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Africa: Governance and Law

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Earl, and I thank him for giving us some signs of hope, or green shoots, as the noble Lord just said. I intend to speak a little about the contribution of Parliaments to good governance, particularly looking at the work of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. First, I have some random reflections. As the noble Lord, Lord Steel, said, Africa is so often marginalised. Few of our newspapers nowadays take any notice of Africa; in respect of South Africa, perhaps only some sniping comments. There are few experts in our newspapers on Africa generally. The FCO strategy, as published in April 2008, states: ""We will continue to shift our resources to Asia and the Middle East"." When there is news, it tends to be bad news, of natural disasters, human disasters and failed states. Good news is often disregarded, for example the good news of Ghana, as the noble Lord said, or the good news of Liberia. Yet there is much cause for concern. The old excuses or scapegoats of colonialism, neo-colonialism and apartheid have gone. The terms of trade, certainly with commodities, until recently have improved, although agricultural protectionism still reigns. There is corruption, and there is too much milking of assets. This week, we have been reminded by what one ECOWAS spokesman called, "the assassination of democracy"—the fate of the President of Guinea-Bissau—of what happened in Mauritania last summer and the problems of Guinea-Conakry at the end of last year. There are indeed many self-inflicted wounds. The African Union reached its compact with the rich world in NePAD, to promote good governance. Of course, there have been many failures. The peer-review mechanism has not been as good as we had hoped. On Zimbabwe, equally it has shown pusillanimity. As the Minister will be aware, since he was there, last month the African Union elected Colonel Gaddafi as its president, which is not the best signal of democracy and good governance. Yet the African Union is there and it needs our support. It needs the help of everyone with its capacity-building. Some claim that the problems of Africa are likely to worsen because the cuts in public expenditure are likely to encourage coups; and that Western aid, the millennium development goals, will be under pressure. The US National Intelligence Commission’s report published last November suggested there would be increasing vulnerability in Africa. One asks, given the failures, how one can expect to attract the FDI, which is so relevant. Yes, Africans need our help as partners, and there is much support obviously and a constituency for aid in the West. It should be both a moral imperative for us and clearly in our interest in our globalised world, because if we ignore their plight their problems will come to us, in the form of migration, drugs, and crime. The challenges of Africa are contained in many reports, some gathering dust; for example, the Brandt report. The scale of the task was well documented in the Commission for Africa’s report in 2005, in which the head of the commission secretariat said that governance was the main stumbling block to development. Effectively he was saying that the build-up of capacity, the rooting out of corruption and improving the way that Governments can deliver are absolutely vital for the well-being of Africa. This point was well made in an article by our high commissioner in Ghana in the current edition of The World Today, in which he stressed accountability, transparency and balance, as he called it, as essential elements. How, then, do we best help in remedying the weaknesses of governance? Only recently, in my judgment, has the importance of the parliamentary dimension been recognised. This perhaps is the value-added aspect of us as parliamentarians, in that previously the aid agencies concentrated only on the executive branch: making tax inspectors more efficient and so on. As an example of this, between 2003 and 2006, DfID spent just over £1 million annually on parliamentary strengthening, out of a budget of over £5 billion. The changes in DfID came perhaps with the 2006 White Paper, emphasising the important role of parliaments in delivering good governance, while acknowledging that parliaments in many countries tended to be weak and ineffective. The 2007 DfID White Paper Governance, Development and Democratic Politics, and the excellent ODI report of the same year, Parliamentary Strengthening in Developing Countries, emphasised this same theme. The APPG report, which the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, contributed to, on strengthening parliaments in Africa, was in my judgment also an excellent contribution to the debate. The ODI recommended that the Foreign Office and DfID should engage more with UK-based institutions such as the CPA, the IPU, the overseas clerks association and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in parliamentary capacity-building. I give as an example the work of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, internationally and in the UK, relating to legislatures in sub-Saharan Africa. The bilateral programmes are important: seminars, workshops and exchanges. Last month, for example, there was the outward delegation to Zambia, which involved discussions on a partnership basis, with scrutiny and accountability as the key themes. In February there was the parliamentary strengthening seminar in Uganda, which the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, mentioned in our debate last Thursday, and in which he participated. Currently at Westminster we have the 58th parliamentary seminar, with 16 parliamentarians from sub-Saharan Africa and six Clerks from Africa. This is an exciting new development, as is of course the Westminster Consortium, a five-year programme involving CPA UK, FCO, DfID, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Overseas Office of the House of Commons, the NAO, the International Bar Association, Cardiff and Essex universities and the Reuters Foundation. They are targeting several countries, including two African countries, Mozambique and Uganda. I look also at the way that the partnership between the European Union and the African Union, which was agreed in Lisbon a year ago, is making progress, on a partnership basis, in many key sectors. My only plea is perhaps over the greater need for co-ordination among the several bodies which are involved in this field. I make one final reflection, on the linkage between development, governance and security. I was saddened to learn of the Government’s decision to withdraw the vast majority of police seconded for reconstruction projects abroad, and possibly next year to slash our contribution to civilian conflict resolution. Where, where is joined-up government, between DfID and the FCO? I accept that these matters, the reconstruction, are easy targets because much of it is discretionary, not compulsory as with other sectors. But there is a key linkage between the basic need for security and development. Can there be additional support for DfID for this work? I would urge my noble friend and the Government—although I suspect he is on side in any event—to think again about this. I join with others who feel very strongly about this matter, including the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Jay, in urging the Government fundamentally to rethink this failed and wrong decision.