POLITICS: British Premier Tours West Africa

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Feb 8 2002 (IPS) - British Prime Minister, Tony Blair this week began a tour of West Africa to discuss trade, debt and aid.

His stops, which began in Nigeria, will include Ghana, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

In Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, Blair addressed Parliament on Thursday, and said the purpose of his visit was to develop a new partnership between Africa and the developed world.

“You need us but we need you to succeed,” Blair told Members of Parliament (MPs).

“Partnership is what we do together. If Africa gains, we gain. Africa is a potential market for Europe. Security of each one of us depends on security of us all. There cannot be a future unless we manage globalisation well,” Blair said.

Before leaving Britain, Blair said the West African trip aimed to set out a route map for the next meeting of G-8 industrial nations in Calgary, Canada.

G-8 comprises Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, the United States, Italy and Russia.

Last year Blair described the state of Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world”.

Blair, who is accompanied by 38 officials, including Claire Short, the Minister for International Development, hopes that the West African tour will pave the way for agreement from the G-8 summit on the implementation of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD).

NEPAD, the brainchild of South African President Thabo Mbeki, offers a package of trade and aid for Africa, coupled with assistance in ending civil wars and improving governance.

Blair described NEPAD as “the best chance that we all have to make work”. The programme, he said, must go beyond the level of aid and grants to include the overall commitment to having a better society.

As expected, the situation in Zimbabwe featured prominently on the two-hour discussion between Blair and President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday. Both leaders affirmed their commitments to the holding of free and fair elections in Zimbabwe on Mar 9-10.

“Our tactics may be different but the objectives are very clear, and this is the common position of all Commonwealth countries. We agreed on the holding of free and fair elections. We also agreed on allowing international observers and foreign press,” Obasanjo said.

“I made it clear to President Robert Mugabe during a recent visit to Zimbabwe that the world will not accept a decision not to allow independent observers, foreign press and continued political violence,” he told a joint news conference in Abuja.

Obasanjo has been mediating the diplomatic stand off between Britain and Zimbabwe, where the seizure of 4,000 white-owned farmlands has triggered threats of international sanctions, since last year.

Nigeria argues that the land crisis in Zimbabwe does not warrant the imposition of sanctions. This position was upheld at the last Commonwealth meeting in London on Jan 30.

Blair is the first British Prime Minister to visit Nigeria since 1988, when Margaret Thatcher visited the West African country.

British assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa, with a debt burden of about 370 billion U.S. dollars, has been steadily increasing.

Between April 1999 and 2000, Britain gave Africa about 725 million U.S. dollars through its international development department.

Most of this went to some of the poorest countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone. The flow of aid is expected to increase again in the 2001-02 year.

In 2000, British exports to Africa totalled 6.6 billion U.S. dollars, while imports from Africa added up to 8.6 billion U.S. dollars, according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

A great deal of trade between Britain and Africa centres on arms, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Thursday.

African nations spent about 76 million U.S. dollars on arms deals in Britain in 1999, the BBC quoted the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) as saying. And CAAT expects this figure to quadruple by next year, boosted by a controversial 41 million U.S. dollars contract for military air defence in Tanzania.

Nigeria, with a population of more than 120 million, says that in spite of its large endowment in oil and gas, millions live below the poverty line of one U.S. dollar a day.

Nigeria, a former British colony, has maintained cordial relations with London since independence in 1960. More than half a million Nigerians live and work in the United Kingdom.

Relations between the two countries suffered a setback in 1993 following the annulment of the presidential election by the military and a near anarchy that took hold of Nigeria during the infamous rule of the late General Sani Abacha. Limited sanctions were imposed on Nigeria by Britain and its Western allies as well as by the Commonwealth.

High level contact between the two countries resumed in 1999 after the restoration of democracy in Nigeria.

Although Britain remains the leading investor in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, there has been no noticeable investment in other sectors of the economy, as Nigeria’s drive to attract foreign investment from that country has not yielded much fruit.

Britain cites fraud, corruption and insecurity as the main reasons for the country’s lukewarm attitude to new investments in Nigeria.

Britain exported goods worth 776 million U.S. dollars to Nigeria last year, while Nigeria exported goods worth 137 million U.S. dollars to Britain the same year.