Looking back, it is clear when the tide turned on Britain’s year for Africa. The four bombs in the London rush hour on the morning of July 7 marked the high water mark of the West’s cooperation on development and things have never been quite the same since.
The terrorists timed their attacks to coincide with the G8 Gleneagles summit and at a moment when British Prime Minister Tony Blair was euphoric after the previous day’s announcement that London had won the 2012 Olympics. The government had put in months of hard work to chivvy the other G8 nations into an agreement to make debt relief more generous, substantially increase aid flows and push forward reform of the global trading system to make it easier for developing countries to export. The idea was relatively simple.
At Gleneagles, the G8 would come up with proposals that would govern policy towards Africa for the next decade; these would then be submitted to the special session of the United Nations, which took place last week. It was assumed, optimistically as it turned out, that the deal could be extended beyond the G8 and, more importantly, that a plan of action would be agreed to put into practice what had been agreed at Gleneagles.
In reality, last week’s summit was a ghastly anti-climax, despite attempts to spin the outcome as a great triumph for the international community. There was no operational plan to make good promises on access to universal health care and HIV/Aids treatment by 2010, and the text agreed in New York was a caricature of woolliness. It left those governments seeking to wriggle out of commitments — and there are lots of them around — plenty of room to do so. The fact that the British development secretary, Hilary Benn, put out a statement saying how well the summit had done speaks volumes. Success speaks for itself: it doesn’t need a press release.
Privately, the government knows the tide has ebbed. One senior official said last week that it would have been better had the summit not been held, and that the task now was to pick up the pieces at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington this week. But it is testimony to the lack of momentum that Gordon Brown, the British Finance Minister, will be trying to prevent the G8 deal on debt relief being watered down, because this was seen as the easiest part of Britain’s agenda to achieve. Indeed, the original plan was that debt relief would be signed, sealed and delivered by the time the west’s leading finance ministers and central bank governors met in London in early February.
What has gone wrong? In a way, it was almost inevitable there would be a backlash. Ideas have their moment, and for the weeks and months leading up to Gleneagles there was an almost unprecedented focus on Africa. But then stuff happened, as it always does. The prime minister found himself coping with the 7/7 attacks; the Germans and the Japanese became embroiled in election campaigns; the Italians fretted about the poor health of their economy; George W Bush’s priority, understandably, is helping people in New Orleans, not Nairobi. The second point is that Gleneagles was not the moment when the West made poverty history, and was never likely to be. As Blair admitted, it was a work in progress, which required plenty of follow-up. His focus at Gleneagles was diverted to combating terrorism, and perhaps as a result, the deal was less watertight than it might have been. Attention in the last hours, for example, was on getting the Germans to sign up to doubling aid, which Gerhard Schroder was prepared to do once he found he had room to wriggle out of the commitment.
Thirdly, the campaign has lost its sense of unity. There was already open warfare at Gleneagles between the pro- and anti-Bob Geldof factions, and the air has been thick ever since with the language of betrayal. Blair advisers are annoyed by what they see as the negative attitude of aid campaigners, saying — with some justification — that accusations of failure hardly create the right incentives for policy makers to take risks.
Even within the government there are signs of disharmony. Brown, despite doing the lion’s share of the hard graft in the run-up to Glen-eagles, was nowhere to be seen at the summit in July, leading some of his supporters to say it was like Hamlet without the prince. There were grumblings last week, as the UN event headed for trouble, that the chancellor would have done a better job in tying up the crucial details of the aid deal than Blair has done.
All that may make it sound as though the outlook is completely bleak, but it isn’t. There is certainly a crucial week ahead in Washington, with the chance that a fully funded debt deal and action to make good the Gleneagles pledge to ease the conditions imposed on developing countries could re-energise the campaign before Russia, with far less interest in Africa, takes over the G8 presidency in January. Before then, of course, there is the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong in December, where the portents are not good. Negotiations are continuing at a snail’s pace in Geneva, and there is little sign of the political will — as opposed to sloganeering — needed to make a breakthrough. There could be two types of failure in Hong Kong; one where the meeting breaks down in acrimonious disarray as in Seattle or Cancun or one where a bland deal is cobbled together at the last minute to save face. Of the two, the first would be immeasurably preferable.
There are two other reasons for qualified optimism. One is that the cavilling and backsliding of some Western governments has put extra pressure on Africa to do things for itself. The recent growth record in sub-Saharan Africa has been better than in the 1990s, and has been helped by improvements to governance that have been long overdue. Those who say that help to Africa would be money washed down the drain of corruption may have a point in some countries, but not for Africa as a whole.
Moreover, the paper released by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) last week showed the rise in oil and other commodity prices has provided Africa with a sizeable windfall. With oil above $60 a barrel, the added revenue for just eight countries in Africa amounts to $35-billion a year — $10-billion more than has been promised by the G8. As the ODI rightly says, it is vital that this money is spent wisely, and ideally there would be some form of pan-African redistribution to spread the benefits from the resource rich to the resource poor.
Finally, the fact that many leaders in the West are staring into empty government coffers has prompted some innovative thinking. One of the few good things to come out of the UN last week was that 66 countries committed themselves to international levies — including taxes on air travel — to boost aid flows. And not a moment too soon, either. This is an idea whose time has come. — Â