From the UN to Whitehall, with a will to change our view of Africa
Continent deserves not just a development policy, but a foreign
policy, says minister
" Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger
" The Guardian,
" Saturday May 10 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/10/unitednations.development/print
(Snipped: preceeding paragraphs on UK political scene.)
Malloch-Brown sees a highly differentiated growth in Africa, that
makes sweeping talk of the continent as misleading as generalisations
about Asia.
"We have three groups of countries. We have the energy producers that
are having huge governance problems in relation to how they manage
resources in a transparent, rule-of-law based way - the so-called
curse of oil or diamonds. We have a second group - the African tigers
- that have been growing very fast from a low base without oil, for
instance Mozambique, which has been growing at 10% for a long time.
The simple take on Kenya's problems is that they have been caused by
poverty - the truth is that Kenya has reduced its dependency on aid to
about 6%. Kenya's problems grew from how its growth was distributed,
and not from inert poverty that people associate with political
conflict in Africa. And yes, there is a third tier of highly
problematic countries with low growth."
The new scramble for Africa and its resources, he argues, could go one
of two ways. "We could have a race to the bottom - making private,
less than transparent, not fully honest deals to secure these
resources, or we could have the system leveraged up to a genuine
competition for Africa's resources, which would benefit Africa and
western companies with deep pockets willing to pay market prices for
these assets. We need to recognise in this new world that we will win
some and lose some."
Scramble for Africa
The new formidable competitor in Africa is China, a force he
controversially sees as playing a largely beneficent role. Pointing
out that China is winning 75% of contracts in sub-Saharan Africa, he
argues that it is rightly reorientating aid in Africa away from just
education to infrastructure and agriculture. "We are seeing a
phenomenon that we last saw in south-east Asia 50 years ago when the
Chinese started stores in the railheads in the Philippines and
Malaysia for the plantations, and by doing so, brought capitalism. It
has been a long time since anybody left Britain to start a small store
in rural Zambia or in the Congo, but the Chinese are doing it, and
they are bringing commerce to economies that have been ostensibly
feudal up to this point."
In the process, China is globally engaging and developing a new
doctrine of intervention. "Global engagement is the great counter to
the [former] domestic instinct of China, which is to limit their
international engagement to a commercial one."
With all this differentiation, resources, proximity to Europe and
Chinese engagement, he concludes: "It is time for Britain to show the
respect of having not just a development policy, but a foreign policy
for Africa."
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