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EU Committee: EU and Africa

My Lords, I find myself in the position of being a very new member of the EU sub-committee. First, I must place on record my wider interests in Africa in case they have not been recorded before. I am the vice-chair of the Africa All-Party Group, the vice-chair of the West African Mano River Region All-Party Group and an executive officer of a number of all-party groups on African countries, including South Africa and Botswana. As a very new member of the committee, I was not involved in the preparation of the report. I feel therefore that I can freely congratulate the committee on its work, particularly the chairman, without any sense of self-aggrandisement. In all sincerity, I felt that the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, who chaired the committee, was extraordinary. It was a tour de force. I look forward to participating in future stages of this work—it is clearly a work in progress, from what other noble Lords have said. The noble Lord stressed the importance of our historic and current affinities between Europe and the African nations, through our languages, trade and development. He stressed that the United Kingdom has the opportunity to set an example of flexibility in the delivery of aid and budget support; he said that it would be a very good area in which to involve NePAD, and other noble Lords made the same point. The African states themselves need to take the lead on human rights, good governance, transparency, peer review and the rule of law. We can be supportive in the European Union, but to make progress which will last and be sustained, action must come from within. Most importantly, the noble Lord and other speakers have referred to what can only be described as the lack of interest in China in issues that we hold so important in our perhaps more mature and sophisticated way of looking at the world and its problems. Emphasis was placed on the perception that China’s concentration was almost entirely on economic development opportunities and creating conditions in which it was able to exploit those opportunities to meet its own needs in the first instance. However, I accept the suggestion made by the noble Lords, Lord Lea and Lord Hannay, that that is probably not in China’s long-term interests. I am sure that that must be the case. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, also mentioned the downside of the work in this report. There are no solutions in sight for Zimbabwe, which has caused a delay to the second African conference. That point was echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, with her very moving description of the conditions that still occur in Zimbabwe with regard to torture. The noble Lords, Lord Lea and Lord Hannay, made excellent contributions to that debate in their own different ways. I turn to the follow-up report to The EU and Africa: Towards a Strategic Partnership. It really is important to note that the adoption of the EU strategic partnership for Africa by the European Council in December 2005 was in response to developments in Africa, not in the European Union. The adoption of that strategy has marked a new determination by Europe to engage with the African continent and for that continent to embark on a New Partnership for Africa's Development—NePAD. The EU strategy must and does reaffirm commitment to peace, stability and development throughout Africa. Equally, it must and does define a single integrated long-term framework for its relations with the whole of Africa. The EU strategy is founded on basic principles of ownership, responsibility and mutual accountability which are generally readily transportable across borders, oceans and cultures. But it is also fundamentally a European political framework, intended by design to address Africa as a single entity. We should not underestimate the challenges that that presents to the European Union and to ourselves. The European Union cannot as yet claim to have surmounted the many obstacles—economic, cultural and political—that there are to achieving the harmony, stability and economic development throughout its 25 member European states. Clearly, achieving those aims on an African continent which contains some 50 nation states that do not benefit from 50 years of gradual progress towards our aspirations as we have seen them in the European Union will be even more arduous. It is recognised that the EU-African dialogue has been possible only due to the emergence of the African Union as the central interlocutor. The fundamental aim is the creation of a constructive dialogue with Africa promoting the implementation of the strategy. The challenge is to maintain the momentum and dynamism created by the adoption and implementation of the EU strategy for Africa. As the report says, it is crucial that the implementation becomes more and more a matter for not only Brussels but each of the EU member states. It is crucial, too, that it becomes more and more a matter for the AU and its member states. The European Council has pledged to review implementation of the strategy at the December 2006 European Council, which we welcome, and at least every two years thereafter to keep Africa at the top of the agenda in Europe. But the question that we need to ask ourselves is how we maintain the momentum and dynamism that we seek in Europe because we also need to consider how we can keep Europe at the top of the agenda in Africa. We have heard many contributions this afternoon about how other countries, especially China, have their own interests in developing their relationships with Africa, which may or may not be mutually exclusive to our own. The challenge that we have is surely how well the member states of the EU can make progress with the implementation of the strategy for Africa through their individual progress and contributions while recognising the competing claims and attractions for the limited governmental, administrative and organisational human resources to respond to the overtures that are being made by other parts of the world to engage more readily with the African nations and the African Union. In the follow-up report, chapter 2 talks about, "““coherence, coordination and cooperation in the field””." Paragraphs 18 and 19 talk about donor co-ordination. I stress that the Government’s response is quoted as saying: "““The priority is to get all bilateral and multilateral donors in a country to work together behind a nationally agreed and nationally owned poverty reduction strategy or plan””." Absolutely, but those of us who have taken any interest over the years in distribution of European development funds and aid know how appallingly disorganised that has been. The report continues: "““EU coordination in the field remains scattered and should be improved””." It certainly does. We have had 20, 30 or more years of trying to distribute funds into projects and seeing them go nowhere. What about improving our ability in the European Union to disburse moneys—aid, loans, or grants—into the projects? I have been incredibly frustrated over the years to hear European Union officials in offices around Africa berating how difficult it has been to realise projects because of the bureaucratic problems that they have dealing with their masters in Brussels and the problems that they have in communicating with their clients in Africa. That has to stop. If there is anything that we can achieve through our EU and Africa strategy, we can achieve some better organisation in that regard; otherwise I wonder why we bother. I must move on. I apologise for venting my frustrations from past careers, if you like. The important thing is that we are establishing in this report the importance of the relationship between the EU’s strategic partnership and the AU’s NePAD project. Paragraphs 31 and 32, in chapter 2, talk about the infrastructure partnership with Africa. It is absolutely right that we should concentrate on how to work better with NePAD and the AU institutions to develop the infrastructure partnerships that they require to make Africa function better in terms of development programmes in and between African nations. Paragraphs 36 and 37 say that the Trust Fund is not at the moment guaranteed beyond 2007. There is no mention of investment. We talk about loans and grants, but not investment. I wonder whether that is shorthand or an oversight. There is so much in this report that one could comment on and debate. It is probably more appropriate to move on. I emphasise some of the points made by other noble Lords in connection with the impacts of other international partnerships that have been forged with Africa. As far as I can tell, in the follow-up report there is an acknowledgement that, if we are able to, we need to work more closely with other continents, which may or may not be competitors. I particularly would like to see emphasis placed on how we could work more closely with the United States of America, India and China. This is just the summary of the output of the Beijing jolly, or whatever you want to call it, of a couple of weeks ago. Do not underestimate the impact that the summit has had on the relationships between the African states and China. There is absolutely no doubt that it has been a serious step forward in the relationships between individual nation states and the opportunities for development that they see through forging stronger relationships with China. It is clear that the outcome from the summit has been the sort of strategy plan that we are talking about in our own EU and Africa strategy here. However, it punches with a lot more weight compared to what we have been able to achieve so far in the EU—hardly surprising when you consider the economic strength and opportunities that China can provide to Africa as a continent. Let us recognise that fact. We go into this not with equal opportunities between ourselves and China, but trying to follow what China is able to do because it has those resources and needs, to such a great extent. Whatever the involvement of China with Africa, we can be sure of one thing—it is driven not by philanthropy, but by its own needs. We must always recognise that.