Lisa Peryman, Odious Debts Online

March 11, 2005

UK media analysis of the long-awaited final report from British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa cast a restrained eye over the commission’s recommendations on trade, corruption, arms sales and aid, mindful the report could go the way of other Africa recovery plans unless it received the backing of rich nation groups like the Group of Eight (G8) and the European Union.

Although, Britain is in the driving seat as the chair of both the G8 and European Union this year, critics doubt Mr. Blair’s team will succeed in rallying support for its proposals. The commission’s recommendations include: 100% cancellation of sub-Saharan Africa’s multilateral debt, a doubling of foreign aid to Africa to a total of US$50 billion a year and the dismantling of agricultural and trade subsidies by 2010 – a particularly thorny issue as some countries like France, Germany and Italy benefit greatly from the EU’s common agricultural policy, targeted as the world’s most protectionist regime.

Countering complaints by campaigners that the 400-page report said nothing new, Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, praised the commission for concentrating on old promises.

“The last thing Africa needs is a wave of wacky new Western ideas to solve its problems. It has suffered enough from fickle economic policy fashions in the past 20 years. As many pointed out when the commission was launched in February last year, why not fulfil on promises rather than think up new ones?” he said.

What is new, Dowden points out, “is a comprehensive report which analyses sub-Saharan Africa’s predicament, both as a continent and in the way that it relates to the world. Its recommendations are described as an ‘integrated package . . . not a list from which either African or rich countries can pick and choose.’ They include everything from multilateral debt to mosquito nets. And they also cite the damage we do to Africa. The report urges rich countries both to support Africa and to end bad policies that hinder its development.”

Echoing this view, Canada’s Globe and Mail agrees that though there is “nothing new in what the authors of the Blair Commission on Africa want,” what is unprecedented is that the “people who hold the purse strings in developed nations” are the ones making the demands, previously the call of aid and trade activists.

The Economist, however, was more dismissive of the report’s groundbreaking focus on the responsibility of the developed world to help African governments crack down on corruption, the greatest obstacle to stable improvement in Africa.

“None of this gets to the root of the problem,” it said. “Foreigners may contribute to corruption in Africa, but they do not cause it. African politicians paint a picture of rich western firms offering irresistible inducements to previously blameless African officials. But more often, it is the officials who abuse their power to extort money from blameless citizens. For every shady multinational slipping a minister a sackful of cash for a contract, there are thousands of African policemen robbing people at roadblocks or African bureaucrats inventing pointless rules so that they can demand bribes not to enforce them.”

While no one doubts the systemic nature of the problem, what such analogies fail to make visible is the lack of political will in western countries to punish companies that engage in Third World bribery, when they are convicted by African governments. Politicians have a tendency to dwell on the failures of African governments to stamp out graft while ignoring the failings of their own political cultures to hold wrongdoers to account.

The commission’s report calls on African governments and governments, banks and companies in developed nations to clean up their act. In particular, developed nations could help to repatriate money and assets “stolen” from the people of Africa.

“Western banks must be obliged by law to inform on suspicious accounts,” the report said. “Those who give bribes should be tackled too: foreign companies involved in oil, minerals and other extractive industries must make their payments much more open to public scrutiny. Firms who bribe should be refused export credits.”

The Global Witness “Publish What You Pay” (PWYP) campaign – an initiative to force companies to disclose their payments to developing countries – welcomed the report but said its recommendations on resource revenue transparency could have gone further.

“The commission recognizes that the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) requires a minimum baseline to which governments and companies must adhere,” said PWYP in a press statement today. “But voluntary ‘codes and standards’ such as EITI can only have a limited impact in bringing about transparency.” Moreover, it said, the EITI emphasizes the responsibility of Third World governments for improving transparency although “evidence shows that companies can also take a lead in publishing their payments systematically in all their countries of operation.”

Developed countries, PWYP urged, must go further than voluntary processes like the EITI and create a global standard for revenue transparency that is incorporated into mainstream financial regulations and accounting standards.

Other responses to the report also pushed for more radical changes than the recommendations on the table.

Tom Cargill, the Africa programme coordinator at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, told The Guardian newspaper he wanted to see something “bold,” such as an end to all agricultural subsidies in both North America and Europe with a “roadmap of how to do it.”

Mr Blair remained determined in the face of reminders the developed world had failed to deliver on promises to Africa in the past, saying he feared the judgment of future generations, who would ask: “How could wealthy people so aware of such suffering just turn away and busy themselves with other things? . . . In a world where prosperity is increasing and more people are sharing each year in this growing wealth, it is an obscenity that should haunt our daily thoughts that 4 million children in Africa will die this year before their fifth birthday.”

Meanwhile Live Aid activist Bob Geldof, proving once again that expletives make everything else sound too complicated, urged leaders of the developed world with a saltier call to action:

“Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] have to ring up George [Bush] and say, ‘Do this. It’s going to cost you fuck-all. Do it for me,'” Mr Geldof told members of the Africa commission at the public launch of its report, causing Mr Blair to flinch.

Developed countries, he continued, could easily comply with the report’s recommendations, including an increase in foreign aid.

“This is . . . peanuts, [the cost of] half a stick of gum every day from each person” in the G8 nations, he said.

Mr Blair later admitted he backed Geldof, saying: “Because I’m a politician in a suit I wince at the occasional word – but actually what he said is really what I think.”