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

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by echoing the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, in congratulating all noble Lords involved in the authorship of the report, particularly their chairman. I learned an immense amount from it and have learned an immense amount from listening to noble Lords in this debate.

All of us born in the 20th century, which I think is all of us in this Room—even my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay—grew up with stereotypes of Africa made by aid appeals and bad news stories. We can all think of those images: flies settling on children with bloated bellies, gun-toting teenagers and so on. Those stereotypes led my near contemporary, the noble Lord, Lord Oates, into a great adventure where, with his father’s stolen credit card, he landed in Addis Ababa, determined to do something about the Ethiopian famine in 1985. He realised two things on landing: first, that Ethiopia in 1985 did not particularly need 15 year-old English schoolboys, but secondly that the problems were not caused by western policy; they were internal and caused by bad domestic policy. We heard from my noble friend Lady Helic how, having grown impressively in the meantime, bad policy is again condemning that country.

I do not think that stereotypes survive first contact. You cannot fail to be hit by the industriousness and the hum of enterprise in Africa. If you want it in figures: before the coronavirus hit, sub-Saharan Africa had been growing at between 5% and 6%. According to the African Development Bank, even this year, despite everything, it is forecast to grow at 3.4%. Of course, that is partly just the number of people. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, the numbers laid out in impressive detail. When I was last in Africa a lot of politicians were saying, “This is a terrible problem and a great challenge—how are we going to find jobs for all these young people?” I would say: imagine the opposite problem. Imagine that you are Russia or Greece or somewhere where you have an immense number of retirees and very few people of working age. Then you would have a problem.

There is a terrific opportunity in demographic growth. If, as my noble friend Lord Eccles said, it sometimes does not feed into growth, that is usually again caused by bad policy. My noble friend specifically mentioned Nigeria. Nigeria has a 120% tariff on rice—a basic staple—and crazy banking rules. By the way, I would say it has a mildly corrupt Government that did not return the favour of the PDP, having accepted the election results last time. It is ultimately in the hands of Nigerians to choose different policies.

What drove that growth in Africa? It is the great unreported happy fact of the 21st century. It was not aid or even remittances; above all, it was mobile phones and the technology that went with them, facilitated by investment. Here is a hard truth: the motives of the companies that put in the mobile phones that allowed farmers to check the weather and see where the seed was cheapest, and allowed fishermen to decide where to land their catches, were purely mercenary. They did this openly for the profit motive; they were not pretending to dress it up in humanitarian terms. Some people find that an unsettling, even sordid, fact. I do not think that the beneficiaries on the ground see it in those terms.

Some people fret that there is a necessary tension between economic growth and environmental protection. My noble friend Lord Lilley ably set out the choice between affordable electrification or electrification through renewables. However, it seems to me that the best thing we can do if we want countries to take environmental protection more seriously is assist them in reaching a level of economic development where it becomes feasible.

My noble friend Lord Ridley is fond of pointing out that, 50 years ago, wolves, tigers and lions were all endangered but now, wolves have rebounded, tigers have flatlined and lions are still endangered. Why? Because wolves live in rich countries, tigers live in middle-income countries and lions live in poor countries. He is slightly oversimplifying but look at the story of our generation. In the years since 1980, there has been net reforestation on this planet of an area roughly the size of Alaska, but it has happened overwhelmingly in wealthy countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Why? For all the most obvious reasons: people in those countries do not rely on slash-and-burn agriculture or wood fires for cooking, and they do not have this constant pressure on land.

What can we do to help Africa to reach a level of development where those pressures are eased? The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, had the answer: open our markets. It does not even cost us anything—on the contrary, we are doing ourselves a huge favour. The reason to have comprehensive trade liberalisation with Africa, including in services, visas and professional qualifications, is not as a favour to a growing part of the world but as a favour to ourselves that also, incidentally, benefits exporters in that great and rising continent. Yes, there will be moments when it is not, if you like, aesthetically pleasing. The movement of rural populations into workshops in urban areas is not pretty. The 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope once said:

“Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural.”


However, this is a process that every country goes through. We were first, and others are now following, but—let us allow them the dignity of agency, for heaven’s sake—they do it because they are making rational choices about how to secure the best living standards.

What can we do to help? We can ensure that they have the right to buy and sell without restrictions. Here, like my noble friend Lord Lilley, I am delighted to be able to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay: we could be doing way more. It is true that a lot of sub-Saharan African countries already qualified for what they call EBA, which is almost a tariff-free deal, effectively. However, as the wags in Africa will tell you, it is not so much “Everything but Arms” as “everything but farms”. There are all sorts of ways in which agrarian produce is excluded. I met Ugandan vanilla producers, who said, “In theory, we are allowed to sell all the vanilla we want to the European Union. There is no tariff”. In practice, the standards are set by two French lobbyists who have substantial interests in Madagascar in such a way as to exclude everyone else’s vanilla. If Britain, pursuing an independent global trade policy, is serious about global engagement, we must identify and remove those tariff and non-tariff barriers. I repeat: we must do this not as a favour to Africa but as a favour to ourselves.

Let us apply the lesson learned by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, aged 15: it is not always about us. We are a naturally solipsistic species—it is human nature to put ourselves at the centre of the universe—but the rise of Africa is a demographic fact and will be an economic and geopolitical one. The challenge for us is to stop thinking of it as an obligation and start embracing it as an opportunity.