Malawi

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, the House should be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for initiating this short debate on a small, faraway country of which many people know little but which he and I know extremely well. I join him in congratulating the Scotland Malawi Partnership. I was on the preparatory committee that set up that partnership and he was the First Minister who saw it implemented. It has gone from strength to strength. The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government have continued to support it very strongly, and I endorse what the noble Lord said. When the noble Lord referred to the history of Malawi, I remembered on one occasion sleeping on the bed of Dr Laws in Livingstonia—not an experience I would recommend to anybody. It was simply a bed constructed out of rope.

In a very short speech I want simply to raise two issues. The first is the question, to which he alluded, of “cashgate” and our aid programme. The figures may not be on the DfID website but sources in Malawi suggest that some $500 million went missing over eight years during the period of the previous Government in Malawi. That is, according to Malawi sources, something like 30% of Malawi’s total budget. When you think that it is a very small country with a population of 16 million and an economy smaller than the London Borough of Hackney, you realise that the damage done by the “cashgate” scandal is enormous. Therefore, it is understandable that not just Her Majesty’s Government but the new Malawi Government are doing their best to see that those who were responsible for this are brought to book.

The former President, Joyce Banda, in a lecture at the LSE this month, said that she was alerted to this scandal at the tail end of her regime by Alexander Baum, who was the European Union representative in Malawi. That enables me to say that I do not share the general view that has been put about that the European diplomatic community is somehow less effective than our own. In my many visits to Malawi, I have found that the small diplomatic community there worked together more cohesively than I have seen in any other country. I pay tribute to the European representative as well as to our own.

In the lead-up to the referendum after Dr Hastings Banda’s period, I was involved in the struggle to bring better democracy and transparency to Malawi. It must be frustrating for the population of Malawi to realise that they have suffered under kleptomaniac rulers who have made a mockery of democracy. I know that our Government and the German Government have financed the external audit that is trying to track down what exactly happened. The United Kingdom has to be tough on this issue. It cannot resume the full aid programme until it is resolved. It should also warn even the new Government that extravagance will not help. There have been press reports from Malawi that the current President took 68 people with him to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York—not a good example to set when he is doing his best to track down the blatant corruption of the previous Government.

Although we have suspended budgetary aid to the Government, I hope that it will still be possible for DfID and other organisations to continue to give direct programme support to various factors in Malawi. In the areas of health, education, agriculture and support for the judiciary, it is important that, even though we cannot give government budgetary aid, we continue to give direct assistance.

To give an example from my own experience, the last time I was there, which was a couple of years ago, I visited a hospital which was very well organised. It had rural outreach clinics and took drugs out to the villages on motorbikes. Somebody had given about a dozen motorbikes to the hospital. I am not a motorbike expert but I think they were probably Chinese—they were quite cheap—and a lot of them had broken down. In fact, there was only one left that worked; the others were all in a shed. Here is an example of when a little ingenuity and a little money, to get a mechanic out there to cannibalise the motorbikes so they could work again, would greatly increase the efficiency of that service. Not a large sum of money was involved. That is the kind of imaginative thinking that our hard-pressed DfID staff in Malawi should be looking at. The Government should be willing to finance such individual projects even if they cannot give direct help to the Malawi Government.

The second issue I want to touch on is the visa regime, ably mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McConnell. As it affects Malawi, it is particularly bad because visa applications have to go to Pretoria in South Africa. Under the Malawi rules, one cannot pay in rand without clearance from the banks. The whole thing is a bureaucratic nightmare. We had a debate on this issue, which is totally unsatisfactory, in the Moses Room a few months ago. We have lost accountability for the visa service. It has been farmed out to an agency, which in turn has farmed it out to subcontractors, presumably on a cheap contract basis. The result is that the service is extremely expensive for Malawi citizens and it is very time-consuming. Mr Tom Greatrex the MP who represents Blantyre, David Livingstone’s birthplace, feels very strongly about this. He has raised it several times and is about to have an Adjournment debate in the Commons on the issue.

In the mean time, I want to make two suggestions, which my noble friend might pass on to the Home Office. First, I do not understand why, when people are coming for short contributions to public seminars of a kind that I complained about before, and will be here for only a few days with firm sponsorship, those issuing the visas cannot telephone the sponsors to make sure that the application is genuine. The idea that visa applications are rejected because people might overstay or give up their careers, families and everything else in Malawi to stay in Britain is simply ludicrous. Another suggestion is that we might change the visa system to insist that sponsors for short-term visits should themselves sign declarations accepting responsibility for the person returning and being liable to a fine if the person does not return. That might cut through a lot of the bureaucracy and establish a visa regime that is fit for purpose.

Better still, I would like to be rid of the agency and go back to the system we used to have. I can remember as an MP on several occasions having to phone a high commissioner or an ambassador and say, “I hear that so-and-so has made an application for a visa and has been turned down. Can you have a look at this?”. They would look at it and say, “This is why it has been turned down. It is perfectly reasonable. It is good policy not to let this person come here”—or, alternatively, they would say, “We have looked at this. It is bureaucratic nonsense and we are issuing the visa”. There is no accountability any more. It has gone. If we cannot get it back, at least steps should be taken, as the noble Lord said, to ensure that the system is improved. I hope that the Home Office will respond in the debate which Mr Greatrex is having shortly in the other place and will come forward with positive ideas on how to improve the system for the benefit of good relations between Malawi and ourselves.