Two years on and it is China setting the pace in Africa

8th March 2007
By Richard Dowden

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At 461 pages and weighing in at almost 4 lbs, the Commission for Africa report, Our Common Interest, was never going to be bedside reading. Put together in less than a year by Sir Nicholas Stern — he deserved the knighthood for effort alone — the report was a monumental assessment of the state of Africa and what needed to be done to help it develop.    

At the launch in March 2005 the prime minster declared it to be British policy. Bob Geldof said we would no longer have any excuse for doing nothing about Africa. The report told us what needed to be done he said.

Laying out clearly how Africa’s global trading position had weakened, its debts had grown, aid had fallen, the Commission report stated quite clearly that Africa was failing.

At the heart of Africa’s failure was ‘the weakness of governance and the absence of an effective state. Good governance and capacity building … lie at the core of all Africa’s problems’ it said. Africa must take the lead in sorting itself out. Others could only follow and help.

It reconfirmed the deal contained in the New Programme for Africa’s Development (Nepad) — that the rest of the world would help Africa if African governments were serious about dealing with the continent’s failings.

In retrospect the report itself had two important flaws. One was the section on culture which either should have been the heart of the document, a cultural explanation for Africa’s failure, or it should have been ignored; the chapter, the weakest in the report, fell between two stools.

The second flaw was that the conclusion had been laid down before the report was conceived. Although Sir Nick carefully costed each policy and programme, the report had to come up with the conclusion that aid to Africa should be doubled — by amazing coincidence — the amount already demanded by the Make Poverty History campaign.

So has the Commission for Africa report gone the way of the Brandt Report, the South South report and all the other global initiatives of the last half-century that tried to address the issues of world poverty?  Today they are jetsam, yellowing in second hand bookshops or washed up on the bleak shores of university development courses. It would be a pity if this report went the same way.

A serious failing of the Commission, rather than the report, was that it was set up in a rush, its members appointed by Downing Street without proper consultation. Although the Commission had African members, the report was driven by Britain and almost no one in Africa knew anything about it.

Peter Ritchie, a senior research associate at the Centre for African Policy & Peace Strategy, points out that the report was not well received in much of Africa where it was perceived as making no new contribution. ‘It was seen as ‘just another report’’ he says. ‘But while the report itself is now largely forgotten I think it has had a knock-on effect institutionally.’

The body responsible for seeing through the Gleneagles commitments is the African Partnership Forum (APF) which brings together African governments, regional governments and the main donors and institutional donors such as the World Bank and the IMF. It is guided by the Joint Action Plan and has established a small Support Unit to work closely with the African Union and NEPAD Secretariats.

Mr Ritchie hails this new mandate for the African Partners Forum and its support unit as concrete outputs from the Commission process. ‘The APF, together with NEPAD, could have a positive impact on strategic, joined up development approaches in Africa. But more needs to be done to strengthen both the APF politically and NEPAD operationally.’

The only issues that it follows up were those on the table at the G8 summit: trade, aid and debt. The CFA report however had delved into new, interesting and important areas such as remittances or university education in Africa.

Has Sir Nick’s work on these topics gone to waste? I use facts and figures about them from the report constantly but I do not hear others quoting them in articles or speeches. Two years on we are only now beginning to see progress on African tertiary education for example.

Meanwhile two huge new elephants have wandered into the room. In fact China and climate change were already there in 2004 but received only glancing mentions in the report. China’s new engagement with Africa will change the continent far more than any other factor in the next ten years. Its huge, new demand for Africa’s resources will push up their prices.

That is good for Africa. And African rulers like the Chinese — as last month when South African President Thabo Mbeki and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao met in Pretoria (photo above) as part of Hu’s African tour. They don’t talk about Africa’s poverty, but instead use the language of unconditional partnership and mutual benefit.

But, as Lindsay Hilsum has said, where Tony Blair saw salvation in Sierra Leone, the Chinese saw a business opportunity. And the Chinese do not so far seem signed up to the Nepad agenda. Thanks to the Commission for Africa and the Gleneagles Summit, Western NGOs business and governments had finally started to sing from the same hymnbook called Sustainable Development. At that moment the Chinese barged in and trampled it into the mud.

One hymn in that book was the Commission for Africa report. It had nice words — if anyone can remember them?

Richard Dowden is Director of the Royal African Society.

Filed Under: Africa, Business, China, Commission For Africa Report
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