Tony Blair Failed Africa. Gordon Brown Can Do Much Better. - STWR

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Tony Blair Failed Africa. Gordon Brown Can Do Much Better.

Blair, Brown and Geldof 11th July 07 - Salim Lone, Information Clearing House

Early in his tenure, outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a high-profile commitment to reducing the excruciating poverty afflicting hundreds of millions in Africa, keeping it on the media’s front burner by numerous high-level initiatives.

The best-known of these was his dedicating to the cause the 2005 G8 summit he hosted in Gleneagles. The issue was again centre stage last month at the G8 summit in Germany last month.

But so complete is Africa’s marginalization in global affairs that virtually none of the hundreds of assessments being published of Tony Blair’s 10 year rule even mention whether he succeeded in his goal.

Blair directed attention to the continent in a particularly telling way right after September 11, 2001. He denounced Africa’s impoverishment as “a stain on the conscience of the world,” giving voice to one of the key strains in the global response to those awful attacks. Many were convinced then that despite the trauma and anger unleashed by the terrorists, the United States and its allies would recognize the need to propel the issue of mass poverty and injustice to the top of the international agenda in the interest of a more stable world.

Because Mr. Blair was the Labour party leader, and followed up his pledge with supporting campaigns, he raised real hopes that that he would lead the world in making a difference on the continent.

Mr. Blair did have one significant success, in Sierra Leone, where his courageous intervention helped end a vicious civil war. Otherwise, he failed Africa. So weak was the much-fanfared commitment that Blair extracted from the G8 at Gleneagles in 2005 that figures released last month showed that rather than expanding substantially, aid to Africa declined the following year. The outlook on trade, which is more important to African fortunes than aid, is even grimmer.

In hindsight, there was never any prospect that a Labourite who presided gleefully over the creation of a huge new British class of the shamelessly rich, and put spin and image well before action, would seek the policies that would match his compassion for the poor. In the six years since Blair first proclaimed his crusade, an inconsequential number of Africans have been lifted out of the brutal deprivations and humiliations that mark the daily lives of hundreds of millions. Ironically, his Conservative predecessor Harold Macmillan’s 1960 speech alluding to the “wind of change” blowing in Africa will be remembered as an infinitely more prescient and determined indication of future action.

Indeed, Mr. Blair’s campaigns not only failed in making any serious dent in mass poverty, he actively contributed to the “scars” he had decried. In my eastern corner of the continent alone, these included the pauperization of millions in Zimbabwe over a relative minor crisis with President Robert Mugabe. In Darfur, his early resort to bellicose rhetoric in 2004, no doubt to distract from the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq, hardened Sudan’s resistance to a UN force which could have more effectively protected against the slaughter there.

It’s in the Horn of Africa, however, where Blair did the greatest damage by supporting or refusing to criticize terrible crimes committed by British allies. In Ethiopia, the Meles regime stole the 2005 election, turned tyrannical and undertook, with full American backing, a lawless war and occupation of Somalia where massive atrocities against civilians occurred. The atrocities included Kenya’s kidnapping suspects for Guantanamo-type “renditions” to secret prisons in Ethiopia. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s army committed massacres and other appalling human rights abuses against his northern populations.

None of these grossly illegal actions drew a peep from a man who constantly portrayed himself as embarked upon a civilizational mission rooted in deeply humanistic western values.

Can Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man who as Finance Minister implemented Blair’s resource mobilization drive for the continent, make a difference, since he too has committed to the African cause? After the multiple promises Blair made and betrayed, no one will want to get too excited about Mr. Brown’s. But there are credible reasons to hope he will do much better. For one, he is a sober statesman who has abolished “spin” from his administration and will take his commitments seriously. Knowing development better than Blair, he immediately merged the aid and trade departments.

He has also made the inspired appointment to the Africa portfolio of former UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, among other things a principal architect of its Millennium Development Goals. Malloch Brown has an extraordinary capacity to turn his bold, albeit sometimes controversial, visions into reality, as when he rescued the all-but-collapsed leadership of his boss Kofi Annan in 2005. He also audaciously challenged the US over Iraq, leading American Ambassador John Bolton to unsuccessfully demand his ouster from office.

Still, assisting Africa to do better will be a very tough task. Both the incoming Browns need to be persuaded that even if the promises from the G8 that Tony Blair had extracted are honoured, they will do little to undercut mass poverty. That is because inherent in the current aid compact is the demand that Africa continue pursuing neo-liberal policies that the World Bank, the IMF and the donors have advocated for two decades.

These policies have created vast amounts of wealth for national and multinational elites, but have at best a mixed record in creating growth; many African economists believe these policies in the 1980s and 1990s set back Africa severely. For certain, they singularly failed to diminish the number of those who live in absolute poverty. The benefits of a rising GDP were quickly monopolized by rapacious and frequently corrupt elites still very much in its early stages of primitive accumulation. In Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki’s government announced last month an unprecedented six percent growth for 2006, but other data released simultaneously showed that the number living in poverty, and the depth of poverty, increased in almost all parts of the country.

A story from the UN Population Fund’s report released Wednesday captures poverty’s horrors. In Kibera, Nairobi’s, and indeed Africa’s, largest slum (pop. 1,000,000), Sabina sells water to those who can afford it, and so she herself makes almost nothing. However, her water comes from pipes which frequently suck in excrement as they run through open sewage ditches.

That is because there are few toilets in Kibera. Hundreds of thousands in Nairobi slums do without. Toilet paper rolls cost half a dollar each, in an environment when many do not even earn a dollar a day. “Our people live like beasts,” local government administrator Charity Bokindo candidly told a writer last week about life in Mathare, Nairobi’s second largest slum (pop. 500,000).

Even the United Nations-inspired Millennium Development Goals, whose 15-year midpoint criteria this year has not been met by a single African country, will not address this poorest of the poor group. Africa, and the world, needs an altogether new drive narrowly focussed on providing those who live in such brutish deprivation with the simplest of essentials.

That people are condemned to such inhumanity results from the abiding conviction among the well-to-do that the poor have an unlimited capacity to absorb it. This is becoming less and less true. The macabre beheadings witnessed this month in Kenya of at least a dozen individuals, with severed heads subsequently hoisted on to poles in strategic locations, were the work of the shadowy Mungiki group, which has also killed at least a dozen policemen and called on the poor and landless to rise up against the government. We will be seeing more and more of such mini revolts spread across the continent.

There are no easy fixes for Africa. But there will be quicker dividends if relieving the poverty’s most open wounds is made an uncompromising national priority. Not everything that can be done is impossibly complex or expensive, such as providing public toilets, drains and clean water supply.

Only the continent’s own leaders and people can correct its rawest suffering. Donors have an important but minor role to play. But they must get this role right. That includes recognizing that what Africa needs most of all is space to formulate its own policies. To determine what these might be, they need to radically alter their approach and engage first and foremost with the grass roots.

Despite all the donor talk of needing to hear Africa’s voice, it is rarely heard. It’s the statements of its leaders that they mostly hear, not the aspirations and cries of its people. Most of our leaders are a highly constrained lot: too dependent, too constantly seeking favours and support for their own regimes to want to upset the anaemic apple cart that the powerful roll out occasionally for their allies. Too much time is spent hearing them out and not nearly enough space and attention given to those who are much more likely to construct a way out of their poverty – if given sufficient support by their own and other governments.

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it - Salim Lone, who was the spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq in 2003, is a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya

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