Tony Blair
By Peter Guest | Published: 01 December, 2008
In his new offices just over a mile from Downing Street, Tony Blair cuts a far more relaxed figure now than in the final days of his 10 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is just shy of 18 months since Mr Blair left Parliament with the words: “I wish everyone, friend or foe, well – and that is that, the end.”
Since that “end,” Mr Blair has not yet settled into the idle retirement of the after-dinner speaking circuit, but has taken on the role of travelling statesman, working as the official envoy for the Madrid Quartet – the EU, US, UN and Russia – to the Middle East and promoting a continuation of the African development agenda he pursued during his time in office.
Mr Blair’s Labour government’s overall approach to foreign policy was divisive at best, marred by unpopular overseas interventions. The May 2005 general election – Mr Blair’s last – saw his party’s majority in the House of Commons cut significantly. That same summer, the G8 meeting convened in the Scottish resort of Gleneagles. Preceded by the rock star grandstanding of Bob Geldof’s Live8 concerts in cities around the world and the attendant media scrum, the conference began with the notion of poverty reduction in Africa foremost in the public consciousness.
That grass-roots interest proved transient, but the new approach to African development instigated at the summit has been a good deal more persistent.
“The important thing about Gleneagles is that it put Africa right at the epicentre of global politics for the first time,” Mr Blair says. “That’s not to say there’s not still masses to do. We’re falling short in many areas, but the importance of Gleneagles was that for the first time, with the most powerful body in the world, Africa mattered.”
The UK put African economic development and climate change on the main stage at Gleneagles, and, in recognition of the increasing importance of the large emerging economies, invited the leaders of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa to take part in the discussion. The talks resulted in the cancellation of $40bn debt to 18 of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries list, as well as a broader programme of conditional debt relief in Africa. There was a reaffirmation of L the leading nations’ commitments to the Millennium Development Goals and public health initiatives.
While subsequent G8 meetings have been accused of ignoring these commitments and the leading nations remain far off their 2015 targets, the importance of the summit, Mr Blair believes, is in the creation of that yardstick. “We now have a series of benchmarks and commitments about how we can measure the reactions of the international community and the leading players,” he says. “It was a different approach too, to say this should be a partnership with Africa. It shouldn’t just be about aid and debt and investment in HIV/Aids treatment and so on. It was also about what Africa can do for Africa.
“I suppose the other really significant thing that we did around Gleneagles was that for the first time, instead of just raising traditional donor issues, we also raised the issues to do with conflict resolution – governance, how we partnered Africa so that Africa stood on its own two feet.”
It is governance and capacity-building initiatives that now form the main thrust of Mr Blair’s programmes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Teams from Mr Blair’s staff are active in both countries supporting presidents Paul Kagame and Ernest Bai Koroma, respectively.
“Increasingly, my view about Western policy towards Africa is that it should focus on building capacity in governance,” Mr Blair says. “Even though the donor aid has done a tremendous amount of good, I think the purpose of what we do in Africa should be to get to the point where each African country can wave the donor community goodbye. Because actually, the donor community… takes up an enormous amount of [governments’] time and effort, and they have to dedicate vast amounts of the business of government to negotiating with the donor community.
“One of the reasons why China’s moved in so sharply in a way is because, I think, for a lot of the countries, China comes in, they say, ‘right, you need major infrastructure, we’ll provide major infrastructure,’ it’s a done deal, it gets done.”
Chinese capital investment
China’s surge in interest in Africa has redefined the investment environment since Gleneagles. When Mr Blair convened the G8+5 in 2005, bringing on board new partners in tackling global problems was central to the new multilateral approach to development. In absolute terms, the amount of capital that China has brought to bear in Africa must represent a qualified success. However, there is an ongoing concern amongst some development organisations and governments that Beijing prefers to act alone, entering into narrow bilateral agreements that are often opaque to the international community. Acknowledging that Chinese interest has shifted the landscape, Mr Blair says that the fact that China was willing to come to the table in 2005 indicates that there is a potential for a more conciliatory approach.
