: some of these links may be temporary. If they do not work,
try the search on the site indicated.
"Arms to Africa scar Britain's conscience,"
Richard Bingley, Feb 3, 2002, The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,643774,00.html
Bingley is spokesman for the Campaign Against Arms Trade
"British arms sales to Africa soar,"
Kamal Ahmed, Political Editor, Feb. 3, 2002, The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,644096,00.html
Campaign against Arms Trade
http://www.caat.org.uk
Blair Speech to Nigerian National Assembly, Feb. 7, 2002
http://www.fco.gov.uk/news/speechtext.asp?5877
Blair Speech to Ghanaian Parliament, Feb. 8, 2002
http://www.fco.gov.uk/news/speechtext.asp?5879
"Cash and carry misery in Ghana, Britain is backing reforms which
are deepening Africa's poverty", John Kampfner
The Guardian, Feb. 8, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4352110,00.html
John Kampfner is making a film for the BBC on the impact of
IMF/World Bank reforms on Ghana.
"Time Bush got Brown's Message,"
Simon Maxwell, director, Overseas Development Institute
The Guardian, Feb. 11, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4353525,00.html
Bretton Woods Update, Jan/Feb 2002
"Brown's 'New Deal' suggests enhanced Bank, Fund roles"
http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/topic/reform/r2608newdeal.html
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by
Africa Action (incorporating the Africa Policy Information
Center, The Africa Fund, and the American Committee on Africa).
Africa Action's information services provide accessible
information and analysis in order to promote U.S. and
international policies toward Africa that advance economic,
political and social justice and the full spectrum of human
rights.
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