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

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure but also quite difficult to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because his knowledge of human rights conditions all over the world, particularly in Africa, is tremendous. His dedication to trying to find solutions is wholly admirable and very much respected by the House.

My African experience comes from CDC. I am very pleased that the committee, under my noble friend Lady Anelay’s chairmanship, was able to get a lot of evidence from CDC. However, my CDC experience ended some 30 years ago. The way CDC operates, the people it employs and the imperatives in their lives have changed dramatically over the last 30 years. I am not going to go into a comparison. I am not at all enthusiastic about comparisons anyway, but time has passed. Things have moved on and when we think about Africa, particularly the 19 Commonwealth members of sub-Saharan Africa, we must think very carefully about the way that things have changed.

I would like to pursue the committee’s partnership concept, which is absolutely the right way to be thinking about a direction of travel. When you come to read the Government’s response to the committee’s report, take into account that the committee was looking for the publication of a proper plan of engagement—the plan of action which was mentioned by its chairman. Paragraph 167 of the report says:

“Bilateral relationships with countries in Sub-Saharan Africa should remain a key part of the UK’s”


involvement. I would say they are vital and, if I might be practical, are the only form of deep involvement in sub-Saharan Africa which makes any sense to me.

I notice that we have just reappointed a high commissioner in what I remember as Swaziland—I think it is now called Eswatini. If you think about how a high commissioner would be the front-line man or woman of British policy in sub-Saharan Africa and compare their role with that of the high commissioner in Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria, it is just not the same thing in any way. Indeed, in pursuing the partnership concept I would like to speculate about Nigeria and the partnership with it.

In parenthesis, we should remember that Cameroon, which has been mentioned several times, quite rightly, is on a boundary with Nigeria. Indeed, when Cameroon got its independence two of its provinces opted to go into Nigeria, so their relationship is very close. At the moment, Nigeria is host to a great many refugees from Cameroon. That is a thing which has to be thought about if we are to create a meaningful partnership with Nigeria. On the other side of Nigeria, again in parenthesis, is Benin. They speak French as their common language in Benin and whenever we think about a partnership with a country in sub-Saharan Africa, we have to think about the complexity of life there.

Let me come briefly to Nigeria itself. It has 200 million people and it is predicted—most population estimates turn out to be wrong, thank goodness—to rise, as has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, to 400 million in 2050. Well, 2050 is not a long way away. The effect of Nigeria’s fertility rate being over five is that the per capita income is falling. The economy is growing slowly again, after Covid and all the other problems, but it is not keeping pace with the increase in the numbers of Nigerians. The per capita income in Nigeria is about $2,500 a year. Noble Lords will do their own mental arithmetic on what that means and be able to compare it with, for example, ours.

When we come to think about a partnership with Nigeria and Nigeria’s relationship with the UK, since the average age of the Nigerians is probably about 16 or 17 and the country has been independent for close to 80 years, we have to forget any idea that the population of Nigeria as they grow up have any real relationship with the fact that we were once the colonial power. We have to start from somewhere else.

The place that I think one needs to start from is: where are the Nigerian Government? If you are going to be a partner but the partner does not tell you what he is thinking, it is not going to be much good trying to be a partner. What about the dilemma of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley? The Chinese are solving his electricity dilemma by building coal-fired power stations. Apparently, that would not be a good thing in Nigeria; well, I suppose they do not have much coal, but they have plenty of oil and a lot of gas. Are we really going to say to our partner, “You can’t do that”?

You have to look at what your partner is saying. What do the Nigerian Government think about the explosion of their population from 200 million to 400 million in the next 30 years? Is it something that they want to see happen? Unless we have a dialogue that opens up a conversation, we will continue to get pathetic responses from the Government such as the one they gave to the noble Baroness’s report—and it was pathetic; it was completely general and had no commitment. We are faced with a Government who basically have no real commitment to any single country in sub-Saharan Africa.