Queen’s Speech

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make a short expedition into the Commonwealth, not much mentioned in these debates, and in particular into three of its late joiners, all of them sub-Saharan nations. That connects me with the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, because a lot of those important minerals are to be found in sub-Saharan Africa.

I sometimes wonder how serious the Government’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa is. When DfID was brought back under the Foreign Office, I thought that we might hear some quite exciting new ideas about how to proceed, but I fear that the recent announcement, which is pretty opaque, does not make the blood run. As an old employee of CDC, I much regret the throwing of an excellent brand name into the wastepaper basket for an anonymous kind of name, which misrepresents what CDC has always done. It invested not in British interests but primarily in the interests of the country where it was working, and it always tried to make that investment work in such a way that it became locally owned as soon as possible.

In sub-Saharan Africa, on the three late entrants that I would like to talk about briefly—Rwanda, Cameroon and Mozambique—the challenges are very complicated. If there was ever a place looking for some form of levelling up, it must be those three countries. They are all poor, they all need economic development and, particularly Cameroon and Mozambique, they have a lot of violence going on within their borders. They all need institutions that can deal with the problems that arise in a nation state, and none of them has reached a level of income and public expenditure to enable it to create those institutions.

Rwanda has a population of 13 million, with a tangled German and Belgian colonial background. It is living on subsistence agriculture, with a median age of 20 and a GDP about equal to that of Brighton and Hove. Cameroon became a member of the Commonwealth in 1995, also with a tangled German, French and English background. The French/English background has not worked; there is a stand-off between the culture and languages of France and England. There is a secessionist movement, which will not work, and there are all sorts of problems. However, like Rwanda, it is a member of the Commonwealth.

Mozambique also became a member in 1995. It has a Portuguese background, and 20% of the population speak Portuguese, which is the official language of Mozambique. However, Portuguese colonialism was very much centred on the coast, and the rest of Mozambique has 20 indigenous languages. The problems in the north, in Cabo Delgado, where there is an Islamic majority, are extremely severe.

My plea is to ask the Government whether they intend to have declared policies towards these three members of the Commonwealth which we can understand, or do they think that things are really too difficult and that the British public are not sufficiently interested for the Government to become interested themselves?