Speaking at his July 4 reception in Nairobi, William Bellamy, the US Ambassador to Kenya, stated bluntly:
“Turning on the fire hose of international compassion and asking Kenya and other African nations to drink from it is not a serious strategy for promoting growth or ending poverty”.
This will have surprised and possibly shocked his Kenyan guests. Another “Ugly American”? It was strangely undiplomatic language. Yet what I expect he had in mind was that there has to be a partnership. In the context of Africa that must mean outside assistance has to be met with improved governance, for it is the poor and corrupt leadership that is holding back so many African states.
Next day the African leaders attending the African Union’s (AU) two-day summit in Libya put out a statement which set out their challenge to the G-8 leaders who were assembling at Gleneagles in Scotland. It was good timing. The requests of the 53 states that make up the AU would have been carefully studied by the so-called Sherpas, who had the tricky and highly responsible task of preparing the G-8 draft press release for their summit masters.
The statement from the AU contained few surprises and would have chimed in well with current Whitehall thinking. For example it had this to say on debt relief, which Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the exchequer (finance secretary), has been handling with considerable enthusiasm and effect for over a year:
“We request the developed countries and development partners to expedite the process of total debt cancellation for Africa by the year 2007”.
Turning to the vexed issue of trade barriers, one of the keys to success, it called on the international community:
“... to establish a fair and equitable trading system and to facilitate Africa’s access to fair markets through ... the elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers ... and trade-distorting subsidies and domestic support, especially in agriculture”.
Such a call falls in the middle of the current row within the European Union over the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Britain and France are putting forward entirely different views. France benefits from the CAP to an absurdly large extent. Reform of the expensive CAP will take time but I have little doubt the EU is now heading in the right direction.
The meeting in Libya invited donor nations to raise their aid to 0.7 percent of their GDP by 2015. This does not have the support of the Bush administration but international progress is being made.
Turning to the hot potato of expanding the UN Security Council there was the expected desire for Africa to be given two permanent seats. The names of the two states to be selected are controversial. My two nominations would be Egypt and South Africa.
It so happened that in the days leading up to the G-8 summit, which in Britain were filled with worthy articles on “making poverty history” and the Live 8 pop concerts, there were appalling developments in Zimbabwe.
The developing world has witnessed regularly the removing of illegal squatters, sometimes on a large scale, by municipal authorities. But what happened under the personal orders of President Robert Mugabe was of a completely different order. Some 250,000 people were put on the streets, and local and international observers were convinced the bulldozing of houses and burning of trading stalls were aimed at those who were believed to support the opposition Movement for Democratic Change under Morgan Tsvangirai in the elections a few weeks ago. This vicious clearing was called “Operation Murambatsivna” which translates as “Drive out Trash”.
In the words of a strong editorial in The Times (June 7): “No attempt was made to resettle the slum-dwellers. No warning was given before their homes were wrecked, possessions burned and livelihoods ruined. Nothing was done for the nursing mothers, the babies, the sick and the elderly kept back by armed paramilitaries and left on the street, cowed and bemused”.
A number of children died in the buildings being destroyed. The United Nations condemned this operation as well courageous religious leaders inside Zimbabwe. But to my alarm the AU saw this as an internal matter and did not wish to comment.
This is not good enough. The aid that has been requested by the AU for its poorest members, and rightly so, is going to come from the taxpayers of the G-8 countries and other nations. The public in Britain, and no doubt in other countries, saw night after night on the television the bulldozers at work and the suffering of those so ruthlessly made homeless. The public in Britain has been moved by the scale of the poverty in Africa, but will not support the huge relief program agreed at Gleneagles, unless leaders of the AU are prepared to speak out against bad governance in member states and corruption and contempt for human rights.
