Zimbabwe

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord St John of Bletso for initiating and leading this debate. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Phoenix Fund for Zimbabwe, set up in 2007 by the late Lady Park of Monmouth, to whom reference has already been made. The fund is now chaired by Shane Lunga, with David Banks as our secretary. Lady Park was a formidable champion for the well-being of Zimbabweans, and I know that she would not forgive me if I failed to contribute to this important debate.

The Phoenix Fund for Zimbabwe exists to assist Zimbabwean refugees and asylum seekers in the UK to pursue courses of professional development, placements and vocational training that will equip them to participate in reviving the economy and institutions of Zimbabwe when circumstances allow them to return home. The trustees of the fund believe that the Zimbabwe of the future will depend on the skills of people like these to rebuild that country in the years ahead. For those talented people who come here as asylum seekers and are not allowed to work, it must be better for them and for Zimbabwe for their skills to be enhanced and their morale sustained than for them to sit on their hands in compulsory idleness.

This debate offers the opportunity to explore the value of equipping Zimbabweans here with the capacity to make a difference in their home country when the time is right. The background to this question is of course the past decade of disastrous economic policies, political violence and social upheavals that have led to some 3 million Zimbabweans fleeing abroad, out of a population of 12 million. Mostly this has affected neighbouring countries in the region, and as a consequence relations between Zimbabwe and its southern neighbours, South Africa and Botswana, have deteriorated, as noted by the International Development Committee in another place. The International Crisis Group reported to that committee that,

“instability in Zimbabwe is profoundly destabilizing to its neighbors. Zimbabweans fleeing economic hardship and political abuses have flooded across borders, overwhelming the social services and the good will of South Africa, Botswana, and other neighbors”.

The flight of Zimbabweans into exile has also of course made a considerable impact here in the UK. Last year more Zimbabweans sought political asylum in the UK than any other nationality. There were 7,420 applications—more than double the number that applied for the next country on the list, Afghanistan. Naturally, the Home Office and its UK Borders Agency are keen to see more Zimbabweans returning home. There are some small projects assisting voluntary return under the auspices of the International Organisation for Migration, but they deal with relatively insignificant numbers.

The approach of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development is more cautious in pointing to the ongoing problems and suggesting that it may still not be safe to go to Zimbabwe at this time. While it is often desirable for many Zimbabwean migrants, whether in the Southern African Development Community region or here in the UK, that they return and contribute their skills and expertise in their own country, the sad reality is that safety is a major concern for many, and with unemployment still at perhaps 90 per cent, opportunities may not be readily available.

In terms of encouragement for voluntary returns to Zimbabwe, those who have received grants from the Phoenix Fund and signed an agreement to return when conditions are right may be well placed to make fact-finding trips without undermining their refugee status if they feel it necessary to return to the UK to see if it would be safe for others to return permanently to Zimbabwe. They could visit different parts of the country where conditions differ and report back to the Zimbabwean community here.

With tens of thousands of Zimbabweans now in this country, many of them living unproductive lives, I ask the Minister whether the retraining and reskilling of returning migrants should not be a key element in the UK’s support for the economic recovery of Zimbabwe. Could the UK give a lead to Zimbabwe’s neighbours in devising, as part of our international aid programme, a training scheme for members of the Zimbabwean diaspora who find themselves here in the UK and who wish to return to Zimbabwe? Such an initiative has the small but significant example of Lady Park’s Phoenix Fund for Zimbabwe, with its grants for courses and training to those who have signed a pledge to return when they can safely do so.