Sub-Saharan Africa (Report from the International Relations and Defence Committee)

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the House is rightly proud of the work of its Select Committees and it is a matter of profound regret, as my noble friend Lord Hannay said earlier, when their reports are not debated in a timely manner. The usual channels should address that. It is a privilege to serve on the International Relations and Defence Select Committee, and I, too, pay tribute to the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, who chairs it admirably and keeps us all on our toes at every meeting. I refer to my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Eritrea, as an officer of various other APPGs and as a patron of the Coalition for Genocide Response.

At paragraphs 82 and 83 of the report, the committee expressed its disappointment at the Government’s approach to Africa, describing it as “confused and confusing”.

“It is not a strategy”,


we said,

“but rather some broad ideas and themes, and there is little clarity on how the Government plans to put it into action.”

In urging the Government to take a deeper interest in Africa, the report points out that Prime Ministers rarely visit Africa and that Ministers for Africa come and go, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said. The noble Baroness, Lady Amos, told us that there is always a new plan—and here we go again. Contrast this with the approach of China. We need to be much more aware of the strategic nature of belt and road indebtedness, the plundering of resources and the quid pro quo demand for African votes at the United Nations.

We also need to learn from and harness the diaspora. As we have been hearing, remittances have a greater value than development aid. That is not to say that we should not restore the cuts in development aid, but we must recognise the role that remittances can play. For example, in 2019, people in South Sudan received $1,200 million in remittances, a staggering 29.5% of GDP, compared with £104 million in UK aid. The World Bank says that in one recent year, $40 billion of remittances were sent to sub-Saharan Africa.

Money and goods from the diaspora are wonderfully targeted and relatively free from the problems of corruption and siphoning-off by officials. Yet, as the Brookings Institution points out:

“The fees paid to remittance service providers to send money to Africa average nearly 9 percent— the highest rate in the world and three times the Sustainable Development Goal target for remittance costs (3 percent).”


I hope that, when he comes to reply, the Minister will address that, especially in the context of the diminished ODA and the high fees for digital remittance channels, and commit to examining the Brookings proposals for a global non-profit remittance platform.

However, unless conflict in Africa, discussed in chapter six of the report, which looks in detail at countries such as Nigeria, Somalia and Cameroon, about which we have heard from the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, is addressed, development will continue to be blighted. As the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, reminded us, the report names ideology as one of the factors driving conflict. Sudan’s civil war, driven by Khartoum’s attempts to impose its ideology, led to 2 million deaths. I saw ruined clinics, hospitals, schools and homes. Ultimately, Khartoum ideology destroyed its own country and partitioned it into two diminished states.

I also visited Darfur. The same ideology killed 300,000 people and displaced 2 million, many of whom still live in precarious, squalid camps. Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the ICC for genocide and crimes against humanity, gave the orders in Darfur. Last week, Sudan’s Foreign Minister, Mariam al-Mahdi, said that Bashir will be handed over to the ICC for trial. I should like to hear from the Minister what progress is being made to expedite this.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, there are mutations of the same ideology: murder, maim, destroy and displace. Globally, a shocking 82.4 million people are forcibly displaced, with more than 26% of the world’s refugee population in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, the highest increase in the number of internally displaced people occurred in Africa. Displacement leads to trafficking, exploitation and jihadist recruitment, posing a real and present threat to local populations and to British interests, and indirectly to Britain itself. Jihadists in Boko Haram, IS West Africa and al-Shabaab have inevitably seized on events in Afghanistan. Like the Taliban, their task is made so much easier by inherently weak and unpopular corrupt Governments. Note that those who blindly support them also become tainted.

According to the 2020 Global Terrorism Index, Nigeria is now ranked only behind Afghanistan and Iraq. Corruption and ineptitude have run the economy into the ground, while the UK has poured in more than £2.5 billion over a decade, averaging £800,000 a day. That does not imply support for cuts in ODA, but it is not unreasonable to ask how those resources are being used to combat conflict.

I have sent the Minister’s department reports that over the past eight months more than 4,000 Christians have been murdered by jihadists in Nigeria, with 400 killed in August alone. Over 12 years, 43,000 Christians and 29,000 Muslims have been murdered by jihadists, with places of worship destroyed, attempts to eradicate alternative beliefs and countless numbers of people displaced. The case of Leah Sharibu—a Christian girl abducted, raped and forcibly converted in 2018—is highlighted in the Select Committee’s report. She is still in captivity. What can the Minister tell us about Leah’s case?

A long-serving retired military intelligence officer states without equivocation that religion and ethnicity are primary factors in Nigeria’s current insecurity. The foremost Muslim traditional ruler, the Sultan of Sokoto, has condemned the killings of others as un-Islamic and has called on the Nigerian Government to decisively address the insecurity. The levels of insecurity in Nigeria are beyond critical, and the Buhari Government’s response is a mixture of complacency and complicity. Beyond ritual condemnations, what are we doing to hold those responsible to account?

I end by turning, as the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, did, to the Horn of Africa and to Tigray, where conflict, as in Nigeria, has morphed into atrocity crimes, including the use of manmade starvation, and where those responsible are living in impunity. Listen to this report from Monday’s Daily Telegraph. It describes how Tigrayans have been

“rounded up, mutilated and dismembered”

with

“thousands of men, women and children”

thrown into

“makeshift ‘concentration camps’, cutting off limbs and dumping mutilated bodies into mass graves as part of an orchestrated ethnic purge”.

What are we doing to bring those responsible to justice?

The report says that the UK and its international partners have too often failed

“to tackle the underlying conditions that allow conflict to emerge.”

It calls on the Government to

“develop longer-term strategies to prevent conflict, and above all to prevent genocide, and support regional partners.”

I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us exactly how the Government intend to do that and assure us that we will be less timid in confronting the destructive power of ideology and naming it for what it is.