---

Africa: Governance and Law

My Lords, today I want to portray Africa as a continent of hope and opportunity, where the UK retains considerable ties and influence. I greatly regret that conflict has so often taken over the headlines and even the debates in this House. I would like this to be an Obama debate. Many noble Lords will be familiar with the President’s Dreams from my Father, which I consider an outstanding work of literature. Africa and America make a powerful combination and it cannot be long before the President turns his attention from the Middle East to the country of his forefathers, which is always ready to welcome him home. Gordon Brown and the President have Africa in common and they will be aware of the serious effects of world recession on Africa. It is likely that they discussed it briefly this week. The noble Baroness, Lady Amos, in the foreign affairs debate last week, mentioned Africa’s advances in economic growth and regulatory reform over the last decade. The Minister will agree that Africa should have increased representation at international level, well beyond the G20 meetings. Today I will concentrate on governance, transparency, human rights and the rule of law. I thank all noble Lords who have signed on for this debate. I shall not, of course, blame them for focusing on some of the negative aspects if they must. I will highlight one country—Kenya—but much of what I will say could apply to other countries where we have substantial interests. I visited Kenya with a CPA delegation last November, mainly interested in the strengthening of Parliament. I am just old enough to remember the zebras in Nairobi’s streets, the last throes of colonial power and the feared Mau Mau. These themes are still echoed in the crossed spears and red-banded shield on the Kenyan flag. Post-election violence suddenly erupted in late December 2007 and January 2008. Hundreds died in Nyanza and other provinces. We visited Kisumu and met dozens of families still displaced in Naivasha, unable to return to their homes. One year on, Kenya is still fragile under a power-sharing agreement between the major parties, brokered by Kofi Annan and a high-level panel last year. This involves, among other things, implementing recommendations by the Waki commission, which named culprits and demanded immediate investigations by a special tribunal of crimes committed during the violence. The problem is that this tribunal has still not met. Kofi Annan himself had to issue a statement last week that this failure could, ""constitute a major setback in the fight against impunity and may threaten the whole reform agenda in Kenya"." The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Professor Philip Alston, last week even recommended, to the fury of Vice-President Musyoka, the sacking of the police commissioner and the Attorney-General for having condoned such killings over a long period. I hope that the Minister, who has been very concerned about these issues in Africa, will again urge Nairobi to press on with the Waki recommendations. It is vital that President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga now remove this stain on their joint Administration, which will remain if nothing is done. We found a panoply of international experts and donors, including the UK, ready to assist. I especially commend the FCO and DfID for following through on a range of projects to reinforce the democratic process, in line with the recommendations of the excellent report of the Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group and the Government’s 2006 White Paper. The capacity of MPs has been strengthened; the Kenyan Assembly has had a younger and bolder voice since the 2007 election; and the select committee process is beginning to make Ministers accountable. Some NGOs and the media are demanding greater transparency by, for example, calling for the taxation of MPs’ expenses, which would not go down very well here, either. Citizens’ groups are analysing MPs’ constituency development fund projects to see whether they are really slush funds after all. Will the Minister confirm that throughout Africa our embassies are always looking out for African civil society organisations that can take a lead in governance and anti-corruption alongside international agencies? One of the key elements of any democracy is an independent judiciary to enforce the rule of law. In that respect, Kenya can easily be faulted, but I would strike a note of caution. The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina said: ""We are often guilty of using words like leadership, government, parliament and institutions as if they represent solid realities … But in truth, all these structures are about as solid as free floating gases … we watch our government float above us like a helium balloon tethered by the flimsiest of strings"." Africans have to beware of constructing too many institutions, while we have to respect the power of family, tribal loyalties and traditions. My noble friend Lady Stern, who has joined the debate, reminds me that governance must take account of African values and may not meet all the formal criteria. To help to support the rule of law in poor countries, she says, donors should be realistic about justice reforms. They should help Governments to develop more locally based and traditional systems for securing justice in everyday life, such as DfID has researched and pioneered very successfully. We cannot blame ordinary people for corruption when the whole state is permeated with it and they have no alternative. According to a survey in 2005 by Transparency International, the police and legal institutions are the most fertile ground for bribery, accounting for nearly half of all bribes in Kenya. The police still have the worst ranking, followed by state corporations, local authorities, the prison service and the judiciary. In the private sector, the worst offenders are in the health and construction industries and, of course, foreign companies are often involved. Counterfeit medicines are a big problem, as is red tape. The Kenya Medical Supplies Agency was dismissed last July for holding up supplies to hospitals. Corruption goes right to the top and involves Ministers from all major parties. The former Finance Minister, Amos Kimunya, was implicated in a hotel deal, though he has now been reinstated as Trade Minister. On the Orange side, there have been accusations against the Tourism Minister for overstated invoices and the Health Minister for millions of dollars missing from the global AIDS fund, which has serious repercussions for us. The Energy Minister has to explain why the Kenya Pipeline Company lost $95 million of petroleum from storage at Kipevu, with Triton Petroleum suspected of collusion. More recently, during the food crisis, the Agriculture Minister and Kalenjin leader, William Ruto, was suspected of allocating tenders for famine relief to his cronies. Whatever the truth of those accusations, they do not give the Kenyan people confidence in their leadership any more than us. The media are vocal and there have been repeated calls from MPs for Ministers such as Ruto and Kimunya to resign—calls that we might not have seen two years ago. Yet they know that nothing will happen fast: the idea that you help your own people is firmly rooted in African traditions even if Europeans have forgotten it. Sociologists explain it with terms such as neopatrimonialism, clientelism and informality. It is a fact of life. Only when individual Ministers come out and demonstrate that they are not above the law can change be seen to happen. In Uganda, where we also have a substantial aid programme, there have been some improvements. Uganda’s score in the Transparency International index improved from 1.9 in 2001 to 2.7 in 2006 and 2.8 in 2007. The World Bank’s global governance indicators showed a similar pattern. An upbeat OECD report on Kenya last year also showed advances in governance and anti-corruption. There are many small but effective NGOs in Kenya. There is a strong Kenya Human Rights Commission, for example, which was the first to expose the offenders behind post-election violence. Gilbert Sebihogo, a Rwandan who co-ordinates with great skill the network of 32 African national human rights institutions, says that Kenya’s commission is one of the most independent in Africa partly because it also represents civil society. From that point of view, Kenya scores high. I wish that I had more time to refer to the growing influence of women in public life in Africa. For example, yesterday I was privileged to listen to someone representing the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone telling us about the extraordinary influence of the women’s movement on the passing of legislation on gender and equality in the past couple of years. I returned from Nairobi full of confidence. The Kenyan people have great energy and diversity. They deserve to succeed in governance just as they do in business. Incidentally, the newly elected US Administration is doubly popular in Kenya: while the Luo were supporting their very own Senator Obama, the Kikuyu were reportedly backing Mrs Clinton, so now they have been brought together. I see Kenya as an example of what is going on in many African countries. It has huge obstacles to overcome and yet it shows what can be done through patient international co-operation in the truest sense. Our Government are similarly involved in countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Mozambique, and I have seen some of the results in those countries, too. I studied the UN General Assembly report last July on Africa’s development needs and looked in vain for signs of progress in the much heralded New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which was to be the policy framework for meeting the millennium development goals, as the Minister will well remember. There are 20 new regional infrastructure programmes that are of value. I hope that the Minister will help me because I could not find very much except mention of nine thematic clusters needing, ""to mainstream adequately the integration priorities of the African Union"." I know that the Minister will be familiar with that language from his past experience. I was once a supporter of NEPAD and I would be sorry if it were now seen to bite the African dust. I turn very briefly to the topic of the moment, Sudan, where the comprehensive peace agreement between north and south still hangs in the balance. I cannot help feeling that this agreement, the product of painstaking diplomacy and considerable sacrifice, is imperilled by the warrant that the ICC has now issued against President Bashir. We must not forget that many others could have received such a warrant. There is something a little too theatrical about the whole proceedings, when the world sits in judgment on one head of state. The question is whether it will have any effect whatever. Meanwhile, I know that many who are working in Sudan have been directly affected and I am certain that our embassy is doing all that it can, as it has many times before, to protect humanitarian workers and get them the passes that they require to have access to places such as Darfur. One important aspect of the CPA tends to be forgotten: reconciliation within the south. We must not forget the atrocities between southerners as well as between north and south. One needs to have more reconciliation between Christians and Muslims, between the many tribes, and between the Government and the church. A friend of mine, Joseph Ayok, who was a parish priest in west Dorset, is the new director of the department of religious affairs in the Government of Southern Sudan. He has particular responsibility for reconciliation and I hope that the FCO and DfID are giving him every possible encouragement. Many of us in the Salisbury diocese are following events in Sudan closely and I am sorry that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury was not able to be here today. Finally, I would like to take up a point raised in last week’s foreign affairs debate. My noble friend Lord Wright was flanked by two ex-Foreign Secretaries when he said that he believed that it was time to correct, ""a serious imbalance between aid and diplomacy".—[Official Report, 26/2/09; col. 344.]" The noble Lord, Lord Hurd, wanted to look again at the 2002 Act. In general, they are of the school that aid means the relief of poverty and not diplomacy. I am interested to hear what the Conservative Front Bench has to say about that. I agree in principle, of course, but my experience of the growing range and advocacy of non-governmental organisations and expert bodies in development suggests that diplomacy now covers a much wider field and there are many informal areas where DfID can support it, including the subjects of this debate. I am sure that the Minister will agree privately with this but, as he missed the debate last week, perhaps he will seize this opportunity to reject these allegations. I much look forward to his reply.