Africa in 2010

We are not African specialists. If we want information about political risk South of the Sahara or in the Horn of Africa, we will turn to one of our clients, Pasco Risk Management, based in South Africa, or perhaps to a political contact or two of our own here in London or in East or West Africa.

But what we do understand is how the West has viewed and is viewing its position in Africa and the effect that recent economic problems in both the US (where instability persists) and Europe (which is deeply troubled) are having on the public acceptability of its forward engagement on the Continent.

There is a push and there is a pull in this. Both push and pull are driven by economic considerations that are beginning to overwhelm the 'idealism' that often gave cover to 'realpolitik' in the wake of the internal liberation of South Africa and derived from rage at examples of genocide and famine elsewhere.

The issues are complex and this is a note and not a paper. You could do worse than read Pasco's own on-the-ground assessments of the situation from an African perspective.

We have two sets of comment to make - first, about the very limited weight that progressive values now have for a Western policy that is definitely on the defensive because of resource constraints and, second, the limited ability of the West to effect its aims through its pivotal states strategy.

Pressures on the Humanitarian Impulse

Progressive and humanitarian drivers for Western intervention should not be regarded overly cynically. They were based on an ideological commitment within New Labour and this derived from the personal position of individuals whose political teeth had been cut on the anti-apartheid movement.

This British perspective would not have mattered in itself except that this progressivism 'worked' well with other drivers - Southern Baptist solidarity with Africa in Black America and a more general liberal determination in Europe that a colonial mentality must be replaced with a humanitarian one.

The high point of this general attitude was represented by liberals like Blair and Kouchner in France and to a lesser extent by Fischer in Germany and the Clinton administration. Adaptation to the opportunity presented for intervention by the Al-Qaeda strike on America was a natural one.

Unfortunately, after the initial success in Sierra Leone, liberal interventionism has undoubtedly been an expensive failure in the Middle East and West Asia while African states have increasingly resented the neo-colonial implications of what is essentially a centre-left imposition of values from the North Atlantic.

It is probable, though, that the policy could have struggled on so long as the electorates of the West were sentimentally directed to giving aid and assistance to their 'little brown brothers' - but that all changed with the near collapse of the complex economic system that underpinned Western largesse.

Three Realities

Three factors have now pushed their way to the head of the queue for Western policymakers: migration; growing disillusionment with the effects on the ground of intervention and of NGO engagement; and simple lack of hard cash and credit to disburse.

In each of these cases, the economic crisis in the West has played its role, taking the moral high ground away from the liberal progressives and returning it to those who question why scarce resources should be redirected to regimes that are now perceived to be capable of looking after themselves.

Migration is the most interesting because, although threats to the system from the nationalist Right have not emerged as serious electoral challenges except in particular conditions, the racist and nationalist underground is undoubtedly growing in strength and self-confidence.

Most migration and most terrorism is actually internally generated from within the West but, just as frightened Americans fear the flow of impoverished Mexicans from the South, so Europeans are unnerved by the flow of Africans into their cities.

The original progressive theory about this was that investment by Europe in Africa would create opportunities for Africans and the migrants would no longer need to flow North. To this was added the theory that Africans merely joined Asians, Arabs and Jews as the latest positive contributors to culture.

This was optimistic because, for many Africans, the poorest conditions in a European city were always going to be potentially more secure than conditions at home and the migrants were often 'post-modern': deracinated individuals rather than entrepreneurial pioneers for village communities.

The paradox of tighter border controls is that the criminal and a-social or desperate and trafficked elements are more likely to get through than families on the move and there has been a determined attempt by liberals to avoid an analysis of this lest it come up with 'racist' results.

But a great deal of the responsibility for migration into Europe lies with the greed and rapacity of Europeans themselves and Africans, with access to the internet as much as anyone else, have been educating themselves about radical interpretations of their own history.

Notoriously, Spanish industrialised fishing fleets have been raping the traditional fishing grounds of West Africa while the scale of oil pollution in some areas of the Nigerian Delta (greater than in the Gulf of Louisiana as we write) has been having similar effects on populations there for half a decade.

The Effects of the Crunch

There was always a faction of the liberal intelligentsiya that was relaxed about migration, seeing it as creating constant economic growth under globalisation. Another faction was ideologically perfectly happy to see Africans drive down Western wage rates as a form of global redistributionism.

The credit crunch of 2008 has pulled the rug out from both of these very influential factions (trickle down and redistributionist both) while the consequences of the crisis have affected the West and Africa equally in their relations with each other.

Inward migration from Africa was now a potential political threat (especially when overlaid with cultural and identity fears). The European electorate was not going to tolerate increases in expenditure overseas, to deal with the effects of recession in Africa, at a time of major public sector job losses.

Interestingly, and to widespread approval, Prime Minister Cameron in the UK has ring-fenced international development funds alongside health and education (helping to force even more draconian cuts elsewhere) but very much on the basis of more effective targeting and accountability.

What he was doing, as a 'soft' conservative himself, was taking aid off the political agenda for cuts until it needed to go back on again but also removing international development from its Blairite position as an integrated part of foreign policy and defence.

The days of doling out cash for political or strategic purposes are now over for the British and its humanitarian focus has been detached from grand policy in order to be treated as a moral imperative in its own right. If things get really bad in the UK, it will be cut because it will now be easier to cut.

Ressentiment

Quite separate from all this, there has been a growing distrust of NGOs and Governments as suppliers of aid. This is not coming from within the West (where critics have easily been pigeon-holed as right-wing miserabilists) but is the leaching back into the developed world of emerging world resentment.

Irritation with aid being used to patronise Africans alongside stories of waste, failure and of the 'fat cats' who appear as salaried do-gooders (from the perspective of some observers) merges with concerns about the tendency to use NGOs as soft power fodder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

The criticisms may not be wholly fair (but nor are they wholly unfair either) yet the suspicion grows that aid is a job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable Western graduates and for scions of the traditional middle class. Many Africans see this as District Commissioners by the back door.

Western policy towards Africa at this level is thus a confused mess, reminiscent of the patronising involvement of young EU officials as inefficient satraps in Eastern Europe as the communist bloc fell apart. Disillusionment spreads, then as now, back from field workers into the heartland.

Of course, the issues are not cut and dried. Despite the values agenda, the US in particular, including private sector philanthropists, have all undertaken major programmes affecting healthcare and life chances (especially for women) in a highly positive way.

But the impression remains for many in the West that, just as they are fearing for their jobs and homes, substantial resources should not be directed to supporting the middle classes of other countries when it is quite clear the help is not always welcomed.

However, it is important to note that there is no movement to end aid but only a growing indifference to claims of the need for aid and intervention that makes it much more difficult for political interests to direct public funds towards foreign policy or security ends.

Strains

So, if we see a drift of public interest (World Cup notwithstanding) away from Africa and African affairs towards a stance of relative unconcern (there is no animus in this towards Africa at all), economic pressures also limit what the West can do in terms of hard power.

In one sense, the Western public has grown up and the shifts show maturity and generational shift. Younger politicians do not have anti-apartheid activism and resentment of imperialism to worry about and can escape guilt as Middle Europeans are now escaping from Holocaust guilt.

African music is now established in the world music repertoire, African writers sit comfortably alongside Latin American magical realists on the shelves, Ghana was supported by many white British in the World Cup and racism is psychologically inconceivable as a concept to middle class kids under 30.

But, self-evidently there are less resources to play with - in Europe, where the engine of European growth, Germany, has found itself bank of last resort to economically maladjusted smaller partners in the European Union, and in the UK which is running not to face its own crisis in the next year.

In the US, Obama will not be thanked if he spends a great deal on Africa rather than on the Gulf Coast, now hit by two successive disasters in Katrina and the BP oil spill, while US unemployment remains high and may even be rising again.

Finally, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are just not going to go away. Afghanistan is a true disaster, involving payments not only on military campaigns but to a corrupt and corrupting puppet regime and major subventions to Pakistan simply to keep its military on side and its economy from collapsing.

Pivotal States

US strategy in Africa (as pointed out by Pasco) was based on containing insurgency, controlling energy supplies (and we add the free access to mineral reserves vital for strategic purposes) and countering Chinese and Indian influence that might remove the continent from the Western to the Eastern sphere.

The methodology for control was based on 'pivotal states' theory - i.e. supporting strong stable states in each major sub-zone and encouraging them to go out and police the surrounding areas, presumably at their own expense but with Western aid and in alignment with Western values.

Placing the unusual Uganda/Rwanda complex to one side, the original postulated key states were Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa and all were expected, under Western guidance, to adopt liberal anti-corruption regimes and to manage their sub-region - later in an African Union context.

All three have been disappointments. The surrounding countries have gone their own way willy-nilly as either failed states or as independent countries following their own paths - they will go with the highest bidder, increasingly China. And, of course, Congo remains a great yawning gap in the system.

Nigeria has remained such an anxiety in terms of its long term stability that the US has now switched its attention to Ghana. At one point, before its recent troubles, Gazprom looked as if it would be taking a strategic position for Russia with the help of Libya and Italy by capturing control of Nigerian gas.

Ethiopia is the strongest state (perhaps) but at the cost of any programme of liberalisation, despite constant Western pressure, wheedling and largely idle threats.

However its intervention in Somalia was abortive - the African Union contingent sit in Mogadishu like rabbits in the streaming headlights of the insurgents.

South Africa seems to have been treated by Western liberals as if it owed them something for their support against apartheid. It didn't and it doesn't.

The peaceful transition to democracy was a remarkable achievement but its very tranquillity and compromise meant that serious issues of economic inequity have not been handled. Too many powerful interests had needed to be mollified. Now, as Pasco reports, the ANC is stirring again.

Capital accumulation by the new black elite was meant to result in trickle-down but the global credit crisis has put paid to that. An expectation of the West that South Africa would put scarce resources into a neo-colonial liberal intervention into Zimbabwe was thus disappointed and quite rightly so.

The Meaning of the US Presence

Africom, meanwhile, is now basically an anti-insurgency operation operating from enclaves which it controls because deals have been struck - Djibouti is effectively a grant from the rump of the old French Empire. It does dirty deeds in a war between the US and fanatics that passes most Africans by.

The US is now engaged in a process of constant and often very expensive negotiation that often comes down to little more than the containment of sworn enemies and the maintenance of the sea lanes that take oil and gas from the Gulf and West Africa to Western refineries and holding installations.

The lesson of all this is that there is no 'Africa' except in the imperial imagination of Westerners brought up on the carve-up at the Berlin Conference. There are many Africas - sovereign states with sovereign interests who still need to stabilise themselves before they start stabilising their neighbours.

A nightmare for the West might be a serious political collapse in a key state or a massive humanitarian crisis in a small state that the Chinese relieve faster and more efficiently than it can. The US and UK scuttled from dabbling in the recent Ethiopian elections for fear of precipitating such a problem.

This state of affairs - growing African intransigence at Western interference and Western economic retrenchment - will not last forever. Each of the pivotal states remain a potential partner of the West according to the original theory but the real aims of any African country must be a different from 'ours'.

South Africa can look across to Brazil and envy its inclusion alongside India, Russia and China as one of the BRICS. Nigeria and Ethiopia, too, would not want less status in the world than Australia. It might take thirty years but these three countries will want parity not patronage.

[These views are entirely those of TPPR and are not to be construed as those of Pasco Risk. For access to Pasco Risk featured articles now and in the future, go to their website]

Al-Megrahi, Lockerbie and the British

If there is one thing that is clear about the sordid business surrounding the release of Al-Megrahi, it is that compassion is unlikely to have been central to his release last week - or rather that it is an odd sort of compassion that places the interest of a convicted mass murderer ahead of that of 270 families.

The problem for an analyst is the connection between the claimed independent decision-making of the SNP Justice Minister and the 'logic' of UK Government interest. Coincidence, shared logic or collusion? What information, if any, in this case, flowed between London and Edinburgh.

Let us assume, without prejudice and just for the sake of argument, that Minister MacAskill's position was 'aligned' with that of London. Why might London be pleased to see Al-Megrahi released? Why does London get delivered a stroke of luck by a political enemy?

Stripping Away Claim and Counter-Claim

Strip away the claims and counter-claims and the meaning of the release may lie where few journalists seem keen to go - in the fact that the Foreign Secretary has issued a Public Information Immunity Certificate stating that to publish certain material would be detrimental to national security.

We are also being led down the garden path by those who wish to portray this as a national security concern related to the so-called war on terror. Yes, the Libyans have taken themselves off the WMD circuit. Yes, there is an historic and current issue over the risks of Islamist terrorism in North Africa.

But the WMD issue did not need al-Megrahi's release after the fact and Ghaddafi and the West have a shared interest in suppressing Islamism whether or not you believe conspiracy theories about the alleged MI6/fundamentalist attempt to take the man out in 1996.

National security in this case can mean only one of two things - the interest of the British in Libya for geo-political reasons or as cover to avoid embarrassment. Remember - this 'Certificate' relates to the disclosure of documentation at Appeal that even the defence has not yet seen.

The secret politics of Anglo-Libyans relations, involving the UK's relations with the US, other major regional states and the politics of Africa, have become so complex that any revelation of the 'truth' (whatever it may be) may result in a PR and diplomatic 'lose/lose' for Her Majesty's Government.

We can either speak positively - of the reasons why the UK might want to cut some slack to Libya - or negatively - the reasons why the UK really wanted this man off its books - but the salient fact remains that HMG is actively suppressing information about its own conduct.

The Importance of Libya

What may puzzle some is why this strip off land between the Mediterranean and the Sahara is important at all. Its importance is not reliant on just one policy but on its pivotal position in three different areas:

• Ghaddafi uses his drive, anti-colonialist track record and funds to promote the idea of an African Union that would include the 'Islamic' north and could bring stability to the 'Dark Continent'.
• Libya's energy supplies, especially its gas, are a major piece on the European economic chessboard. A loose relationship between Tripoli, Rome and Russia offers a highly ambiguous opportunity and threat to the European Union, both providing gas and making its supply part of Russia's OGEC aspirations
• More negatively, Ghaddafi is not a great fan of the two-state solution for Palestine and is mercurial to say the least. He has also been an active secularist rival to the Saudis. What is not wanted at this time is Libya being distracted back from African into Middle Eastern affairs.

Trade opportunities are important (we must declare the interest of Tim Pendry being on the Board of the Middle East Association although the opinions here are wholly TPPR's) but they are not quite what they seem on the surface.

It is not just about energy production where the Americans have been hovering around for some time and with probable success once things have settled down again. Nor is it just about general Mediterranean trade and investment where there is a natural post-colonial Italo-Libyan connection.

The UK, including the Scots (though we see no evidence of unwarranted business influence over the Scots Executive), will gain general benefits from energy and trade development but the real gold mine lies in the long-promised modernisation of the Libyan economy.

As with Syria, the City of London sees eventual financial liberalisation as a prime opportunity for the sale of important financial, professional and consulting services in which the British are global leaders.

From London's perspective, this is the economic icing on the geo-political cake. Britain's welfare state has been structured since the 1980s to depend almost entirely on export income from the City. Its manufacturing is in terminal decline and its own energy production is coming to a shuddering halt.

Private attempts to 'sell' into Libya were going on long before the finalisation of the WMD deal, centred initially on a set of business interests with security sector and City links who saw themselves as competitive with American aspirations - that is another story.

The African Connection

The point here is that the Al-Megrahi release has to be seen not in simplistic terms as a trade-off for business (which is what most anti-Government journalists would like the story to be) but as just one component in a very finely drawn Libyan policy that has constantly balanced multiple interests.

In addition to its trade and energy aspirations, the UK has long had a strong position on the settlement and management of Africa that has slowly come to develop a European dimension.

This is related not only to Libya as a gateway to energy (including possible pipelines from Nigeria, although these are likely to go through Algeria) but also as front line in the war against the flows of migration that threaten to destabilise European politics.

But a key plank of Western interest is the creation of a working African Union capable of dealing with failed states. As of today, the African Union's military capability is a joke. Its role in Mogadishu is an embarrassment to the West and the Continent. It need not be so.

If there is a war on terror aspect to the Libyan connection, the fear is not that the Sahara may be dominated by Islamised tuaregs or that Algeria may go the way of Afghanistan (neither truly credible propositions). It is that oil-wealth states like Nigeria might implode from internal sectarian unrest.

A constructive relationship between Libya and the West, extended to South Africa and Nigeria, could ensure sufficient funds for a sufficiently well-trained armed force to ensure strategic liberal interventionism on the cheap without accusations of colonialism.

The American Aspect

Europe and the US do not always have the same interests. Economic competition continues and the Americans are very much more touchy about 'terrorism' - and are culturally more unforgiving of slights, often extending their moralistic security blood feuds for decades.

The UK's entire foreign policy is predicated on the Atlantic alliance. Incredible efforts go into ensuring that the US is not discomfited and yet there is a natural tension between US foreign policy and the aspirations of the British 'Arabist' old guard in the FCO and security services.

Some of those most keen on relations with Libya (and Syria) were also those most privately scathing of the US intervention in Iraq and so, logically, of the extreme Atlanticism of Tony Blair.

Nevertheless, British policies of engagement with key Arab 'rogue states' (though not Iran) started in earnest in the late 1990s, with the aim of slowly bringing the suspicious Americans along with them by stealth. American diplomats were often collusive but well aware that it might be hard to explain at home.

Success in Libya may be matched by success in Syria before too long. There is a great deal at stake for the UK in demonstrating that 'regional rogues' can be turned around through British intermediation - and, ergo, that the British are worth continued investment in by Washington.

And this is where things start to go a little awry and where 'national security' considerations in releasing information could mean anything or nothing. They could certainly mean no more than that sources should not be revealed but we have to consider other possibilities.

Internal Contradictions

At the heart of this mess is the exposure of an internal contradiction that the UK Government must, on the one hand, sustain its regional policy in which it has invested so much and, on the other, never ever step out of line from Washington - ever!

It is widely accepted that Al-Megrahi was a player in a complicated security and intelligence game in which the 'other side' were his Western security service equivalents. It is also widely accepted that the evidence against Al-Megrahi was circumstantial.

The angry passion of Robert Mueller of the FBI over the release argues against any deliberate 'fix' to 'get' Al-Megrahi as the wrong man insofar as the American-backed case (which contains many questions and anomalies) was clearly based on a sincere belief that Al-Megrahi did the deed.

But the suspicion remains that the prosecution case was too bound up in the secret machinations of insiders to be wholly fair. The FBI was not then (though is more so now) the prime prosecutor in security and intelligence cases. Its inexperience may have allowed it to be led in certain directions.

There was prima facie cause for Al-Megrahi to be targeted as a senior security official on the other side and incentive later to ensure that the US made its point in making his handover a pre-emptive sign of good faith on the part of Ghaddafi when he most needed to cut a deal himself.

It is easy to forget just now much energy was invested between 1991 and 1999 in getting Al-Megrahi to trial in a process involving no less than Nelson Mandela.

And there is the determined denial of responsibility of a dying man, the doubts of many (though not all) family members of Lockerbie victims, the fact that new evidence was about to be presented at Appeal and the persistent alternative scenarios linked more directly to the Levant and to Iran.

This is not to say that he is not guilty nor that the trial was unfair, only that the release on 'compassionate' grounds tends to confirm that this case had everything to do with politics and very little to do with justice from the very beginning.

None of this energy was devoted to Iran Air Flight 655 which became 'sorted' as a bilateral compensation deal in 1996 as if it was an industrial accident. Even the fact of that incident and the timing of Lockerbie raise questions as to Libyan motivation that have not been fully answered.

Back to the Public Information Immunity Certificate

Above all, there is the Public Information Immunity Certificate and the timing of the release - compassionate for someone who ostensibly was responsible for the wilful murders of some 270 human beings yet not compassionate in the least for the family members of those who were murdered.

Martin Kettle in the Guardian today is naive. A lack of evidence is proof of nothing. Only evidence is proof of something and, even then, if out of context and with other evidence missing, it may not be as reliable as it appears.

Admittedly such thinking as ours could be in danger of going down the route of that peculiar bug-bear of the modern liberal intellectual, conspiracy, and we are right to be cautious. The state of Libyan-US relations in the late 1980s involved a state terror war on both sides that could provide motivation.

But what is not written down or is not revealed (because it was written down somewhere else a long time ago or is not being revealed by choice) is not unimportant precisely because we cannot tell whether anything is there at all. The silence means that we must remain cautious about Government claims.

As things stand, what was published yesterday by the Government is useful and it does make it clear that there was no crass link between trade and the release of Al-Megrahi. But it also smells of misdirection, even in the attempt to shift the media's ground back on to the irrelevant war on terror.

I hope we have argued plausibly that Anglo-Libyan relations are complex and multifaceted and that the release is inexplicable as 'compassion'. Whether guilty or not, Al-Megrahi is a pawn in a game between two sets of unaccountable security apparat who have both got themselves into a dreadful pickle.

So long as Al-Megrahi's release pre-empted his Appeal and so long as the Government persists in issuing Public Information Immunity Certificates on grounds of 'national security', we are justified in asking whether an Appeal might have exposed things best left unexposed.

From this point, we must remain silent. The Government may have acted correctly in all respects. Al-Megrahi may have been an unrepentant psychopathic mass murderer. Political and contingent fee legal interests may have been muddying the waters with claims and counterclaims.

But if Al-Megrahi's appeal had been successful, would it have raised serious new issues about who actually was responsible, directing global attention to the Levant at the very time a volatile American Congress and an even more volatile Israel are being drawn into the Peace Process?

The possibility (no more) is that the case against Al-Megrahi, if proven false, might have seriously disrupted both Anglo-American and Western-Libyan relations. Until Government 'opens its books' on its Libyan policy, this possibility must be taken seriously.

Only the fact that the Scottish Executive seems to have come to an independent view regardless of central Government protects the latter from accusations of political manipulation. The decision-making process in Edinburgh is where investigative attention must turn now.