Global Policy Forum

By Simon Jenkins

Ask not what you can do for Africa. Ask only what Africa can do for you. This maxim has governed outside intervention in the dark continent from Kitchener to Clinton, from British Empire to British Aerospace. It has usually proved the safest, if cynical, guide to policy.

One of Tony Blair's acquired virtues is his immunity to parody. The British leader — Prime Minister now seems a strangely feeble title — leaves today on the latest of his global state visits, this time to West Africa. A man who "feels the hand of history on our shoulders" wants to make Africa, his "scar on the conscience of the world", into "a top foreign policy priority". Perish the death of the soundbite.

Mr Blair's participation in the moral Scramble for Africa is being widely mocked. The first George Bush wanted to "save Somalia from itself". Bill Clinton staged a "concern for Africa" junket three years ago. Mr Blair wants to enter Sierra Leone in triumph, to mark a classic neo-imperial success for British arms. Troops sent "for two weeks" two years ago to evacuate British citizens from Freetown are now the backbone of the United Nations' latest colony. Seventeen thousand foreign troops roam Freetown, pumping money into the economy and setting up war crimes tribunals. Mayhem would break out if they left.

Yet I am in favour of Mr Blair's trip. Nobody goes to Africa without returning a wiser man. What Mr Blair can do for Africa is desperately simple, and desperately hard. He should stop almost everything he is doing now and do the precise opposite. I fear he will not.

British policy in Africa has rarely been more cynical. Taxpayers are financing one of the biggest ever sales pitches aimed at flooding Africa with weapons. Government promotion alone is worth $200 million. Under Labour, arms exports to the continent have, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, risen from £52 million in 1999 to £125 million in 2000 to more than £200 million next year. These exports must be paid for either by extra debt, which Western taxpayers will one day "relieve", or by the sweated labour of Africa's people. What this has to do with "healing scars" is beyond me.

BAE Systems, with government support, has just hard-sold an unnecessary £28 million military air traffic system to Tanzania. Experts advised a £7 million system. It will be financed by debt at the same time as Britain is supporting World Bank debt relief for the same country, relief supposedly to pay for primary education. These deals are supported by British ministers such as Clare Short and Peter Hain, who would both win Olympic medals for moral pontification. If sovereign governments wish to buy expensive toys, that is their business. I cannot see why the rest of the world should finance, or even encourage, it.

South Africa's Government, ensnared in arms-dealing corruption, is currently spending £4 billion of precious foreign exchange, not on urgent Aids drugs but on weapons. This includes £100 million on British Hawk jets. Local politics is in uproar over this perversion of South Africa's public finances, in which Britain is heavily implicated. British ministers say that if Britain does not sell such weapons, someone else will. Let them. The Government's Export Control Bill has been so weakened as to make it an offshore arms dealer's charter. It last week roused 40 bishops, including even the Archbishop of Canterbury, to protest.

Africa has over the past 25 years received more external aid per head than any other continent on Earth. While average global living standards have risen over that period, in Africa they have fallen by 20 per cent. Africa is by far the poorest continent on Earth.

I am not overtaxed by Mr Blair's "conscience" over this. The West has done no better for Africa since decolonisation than it did during the age of Empire, some would say worse. But I go this far with the "anti-globalisers". Whenever I have visited Africa, I have returned uncertain whether foreign aid was evil in itself or evil only in its application. Some that is worthwhile goes on health and education. Most is squandered on wasteful infrastructure projects, "know-how" consultancies and arms deals. These reward local elites and outsiders and repatriate bribes and profits to European banks.

As The Times reported last Saturday, Labour's cruellest privatisation is that of the old Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC). Ms Short wants to sell 60 per cent of it to City investors, for reasons that appear entirely those of Treasury ideology. Two thirds of the corporation's African staff have been laid off as it withdraws from small farm projects with low returns in favour of big constructions.

If Ms Short wanted to pull out of African direct investment, she could have donated the CDC's assets to host countries. That is what happened when foreign firms "punished" South Africa for apartheid by disinvesting. It even boosted home-grown assets and enterprise. Ms Short's sanctions are harsher. She is squeezing her African investments to inflate the book value of the CDC to make it more attractive to the City. Projects have been told to yield a 25 per cent return, which for farming is near impossible. The CDC is becoming just another bank.

This is not aid. The CDC was set up to invest where private capital would not invest. Now it will only invest in such a way that, by definition, private capital will rush to take up 60 per cent of the CDC's stock. The Economist reported last June that Africa had fallen to rock bottom as a CDC investment priority. How does that accord with Mr Blair's "top priority"? The Prime Minister may thrill to the cry of Palmerston. Ms Short is out to emulate the Randlords.

There is no question what Africa needs more than anything else. It needs the world to buy its goods. It needs trade. The global recession and collapse in commodity prices is a catastrophe for Africa, far outstripping any aid flows. The West's response has been to raise protective tariff walls round its domestic markets. While the world price of wheat, rice, cocoa, coffee, tea, fruit, maize and oil continues to fall, America's Congress and Europe's common agricultural policy fiercely maintain tariffs and subsidies. The only produce imported freely into the West are heroin and cocaine. Africa does not grow them, yet.

The rich world now spends $1 billion a day subsidising its farmers to shield them from Third World competition. This is a $1 billion-a-day tax on poor countries, six times more than is spent on aid. Stop the subsidies and you could forget about the aid. This would be an all-win game for taxpayer, consumer and Third World alike. Yet neither Mr Blair nor Gordon Brown will do any such thing. It would upset Brussels. It would upset America. It would upset Britain's farmers, on whose meat price support Mr Blair last year lavished more than he spends in a year on the world's poor.

British politicians lack the guts to reform this state of affairs. They give aid to a plethora of international agencies to assuage their guilt. They pour money into the World Bank to assist in dam-building, population displacement and agro-chemical dumping. They flood poor countries with arms they do not need. But when asked to do something concrete to promote small-scale employment and investment, which is admit poor nations' produce to British markets, they mumble about Brussels and turn away.

This is what makes young people cynical about politics. As bankers and finance ministers stuffed themselves with canapés at the World Economic Forum in New York this month, they did not pledge themselves to take forward last year's "Doha Round", aimed at freeing the 70 per cent of Third World trade that is food and textiles. They did not pledge themselves to stop immersing Africa in debt to buy expensive dams and weapons. They did not pledge themselves to take more migrant workers, a vital source of remittance cash to poor states. They did not promise to stop subsidising their farmers to shut out African competition.

The reason is that there are no votes in such pledges, only in protectionism. But if Mr Blair learns anything of this on his trip, it will have been worthwhile. Africa could yet be the better for it.

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