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).
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.
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.
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.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, who chairs the committee with great distinction, following in the footsteps of the distinguished noble Lord, Lord Howell, who will be contributing shortly himself. I begin by paying tribute to our late and much-missed colleague, Lord Judd. Frank had great expertise and a great love for Africa and its peoples. He had his head in the air but his feet were very firmly on the ground.
My first observation is this: the report, which is very radical, particularly in its call for a new strategic approach to Africa, has been to some extent overtaken because of the delay of over a year between publication and the debate we are having now. Clearly, the authorities need to examine this.
My second observation is that there is much British experience of Africa. After all, as the noble Baroness said, 19 states are members of the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, in this country there is insufficient attention to Africa. Just look at the British press coverage compared with that of France, for example. I recall that, when I was in the FCO, Africa was the afterthought state and afterthought posting, when those who had key expertise elsewhere had a short period in Africa and did not build up a particular expertise. Let us hope that the much-criticised merger between DfID and the Foreign Office will lead to a change in that. There is also a great turnover of Ministers. It is sad to mention in passing the gaffe by the incumbent in mixing up Zambia and Zimbabwe.
I shall give examples of areas that have changed since publication, or which merited greater attention in the report. The report argues for greater commitment by the UK to Africa, yet the subsequent cut in overseas aid must surely undermine this aim and lead to a reduction in our influence and a consequent increase in the influence of other countries, particularly China.
My Lords, I, too, served on this committee. I do so no longer but I begin by paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, who did a remarkable job after all of us, I think, had some initial hesitations, both about taking on such a huge subject that involved a large number of countries and about whether we would be able to give coherence to our findings. I hope that we managed to do that; if we did, it was largely thanks to our chair.
I join the noble Baroness in saying that the fact that we are debating this report on Britain’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa some 15 months after it was published is a travesty of proper parliamentary procedure, which cannot be justified by excuses about Covid. I hope that that invisible entity known as the usual channels, which of course could not be present in this Room, will take some lessons from this because, together with the failure to debate the report of the committee on Afghanistan, this is frankly a scandal.
Why do I say that Covid is not a reasonable excuse for not debating earlier? It is quite simply because Covid has hit Africa particularly hard, accentuating the many challenges that its countries face in health, social and economic terms. We should have been debating what Britain can do to help. Why so? Because Africa matters to Britain and Britain matters to Africa, however patchy our past record there may have been—and it was. Through partnership and co-operation, we can make a real, positive difference there and shape up an essential part of our post-Brexit international role, which is likely to be more significant and more helpful to our western allies than any chasing after Indo-Pacific tilts.
On that point, the integrated review says quite a lot about the Indo-Pacific tilt. However, it does not explain coherently the rationale behind it or of what in practical terms it needs to consist. Briefly sailing an aircraft carrier through the South China Sea does not answer that criticism. The case for working in concert with the US, Japan, South Korea, Australia and other countries in the region to reduce the economic, trade, technological and investment disequilibria between all of us and China, which has taken excessive advantage of the benefits of WTO membership and other aspects of the rules-based international order, is a convincing one. But militarily too? I really wonder. Where is the evidence that the US—or India, for that matter—is looking to us for a closer military relationship in the Far East? The US has gently made it clear that it is in Europe and in Europe’s back neighbourhood, of which Africa is clearly a part, where it is looking for a more active and more substantial role from us, our European NATO allies and the EU as a whole. Given Africa’s potential in terms of demographics—the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, rightly referred to them—and economic growth, does that not make good sense from our own point of view too? I suggest that it does. Let us not forget that sliding into a quasi-Cold War relationship with China will not endear us to many African countries, which will want no part of that.
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, not least because it gives me a rare opportunity to agree with two things that he said: first, that the Government should spell out sooner rather than later a post-Brexit trade framework ambition for our relationships with African countries, and, secondly, that they should facilitate rather than discourage the development of a pan-African free trade area.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Anelay and her committee on producing a comprehensive and valuable report—so comprehensive that, in the few minutes available to us, one could not comment on it generally. I have been interested in these subjects since my first career was working on aid and development projects in Africa and Asia. That led to me being appointed by David Cameron to chair his global poverty commission along with Bob Geldof—an unlikely pairing, you might think—which in turn led to the formation of the Trade Out of Poverty group where my noble friend Lord Hastings, whom I believe I am allowed to call my noble friend, and I were initially and subsequently chairmen, with great and invaluable support from the noble Lord, Lord Boateng.
At a conference organised by that group to coincide with the meeting of Commonwealth Trade Ministers, I was struck by the different priorities of the European and African contributors. The European contributors, myself included, talked about the importance of facilitating trade, removing barriers, encouraging and supporting education, shifting the emphasis of aid to helping in the development of the economy and trade and that sort of thing. The African delegates politely agreed with that but then focused on one word, which, to my astonishment and that of most people, they all without exception repeated again and again: electricity. They said, “We cannot develop without electricity. Our development depends on developing our electricity, and unless and until we electrify our economies we will not grow or develop.”
My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to debate this report, but I have to say: better late than never. A couple of speakers have mentioned that the report was published in July 2020, and here we are debating it in September 2021.
The good news is that the report emphatically remains relevant. It is a very substantial piece of work of 160 pages, produced during the period when we were facing all the difficulties of remote working. I pay tribute to the work of our secretariat, particularly our clerk Eva George, and very much so our chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay.
One thing we can all agree on is the huge importance and potential of the region we studied, Africa south of the Sahara. The population of Africa as a whole is projected to double to 2.1 billion by 2050. By 2100, the population of the continent will account for just under 40% of the world’s population.
The UK has close links extending over many generations with many countries of the continent—especially in the south where, as we have heard, 19 countries are members of the Commonwealth—but by no means have all these relationships been positive. Our colleague, my noble friend Lady Amos, told us in her evidence that
“a lot of young Africans I speak to are very ambivalent about Britain, partly because of the issues around visas and the perception of a hostile environment, but also … [because] they will have family here who are constantly reporting back on what it is like to be living and working here.”
But the contacts and interactions over so many years also have many advantages. Dr Nick Westcott, director of the Royal African Society, told us that there was respect among African Commonwealth countries for the UK’s
“strong tradition of a free press, free speech, democratic institutions and visible and effective accountability.”
My Lords, I declare my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Zimbabwe and vice-chair for southern Africa of the Africa APPG. I join other noble Lords in commending the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and her committee for an excellent and comprehensive report, although I must admit that when I read it I felt a mixture of despair and anger, because it confirmed everything I feared and have often observed—the lack of strategy or consistency, the counterproductive policies and the missed opportunities.
I had the privilege of working in southern Africa as a teacher in a rural secondary school in the late 1980s and subsequently have been an adviser in South Africa’s first and second democratic Parliaments in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since that time, I have travelled irregularly back to the region and remain in contact with many of my former pupils, as well as with politicians and others whom I came to know in South Africa. What is most striking to me is how our significance in the region has waned over that period, not just among political elites but in the eyes of ordinary people. It is, in part, a consequence of the lack of consistency, strategy or even sometimes apparently any real interest in Africa highlighted in this report.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, Africa remains important to Britain and Britain still has the chance to remain important to Africa. The noble Lord, Lord Hague, pointed out in the Times last month that, over the next 30 years, Africa’s population is expected to grow by more than 1.1 billion people, meaning that the continent will host three times the population of Europe by 2050. As a result, he argued:
“The future of Africa will … be one of the decisive factors in world affairs”.
Yet there seems to be no real understanding in government, at a political level at least, of Africa’s central importance economically and politically. Perhaps that is in part because of the fact highlighted in the report and referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that since the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, was Minister for Africa for a period from 1989 to 1997, no Minister has been in place for more than two years. The noble Baroness’s effectiveness as a Minister was not just because she was an excellent Minister, which obviously she was, but because she had been there, was known by people, had the expertise and was highly respected. With the best will in the world, that cannot be achieved, however good or bad our Ministers might be, if they are reshuffled every few months.
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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 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.
Perhaps again, the defeat of the West in Afghanistan will lead to a loss of credibility and enhance the appeal of jihadist groups, which are active not only in the Sahel but down the whole swathe of east Africa, from Somalia right down to Mozambique. Do I detect the possible beginning of a recognition in the post-Afghan situation of the need for closer co-ordination of policy, particularly with France? I recall that Robin Cook, when Foreign Secretary, initiated regular high-level meetings with the French and closer co-ordination with posts, for example with the British having a position in the French embassy in Togo and the French having a link with our high commission in Accra. There must surely be some scope for that.
Can we have a detailed breakdown of the effects of the cuts by country and by section? VSO, for example, is part of that soft power which is too often neglected. I understand that VSO has been funded, albeit at a reduced level, only until the end of this financial year. There is no certainty thereafter. How can VSO, which is so important to our soft power impact, plan properly for the future when it does not have adequate and long-term funding? I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, will consider writing again on behalf of the committee to the Government to try to obtain some clear commitment on funding for VSO.
It would also be helpful to have some indication of the Government’s contribution to the challenge of Covid. After all, we have bought substantially more vaccines than we need. We will need to pass not only vaccines to Africa but, hopefully, some of the technical expertise that we have, given that even South Africa, with its comparatively good communications and quality medical services, is struggling massively.
Africa contributes very little to climate change: perhaps 0.3% of carbon emissions. Yet the effects are potentially massive, as we have seen in the latest UNICEF report. It showed the effect on sub-Saharan Africa, which is vulnerable to the increased frequency and severity of floods and of droughts, with inadequate infrastructure.
My final point relates to population, a problem that is only touched on in the report. The explosion of Africa’s population has effects not only on Africa but on us in Europe through migration. I understand that this is too hot a potato for the Security Council to handle. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, with his experience, may wish to comment on that. The report states that the population of Africa will double by 2050. Africa’s population was 230 million in 1950 and is projected to rise to 2.53 billion by 2050. Even as fertility is projected to fall, Africa’s share of global population, at 17% in 2017, will be 26% in 2050 and could reach 40% by 2100. Nigeria, for example, had a population of 38 million in 1950; it is projected by the UN to rise to 411 million by 2050 and to 800 million by 2100. The noble Lord, Lord Hague, wrote a perceptive article on this recently, in the Times of 24 August. Have western Governments and our African partners adequately recognised this challenge?
The human pressure for land leads to the cutting of forests, adding to climate change, desertification and conflicts over land and water. How will Africa find the resources to feed, educate and house that scale of increase? Will Europe be prepared to open its doors more widely to receive the new and increased migration? What work is under way with African and EU partners to confront this challenge?
Of course, expenditure on girls’ education may help and is important, but it is clearly insufficient. To what extent is family spacing a part of our aid effort? To what extent have we factored this population increase, massive as it is, into the aid policies that we pursue, particularly in Africa? Surely we need to work alongside African states, as well as with our EU partners and countries such as China, to understand the nature of local societies, recognise the problem and seek to mitigate its effect. The report is valuable—it is a gold mine of information—but perhaps we need another report on the challenge of population in sub-Saharan Africa.
I will focus my remarks on three main issues: trade policy, visa policy and peacekeeping. There are many more, but time presses. We heard a lot ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum about how the UK would be able to offer much better trade opportunities both to African countries and to our exporters if we were outside the EU. More than five years on, there is nothing to show for that, other than a number of rollover agreements—“running to stand still”, we might call it. I urge the Minister, when he replies to this debate, to undertake that within, say, six months the Government will publish a detailed framework for the development of our post-Brexit African trade policy. Any such framework will need to address how we plan to ensure that our policy objectives do not cut across, complicate or undermine the objective of an African free trade area, whose success the Government have quite rightly identified to be in our interests. I am delighted to hear that the Minister has signed a memorandum of understanding with the African Union on this, but I hope that he also understands the complexities that will arise from making our trade policy towards Africa consistent with Africa’s own trade policies.
On visas, as the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, said, all the evidence that we took demonstrated that the pre-Covid operation of our visa policy towards African countries was humiliating and a serious obstacle to any strengthened relationship with them. On higher education scholarships and university places, which are surely a key part of any future British policy, the requirements were onerous and, post Covid, completely inoperable because they required people to travel to countries other than their own to take an English test, even where English was an official language of the country concerned, as I discovered when I was in Liberia last year. What is our future policy on these visa issues? Not a squeak do we hear. If we cannot find a better, more humane approach, there will be little chance of a strengthened relationship with the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. I hope that the Minister will say something on that.
Thirdly, only an incurably foolish optimist would suggest that there will not be a continuing demand for international peacekeeping in Africa, both UN peace- keeping and African Union and subregional operations. The integrated review says little on this. What contribution do we plan to make to it? Will we not only help to train African peacekeepers before they deploy, as we are already doing—I welcome and applaud that—but mentor them when they do deploy, which is what they desperately need? Will we be there with sophisticated equipment and staffing to help such international operations? You would not get the answer to that in the integrated review.
I hope that the Minister can provide some response on these three issues. I cannot say that the Government’s original response to our report, which raised all these issues, was in any way adequate. That was why the committee, rather unusually, had to send it back and ask them to try harder. The FCDO tried a bit harder, with some modest success, but the hard fact is that that Africa strategy about which ministerial speeches often wax eloquent simply does exist. There was a total unwillingness to provide us with a detailed explanation as to what it consisted of. Since then, the draconian cuts in the aid budget have hamstrung any future strategy. I hope that the Minister can at least assure the House that those cuts will be restored and that full implementation of our legal commitment to 0.7% of gross national income will be honoured as soon as our economy again registers growth.
I do not often have a good word to say for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin but he said the future prosperity of Russia depended on two things, Soviet communism and electricity, and he was half right. You cannot develop without electrifying your economy, and we have to recognise that. Industry cannot function without a regular, reliable and economical supply of electricity. Education is hampered if people cannot study because they have no light to work by and read by in the evenings. Hospitals cannot function if they cannot run refrigerators and other equipment because they have no regular and reliable source of electricity. Female emancipation, above all, cannot proceed if women are unable to leave the home and domestic tasks because they cannot have refrigerators, washing machines and the other things that have played a major part in freeing women in so many parts of the developed world from some of those chores.
Since I worked in Africa, the supply of electricity has improved, but unfortunately in many areas it has been outstripped by the actual, let alone potential, demand for electricity. Blackouts, shortages and the sheer absence of electricity are widespread. Although references to electricity in the report are few, I am glad that paragraph 333 mentions the availability of
“‘strong DfID support, both technical and financial’ for the African Development Bank’s efforts to ensure that the 250 million people in the region without access to electricity and energy were able to get this off grid.”
Unfortunately, that is qualified in the next paragraph by a report saying that
“it was important to ‘make sure that we do not subsidise the use of fossil fuels or investment in them, and that we do subsidise the use of, and develop, renewables’”.”
It is also reported that
“The UK’s aid budget was ‘going much more into renewables than into fossil fuels’”,
and since then that has been intensified.
Obviously, renewables may be the optimal way to provide electricity in parts of Africa where you are distant from, and unable to be connected to, a grid—the sun is a lot more plentiful there than here, and in some places wind is also well available—but even in Africa the sun does not shine at night and the wind does not blow all the time, so you need batteries. The combination of intermittent renewables and batteries is hideously expensive. It may be cheaper than anything else if you are a long way from the grid, but we should not kid ourselves that it is cheap.
For urban areas—the population of Africa is increasingly living in urban areas—renewables are far more expensive than reliance on fossil fuels. Some armchair commentators in this country, who certainly do not fall into the category of experts, claim that renewables are cheaper. If that is so, wonderful—there would be no problem. If renewables were cheaper, no African country would waste its resources on a more expensive source of electricity, would it? They are not stupid. Or are we going to base our policy on the assumption that African Governments do not know what they are talking about and are too unwise and ill educated to choose the cheaper source of electricity over the more expensive?
They are trying to develop fossil fuel plants, but of course they cannot get loans and assistance from international organisations, or from us, to do so. It is surely arrogant and patronising of us to say that they are going about these things in the wrong way. We have to decide: should we help them to electrify their economies in the most economic way by offering technical advice and, if need be, access to finance, or should we withhold such assistance and even put obstacles in their way and the threat of punitive tariffs on their exports if they do not rely on renewables?
Those who argue that we should use every method that we can to guide, force and coerce them to use more expensive renewables, rather than cheaper fossil fuels, say that we should do so because African countries, and poor countries in general, are more vulnerable to climate change. They are right—that is true—but poor countries are vulnerable to climate change because they are poor. We are much less vulnerable because we are developed. They will reduce their vulnerability only if they develop and they will develop only if they have access to electricity. I rest my case. We should not stand in the way of Africa developing itself in the way that Africans think is best for them.
There are many positive connections through the Commonwealth; 19 of the countries in the region are members, including two recent additions, Rwanda and Mozambique. I think many of us are quite surprised that countries are joining that were never formally associated with Britain in the way that others were. Others have expressed interest in joining. In addition, of course, there are numerous soft power links between us, ranging from the BBC to the Premier League.
But, for all the advantages of the history of interaction between the UK and Africa south of the Sahara, there is a clear sense in our report—in fact, it is a theme in the report—of opportunities missed. Dr Westcott said that
“‘the overall perception of the UK’ was that it had ‘been a major player and a major partner for Africa,’ but it was ‘fading’.”
We were told that Africa has suffered
“political neglect from the UK”,
and it is hard to disagree. One illustration of that—you might think it is an oversimplified one—is that, since 1997, the British Government have had no fewer than 19 Ministers for Africa. That is an average time in office of 15 months. How on earth can a Minister make a positive impact in that time, let alone maintain personal contacts with African political leaders, which can be so important?
All too often, UK Governments have made grand statements that have not been followed by action. In a speech in Cape Town in August 2018, Theresa May announced the Government’s intention to be the largest G7 investor in Africa by 2022. By the time of the UK-Africa Investment Summit in January last year, the target had been dropped and Boris Johnson said he wanted the UK to be a “partner of choice” for the continent, whatever that means—any help would be gratefully received. Our trade with sub-Saharan Africa, both in goods and services, currently amounts to just 2.06% of UK exports and 1.76% of our imports. There has been a flatlining in UK trade and investment in the region. The Royal African Society told us:
“African leaders complain that British companies are no longer bidding for … big contracts.”
The picture that clearly emerges is that of a part of the African continent which has huge potential, which has many generations of interaction with Britain, about which British Governments speak grandly, but where the potential is unrealised. In paragraph 4 of our conclusions, we say:
“Successive governments have said that Africa should be given a higher priority across Whitehall, but have failed to make this a reality in the face of competing demands.”
That is why we call on the Government to publish a clearly articulated list of the priorities for their engagement with Africa and an action plan for meeting them. And it is a good time to be doing this. As we say in paragraph 415,
“Leaving the EU provides an opportunity for the UK to re-cast its trade relationships with African countries and remedy some of the defects in the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements.”
There are also a number of practical proposals that could be implemented quickly. One would be to keep Ministers in post long enough to establish personal ties with their counterparts on the continent. It is also important that intergovernmental meetings are not simply at official level but at a political one. Another would be addressing the problems associated with UK visa policy, as previous speakers have mentioned. Among the many criticisms expressed to us were its bureaucracy, its inconsistency and its cost, as well as its being time- consuming and humiliating.
Then there are the problems with remittances sent by families from the UK to Africa. We know from a 2018 World Bank report that the total value of remittances to low and middle-income countries in Africa was three times higher than the combined official development assistance that they received and similar in size to their total foreign direct investment. We know the huge benefits of these remittances, which go directly to support individuals and companies, cutting out any payments to intermediaries. Yet the average fee for an international money transfer to sub-Saharan Africa is a staggering 9.4%. Our Government should be working to reduce these costs, which the World Bank has said could be as low as 3%.
Finally, the Government should do far more to engage with the hugely important resource that we have, which is the African diaspora. In 2019, diaspora groups in the UK included 251,000 from South Africa, a similar number from Nigeria and 128,000 from Zimbabwe. These intercontinental family ties are a huge source of mutual support and understanding and carry great potential for ever closer ties in the future. Many of our witnesses argued that the Government should improve their engagement with the diaspora, which, as we say in paragraph 478, is
“an essential resource in delivering the Government’s plan to increase trade and investment with the countries”
of the region.
These are just four relatively simple ways—ministerial links; visas; remittances; and the diaspora—in which the UK could deepen and strengthen its links, which are already of long standing, with sub-Saharan Africa. I am proud of our committee’s work, which is substantial and practical, about an area of our foreign policy where our message to the Government and the Minister is “Could do better”. I look forward to his reply.
China understands the importance of Africa. Even Russia, with its much more limited resources, understands the importance of Africa. But they seem to have some sort of strategy, where we seem to have a series of knee-jerk reactions. Somebody described it to me as if we are playing a chess game: they are sat there looking at the board and we in the meantime are watching TV and shouting at the kids to be quiet. Every now and then, they say, “Your move”, and we look up, look at the board and make a move. It is not surprising that it is not very strategic.
Nowhere could our lack of strategy be clearer than in the approach we have taken since the beginning of Covid. We have hit African economies with a triple whammy. First, not content with the big cut that our aid budget would have faced anyway as a result of the Covid-related reduction in our GDP, we savaged it yet further, cutting off assistance to millions of people at their time of greatest need.
Secondly, we cornered the market in vaccines for ourselves while African countries have gone wanting. We are talking about booster programmes at the moment, when some of the most vulnerable people in Africa do not have access. Where national programmes have managed to get above 20% vaccination rates—for example, in Zimbabwe; not a country or Government that I normally commend, but they have—it is largely led through Sputnik and Sinovac, because they have provided the drugs. People do not forget such things. We have compounded that by helping to spread the erroneous belief that AstraZeneca was ineffective against the beta variant, something that has been proved not to be the case, but we still seem to spin.
Our final coup de grâce has been to cut off the African tourist economy at the knees by putting every African country on the red list and requiring that even double-vaccinated tourists have to quarantine on their return. There is no rationale for such a blanket approach: the US does not take such an approach; Germany does not take such an approach; Switzerland does not take such an approach. I hope that, in his response, the Minister will explain why we take such a different view from them.
We talk about tourist travel as non-essential travel, but it is essential to those economies. It is estimated that tourism provides £160 billion to Africa’s GDP and £18.3 billion to South Africa alone, supporting 1.5 million jobs. Travel bans are literally a death sentence. Of course we have to protect our people, but we must have a coherent rationale in how we go about it. If we do not correct this policy by the time of the southern hemisphere summer season, we will further devastate the economies of many countries, driving desperation and compounding political instability. I hope that the Minister will give us some comfort in that regard.
A number of noble Lords have raised the issue of visas, the excellent report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Africa and other all-party parliamentary groups which also fed into this report. When I sat on the governing council of the International Planned Parenthood Federation for three years, our African youth representatives could never come to this country: they were never granted visas. That was shocking, and it was of course noted. We made many representations to the British Government, but they would not treat it on a sensible, rational basis because the embassies and high commissions no longer had any discretion in these matters.
My final point is on climate. While I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the importance of electricity, I also say that the importance of getting African countries to work as part of the COP 26 process has been fatally undermined by our reduction of aid. I hope the Minister will also address that.