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

Baroness Anelay of St Johns Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Grand Committee

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[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

That this House takes note of the Report from the International Relations and Defence Committee The UK and Sub-Saharan Africa: prosperity, peace and development co-operation. (1st Report, Session 2019-21, HL Paper 88).

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to introduce our report The UK and Sub-Saharan Africa: Prosperity, Peace and Development Co-operation. I thank the members of the committee and our staff, including our specialist adviser Dr Julia Gallagher, professor of African studies at SOAS, for all their hard work in producing the report. I am also grateful to all the witnesses who contributed to our inquiry, one of whom, the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, has subsequently been appointed as a member of our committee and is participating in the debate today.

Our inquiry was launched in July 2019 and the report was published in July last year. In the interim, in addition to carrying out short inquiries on topical issues, we have conducted two major inquiries: our report The UK and Afghanistan was published in January this year and our report on the UK’s security and trade relationship with China will be published this month.

The constraints on parliamentary time caused by the pandemic have delayed the opportunity to bring today’s report before your Lordships for debate. Naturally I am looking forward to hearing the contributions by all noble Lords today. Despite the passage of time since we published our report, our 96 conclusions and recommendations remain valid—some of them perhaps even more so. Today I shall give an overview of some of the major issues that we covered.

Our primary recommendation, from which all others flow, is that the Government should publish a clearly articulated list of their priorities for their engagement with Africa along with an action plan for meeting them. When Theresa May visited Cape Town in September 2018 as Prime Minister, she announced a “fundamental strategic shift” in the UK’s engagement with the countries of Africa, known as the “strategic approach”. We welcome the uplift of staff in the region that followed that announcement but are disappointed to conclude that the Government’s so-called strategic approach to Africa falls short. It is not a strategy but rather some broad ideas and themes. Making a random set of speeches does not constitute setting out a coherent strategy.

The context of the UK’s departure from the European Union and the integrated review of foreign policy, defence, security and international development presented us all with a timely opportunity for a renewal of the UK’s engagement in Africa. So what additional light was thrown on the strategy by the Government’s integrated review earlier this year? Not a great deal, I am afraid. The region takes up so little space in the review that it reminds me of the evidence given to us by General Sir Richard Barrons, who said that while “politicians … and officials” often say that “Africa really matters”,

“almost in the next paragraph Africa becomes the fourth priority”.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a region of 49 countries of immense complexity and diversity. In the next 30 years it will see unprecedented social and economic changes, some of which present enormous economic and social opportunities as well as challenges for individual nations. The African Union has developed a long-term strategy intended to meet those challenges and harness the opportunities. We say that the UK should take a greater interest in, and seek a stronger partnership with, sub-Saharan Africa to support the delivery of the African Union’s strategy.

The region has some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Africa’s population is expected to double to 2.1 billion by 2050. That growth is fuelling a rapidly expanding middle class and an increasing proportion of young people across the continent. Africa is the biggest bloc at the United Nations and it can be felt that the AU is growing in significance. It is therefore of strategic and geopolitical importance to the UK. It is a region where the UK really can make a difference.

During our inquiry, it became clear that aspects of the UK’s domestic policy have a direct impact on its reputation in Africa. We received overwhelming evidence that the UK’s—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, but a Division has been called and we will adjourn for 10 minutes.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a consensus in the Room that we do not need 10 minutes for a Division. If the Committee is content, we will make future adjournments for a Division five minutes. I think that meets with the approval of everybody I can hear.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, I had begun to explain that, during the course of our inquiry, it became clear that aspects of the UK’s domestic policy have a direct effect on our reputation in Africa. The first of those is visa policies. We received overwhelming evidence that the way in which the Home Office deals with visa policy is damaging to our reputation across Africa and has a deleterious effect on our businesspeople’s ability to carry on economic relationships with countries across Africa.

We also heard evidence of the lasting impact of the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism on perceptions of the UK in the region.

We were struck by evidence that remittances from the UK to sub-Saharan Africa exceed both aid and charitable giving. Remittances are given too little profile in the narrative of the UK’s economic relationship with sub-Saharan Africa, and we believe the Government should work to reduce the cost of remitting money to the region.

Of course, it is now clear that the pandemic is having a damaging impact on the region in both health and economic terms. This adds urgency and scale to the collective responses needed to the challenges we identify in our report. Significant economic support from international partners will be needed to prevent economic gains made over previous decades being reversed. In particular, we say that the Government should support the African Union’s call for a two-year standstill for African countries’ public and private debt and continue to work with international partners to ensure that the Covid-19 vaccine is made more available to developing countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

We conclude that the UK’s future relationship with the countries of Africa and their regional institutions must be based on a genuine partnership. That has not always been the case. The UK should continue to support constructive reforms to the rules-based international order, including the UN Security Council, to provide, for example, African countries with a voice commensurate with their size and importance.

The cultural, educational, language and other soft-power connections of the Commonwealth provide a substantial basis for a further strengthening of the UK’s ties. We believe the Government should work with the 19 African members of the Commonwealth to seek ways in which its work in the continent could be strengthened.

We conclude that working with international partners must remain an important part of the UK’s approach to sub-Saharan Africa. We identify common interests between the UK and France, particularly in the Sahel, and the need for new methods of co-operation to be built up with EU institutions and member states.

It is, however, China which is regarded as an important partner and source of investment in the region. There is scope for the UK to work constructively with China, especially through multilateral institutions, on issues such as debt, health, climate change and trade—provided, of course, that the UK’s national interests and values are robustly defended.

We welcomed the range of effective UK official development assistance projects across the region and were therefore dismayed by the Government’s decision last year to make swingeing cuts to ODA across Africa. The cuts are already damaging the UK’s reputation and standing there.

The committee finds that UK trade with and investment in sub-Saharan Africa has flatlined over the last decade. Concerted action by the Government will be needed to address this. The UK-Africa Investment Summits in January last year and this were high-profile events and welcome, but detailed, consistent follow-up is required. I note, for example, that the Minister for Africa tweeted this last weekend that he had signed an MoU for the UK to partner with the African continent free trade agreement—we are the first non-African nation to do so—but he did not say what the MoU is about and what it would do. I hope that my noble friend Lord Parkinson can update us on that and explain what the implications will be for UK trade with the region.

There are significant challenges to peace and security in sub-Saharan Africa. They are likely to be exacerbated by wider trends affecting the region, including population growth, weak states, governance challenges, violent ideologies and the climate crisis. Witnesses highlighted instability in the Sahel, Nigeria, Somalia and Cameroon as of particular concern, and areas where the UK could play a constructive role, including through peacekeeping, diplomacy, and support for human rights. We should now, of course, add conflict in Tigray to that list. The Government’s strategy in the Sahel is now unclear because the integrated review mentioned the Sahel only once and Mali just in passing.

While the UK pursues important new economic opportunities and seeks to tackle security challenges, human rights will remain critical. The Government should consider a package of support to build the necessary conditions for democracy to function effectively in sub-Saharan Africa: a system that encompasses accountability, human rights, the rule of law, the prevention of conflict and measures to fight against corruption. That package should be a key factor in an Africa strategy and implementation plan. We should work in partnership to achieve those goals. It would be a partnership of lasting value both to us and to the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, I also begin with thanks to all noble Lords who participated in today’s debate, as well as to those who rotated off—it is horrible phrase, is it not? It sounds like something to do with a rotisserie—in January and those who have rotated on. I thank those who have such a deep knowledge and interest in Africa and see beyond what the red tops—okay, I read the Daily Mail, but noble Lords know what I mean—say about it; they have a much deeper understanding than so many. It was great to be able to listen to noble Lords; thank you very much indeed.

It was a great privilege to introduce this report because it was the first time I have been able to do so since I became chair in July 2019, taking over from my noble friend Lord Howell. Without him, this committee would not have existed in any event and this House would have been the poorer for it. He is possessed of an enviable quality of analysis and clarity of presentation. I always used to enjoy listening to him in the long, cold years of opposition when he was our Front Bench spokesperson—the Treaty of Lisbon? We were there—and when he was the Minister at the Foreign Office and subsequently served this House so well.

I very much agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, that the purpose of our committee was to move the dial—a horrible phrase, but the noble Lord made it much better. He said that it is important to change the narrative about the region. That was picked up by my noble friend Lord Hannan, who talked about the stereotypes stuck in the some of the minds of not just younger people but older people, if I can speak like that. Too often we think about Live Aid as describing all of Africa. We think of poverty. There is a difficult nexus here. We must try to encourage people to be generous, and to realise the value of overseas development and of contributing, both financially and through hours of work for voluntary organisations to assist across Africa. However, we must also be sure that we can be clear about the opportunities, as my noble friend Lady Fall set out so clearly. We have to look at the strengths in Africa and build on them while not being doe-eyed and ignoring some of the vile practices that go on in, say, the middle of the mining areas of the DRC, as well as the ways in which Presidents and Prime Ministers seem to ignore their constitutions and try to go on for ever. We must be clear-eyed about the difficulties too.

My noble friend Lady Helic made a really important point about that: not so long ago, we saw Ethiopia as the way forward for the future, with the great success when Abiy Ahmed became its leader. I went there with the Inter-Parliamentary Union in February 2019. It was very much a case of meeting people who were excited about this new environment in which people of different religions and regions were coming together. You could feel the dynamism. Science parks were being thrown up all over the place; the Chinese were investing there a great deal, of course. At that time, I had the privilege of having a meeting with Ethiopia’s equivalent of our upper House. The Speaker of that House, who was a Muslim and the first woman Speaker of their upper House, was from Tigray. Now, she is no longer there. She left immediately after the conflict began and made it clear that she would stand in Tigray with those being oppressed.

I think the conflict in Tigray has made us realise far more carefully that we should never take anything for granted in Africa. We need to be able to work in partnership, but we also need to ensure that we do not tell Africans how to behave, because there is such diversity, and it would make it look as though we were going back to our old ways of trying to foist our views on them.

On the other hand, if we do not assist with conflict resolution, why will businesspeople invest in Africa and ensure that there is a way forward that is good for them—but my goodness, it would be good for us, with a hard-edged idea about the increase in a population who have been increasingly well educated, who are motivated and with whom we really should be able to share innovation, as my noble friend Lord Sarfraz said. There are the ideas about how entrepreneurial work should occur in Africa.

When I visited many countries in Africa as a Minister, I met entrepreneurs who were longing to have better trade links with us. My colleague on the committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and I visited a regional economic community when we were in Botswana on a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association visit. We saw its determination to make the African continent free trade agreement work, against the background that the regional economic communities have had their own cross-border issues in their activities too, so it is not a straightforward matter.

Throughout all this, there is so much that we can achieve as the UK in partnership. We will be watching the way forward in what the Government do—my noble friend Lord Parkinson will know that. I thank him for stepping in at very short notice to take this debate. He has done that astonishingly well—although that sounds terribly condescending; I apologise for that. We will be watching, because one of the roles of any Select Committee in holding the Government to account is to ensure, when the Minister is wise enough to say in winding up that he will follow up on any points that he has not answered, that we remember and press him on that. He knows that here before him is a group of Peers who are trying to ensure that the United Kingdom is successful in its relations with all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We are ambitious.

Motion agreed.