Republic of Cameroon: Economic Partnership Agreement

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed. I declare my interests as listed in the register and that, in my time as Minister for Africa, I had the chance to visit both countries and to meet President Paul Biya and President Nana Akufo-Addo.

The benefits of free trade are absolutely huge and although the figures for our bilateral trade with Ghana, which is £1.2 billion, and with Cameroon, which is £200 million, may sound quite large, when you compare this to, for example, our bilateral trade with the Republic of Ireland, which is £70 billion, our total bilateral trade with sub-Saharan Africa is only £40 billion, so the scope for an increase in that is absolutely huge. I suggest that we have to take these really fast-growing economies more seriously. I welcome the focus on Africa in the recent integrated review of security, defence and development, because these are some of the countries where there are growing middle-income parts of the population and other countries are aggressively using their influence to try to build their trade, particularly China, Russia, Turkey and Brazil. We need to act quickly and these rollover treaties are an incredibly important part of that.

I absolutely take on board the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. What a huge contrast there is with Ghana, which has transitioned from one regime to another with the minimum of fuss and been an exemplar for smooth democracy in west Africa. In fact, I had the pleasure of meeting Nana Akufo-Addo many times as the result of the partnership between his party, the NPP, and my party, the Conservative Party, over many years. We were called to the Bar at roughly the same time. He worked incredibly hard for his position, persevered and fought a number of elections. On many occasions he accepted the result and eventually he won the prize as president. What a contrast with Paul Biya, who we all know runs what is effectively a dictatorship. There have been repeated human right abuses over a number of years and, as the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, pointed out, there has been a focus on human rights abuses in the anglophone part of southern Cameroon, which I have visited on occasions.

I would just say to the noble Lord that we have two options here. Either we remain engaged and have a dialogue with Cameroon and exert influence. I found that, when I was able to meet President Biya, in private we were able to achieve much more by making representations around human rights, but at the same time remaining engaged. I just say to the noble Lord, and others who have a regret about this Motion, we do not have a dispute with the Cameroonian people. We want prosperity, engagement and wealth creation, and if we can achieve those aims, we will see Cameroon move to democracy and to proper all-party elections and, in the meantime, create prosperity for the people of Cameroon and, indeed, the people of this country as well.