Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
9 DECEMBER 2003
PROFESSOR JAMES
BARBER AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
SIMON
Q20 Mr Hamilton: And, of course, you
could understand that more if the opposition in Zimbabwe was white
but it is not—well, it is partly but it seems to be mainly
black.
Professor Barber: Yes.
Professor Simon: Very much so.
Q21 Mr Hamilton: Finally, do you think
the British government, the Foreign Office here, can in any way
influence South Africa's attitude towards Zimbabwe? What should
the FCO do now to influence future events or from what you say,
Professor Barber, is Thabo Mbeki's position really pretty solid
and he is not going to change?
Professor Barber: He is not going
to change publicly, I do not think. The hope is that he will put
some personal pressure, but I cannot see Mugabe moving because
of the sort of pressure that South Africa has exerted so far.
If you really wanted to pull the plug you could stop supplying
not just food but electricity , transport and so on, but South
Africa has not done it so far and I cannot see it doing it in
the future, so we just have to go on and hope, that somehow Mugabe
will be removed.
Q22 Mr Chidgey: I would like to raise
some questions concerning South Africa and the African Union.
As you know President Mbeki was a very strong supporter of the
OAU, and also first president of the AU[13]We
all know, of course, that relations between the AU and the west,
particularly the United Kingdom, were at times more than a little
strained but what I am particularly interested in is how does
the new African Union differ from the old? What potential do you
think it has to tackle effectively the complex social, political,
economic problems which are set out in its constitution as its
major role. Is this a realistic approach?
Professor Simon: It is a very
good question. The answer is difficult because it is probably
shades of grey and matters of degree, at least in the short term.
One of the key issues that some would find problematic is the
role that Libya's president has played in the whole transformation
from the OAU to the AU, and the way in which it is alleged in
some quarters that he was attempting to do this to create something,
as it were, in his own image and perhaps another way of looking
at it would be to counter the increasing influence of South Africa
and the southern cone, if you like, within the pan-continental
movements. It is not quite clear how much of the resourcing he
is providing but certainly during the transitional process and
the negotiations that followed it was substantial, so I think
there is a little bit of concern there. My sense is that in many
parts of the region there would be greater support for the more
geographically specific regional economic initiatives, like SADC
and ECOWAS[14]because
they are more coherent . . .
Q23 Mr Chidgey: Support from whom?
Professor Simon: The member states
themselves, and they would see those as more potentially useful
vehicles for the economic collaboration than the pan-continental.
At the continental level, the question becomes the relationship
between the African Union and NePAD and, again, there is still
some definition that we need to have there.
Professor Barber: It is rather
early to judge, that is the dilemma. It is a new initiative and
the hope is that new initiatives improve things, but SADC itself
has reorganised itself recently with the hope that it will be
more efficient. In the past it gave out segments to a particular
state to carry out, for example, South Africa had health as one
of its segments, but it was done by civil servants in South Africa.
Now there has been a change in SADC and they have six areas in
which they operate as a central unit, and the hope is that that
will be more effective.
Q24 Mr Chidgey: On that point, particularly
your reference to SADC, has the disappearance of Zimbabwe damaged
the AU and, particularly, SADC?
Professor Barber: Oh, I should
think it has damaged most things, yes. There was a big argument
earlier between Mugabe and Mandela over SADC's Organ for Defence
and Security because Mugabe had been rather cock of the walk before
the South Africans arrived. When the South Africans arrived Mandela
became the dominant personality and Chairman of SADC. Mugabe,
put out by this, wanted to have a separate area of his own and
he tried to take over the Organ, so they had quite a substantial
clash.
Professor Simon: I would agree
with that.
Q25 Mr Chidgey: You, of course, know
that South Africa was very strongly for the creation of a Peace
and Security Council within the AU. I really want to ask you whether
you think the scheme will come to fruition and what it could achieve,
bearing in mind they see this as a vehicle to produce an African
stand-by force, rather along the lines of the EU model, I suppose.
But I want to link that question to something you alluded to earlier
which is the controversy over the arms deals in South Africa which
go right up to the Vice-President. It is a matter of record that
Mbeki decided he will not be prosecuted even though there seems
to be quite a lot of evidence that suggests a prosecution should
have gone ahead, and this involves two major very large companies,
if not entirely British they certainly have a very large British
involvement in their operations. So really I am asking, first,
how can South Africa have any credibility in a programme such
as NePAD, which is linked to the AU which Mbeki is a great supporter
of and which is out there to drive against and eliminate corruption,
when at the very highest level within their own Government there
are huge questions about the propriety of arms purchases? If you
then link that to whether they have any credibility in sponsoring
a pan-African peace-keeping force, does it not all seem a bit
of a mess? That is one way of putting it, but it does not have
much credibility, does it?
Professor Simon: I can understand
that view and I think the central difficulty to grapple with is,
on the one hand, the sense that I think does have genuine roots
at least in some quarters amongst African governance that there
is a need for some such institution and, on the other hand, increasing
concern which has been reflected in some of the critiques offered
by South Africa and other African states that ultimately what
is driving this is a western attempt to devolve international
peace-keeping down to the continental and subcontinental region.
Particularly they would point to the role the US has taken on
in the post-Cold War period as global policeman and enforcer,
in the sense that, as we have heard in recent weeks, the American
government has realised even it has limitations of resourcing
and personnel to do this in too many conflict zones simultaneously,
and really what is driving this is an attempt to devolve that
responsibility and the risks and so on on to Africans.
Q26 Mr Chidgey: But is not that the wish
of the African countries themselves?
Professor Simon: Well, there is
support in some circles but not unanimously. There is great concern
about this and therefore the balancing act to be trodden is how
to support, train, facilitate and to resource this without, again,
being seen to be the "sugar daddy" to something that
is "going to dance to the pay master's tune".
Professor Barber: What I would
say is that South Africa has been more open than most places.
There is corruption, of course as in all societies, but at least
in South Africa there is reasonably free press, it investigates
things, and we know about the degree of corruption. So in that
sense it is rather hard to say that it is like other African states.
I think South Africa in some ways is different from other African
states, and one of the elements is that it has quite a strong
civil society and it has a press that is reasonably free and critical.
When it comes to the OAU I have only once visited it and I found
it rather depressing experience so I am a poor advocate of it.
Whether the AU will be better, I do not know.
Q27 Mr Chidgey: We have touched on this
already but it relates to our relations in this area with South
Africa and, of course, those of the EU, looking particularly at
the AU's aims for the continent which involve peace-keeping forces
as well. Really what I want to ask you is, in short, what more
could we be doing in the United Kingdom and the EU to assist the
AU in achieving its aims, and do we suffer at all from the fact
that this arms deal in South Africa has been a huge controversy,
and they are the key players in trying to establish a regional
peace-keeping force? Does that rebound in any way in the assistance
that the United Kingdom can offer? Is that rather tarnished by
this because of the involvement of British firms?
Professor Barber: I doubt it.
It seems to me the AU is a broader issue than the arms deal. Now
the EU relationship with Africa generally is one that, as I mentioned
before, I would like to see more sympathy with in terms of freedom
of trade and so on, and encouragement of the people of Africa
to be able to sell us their goods, so it is that general level,
that Britain can play a role in the EU helping the AU in that
sense.
Professor Simon: I would underline
that last point. Many people in South and southern Africa see
Britain as potentially one of the main allies within the EU context,
particularly over fishing rights and other resources, where Spain
or other countries have taken quite hardline positions. My sense,
to answer your question more directly, is that the FCO and the
British government more generally have been far more positive
in responding to NePAD than thus far to the African Union, but
even there I would characterise it largely as something like,
"Make encouraging noises but let's wait and see; let's look
for evidence of progress before committing ourselves."
Q28 Mr Chidgey: But NePAD is an AU programme.
Professor Simon: That relationship
is not as straightforward as it may seem.
Q29 Mr Maples: I want to look at South
Africa in a slightly bigger context. How does it see the Commonwealth,
its role in the Commonwealth, how it might use it, whether it
feels it gets used by the Commonwealth? How do they see that?
Professor Simon: I think Mbeki's
take on that would be rather different today from a week ago,
for very obvious reasons. Let me answer it in an indirect way.
I think the kind of perspective we had portrayed by Mugabe at
the weekend of nothing but a talking shop and a club does it a
disservice and demeans it. That said, Zimbabwe's departure probably
does not demean the Commonwealth in the short-term because there
are precedents that if there is a change of Government the country
could be invited to rejoin, and that gets us out of that particular
problem. In specific relation to South Africa, I have little doubt
that President Mbeki himself sees it very much as one of a suite
of global multilateral institutions where South Africa can play
a pivotal role, often as a broker between if you like the old
Commonwealth and the new Commonwealth—Europe, Australasia,
Canada, and Africa, Asia. The trouble is, what happened at the
weekend has probably been something of an implicit or indeed explicit
rebuke to Mbeki's envisaged role. I think broadly speaking there
is still fairly solid support for South Africa's membership and
role, and South Africa has been greatly encouraged by the accession
of Mozambique, more recently of Cameroon, in the sense that, in
that respect, it might assume something more of a wider role than
simply a former British ex-colonial club, because after all Mozambique
was never a British colony, protectorate or anything else.
Professor Barber: South Africa
sees itself as a bridge-builder between the first and third worlds,
and in that sense it has been reasonably successful. When it first
came into the world of multilateral institutions, after 1994,
there was great enthusiasm of course. A friend of mine was at
one of the meetings, on fisheries I think, and he said that when
the South Africans came in everybody stood up and cheered; he
said it was like the Second Coming. They have managed to build
on that and I think one of the successes of South Africa has been
in things like the World Trade Organisation, in the NePAD movement
and so on, to be a bridge between the First and Third worlds,
and they see it that way. I will again quote Alec Erwin who said,
"We have both the First and Third Worlds here, therefore
we are in a position to help." I can only agree, I think
it has been one of the most successful areas of South Africa's
international efforts to bridge-build.
Q30 Mr Maples: Can they be both a bridge-builder
and a leader of Africa, or sub-Saharan Africa?
Professor Simon: They are attempting
to be, yes.
Q31 Mr Maples: Are those things at some
point going to come into conflict?
Professor Barber: They have not
always been welcomed by African states. Some African states have
said, "They are trying to speak for us and they do not understand".
They did not get full support for their Olympic bid from some
Africans, so there is uncertainty.
Q32 Mr Maples: The same question really
in relation to the United Nations. The United Nations might be
a better place to play that role of bridge-builder.
Professor Simon: Again, there
is evidence in several respects, one of which, perhaps most conspicuously,
was South Africa's role in promoting the Ottawa Treaty banning
landmines in 1997. There are other examples where the bridge-builder
role has been played very successfully and in that case South
Africa certainly does, to quote the phrase, "punch above
its weight." That depends obviously on maintaining and retaining
support within Africa and again there is that slight ambivalence
because of the historical role and the sense on the part of many
of the smaller and weaker countries that South Africa stands to
gain much more than they do from many of these pan-African and
global movements, so that is a tension line I would draw attention
to.
Q33 Mr Maples: Do you think in both these
contexts, the Commonwealth and the United Nations, South Africa
has fully bought in? To what extent has it bought into the good
governance, democracy, human rights, rule of law agenda? That
seems to be going pretty well within South Africa, but has it
bought into that agenda as far as the rest of the Third World
is concerned? Do we see them as an absolutely essential ingredient,
that it is not going to work for them if they do not have these
things in place?
Professor Barber: If I may go
back, in terms of the UN, they may not say it openly to you but
they would like to see a reform of the Security Council with permanent
seats for an African or African states, and they see themselves
of course as the natural inheritor of the seat for Africa. Others
do not necessarily share that view.
Q34 Mr Maples: Would they see that as
something they could use to promote this agenda, or is our agenda
fundamentally different from theirs in this respect?
Professor Simon: I think it also
depends, in the sense of chronology, which interests predominate
within, say, the Department of Foreign Affairs. Certainly in the
first few years after transition in 1994 there was remarkably
little change of key personnel except at the very top. So they
had a strong continuity of, if you like, old guard people who
had served under the National Party government, and that played
a quite important role in terms of South Africa's response on
a number of these sorts of initiatives and the relatively uncomplicated
way in which South Africa signed up to some of these apparently
universal, individualised rights. Gradually as personnel change
was effected, as the Mandela regime has yielded to the Mbeki regime
and his very different vision, that has become a little more complicated,
and there is this balance which I alluded to in response to an
earlier question, between the sense of a more, as it were, communalist,
collective African perspective on rights rather than the kind
of Western focus on the principal priority of individual rights,
and that difficulty again, that conflict, I think is beginning
to come out in some of the apparently divergent views and responses
to different initiatives, often in quite rapid succession.
Q35 Mr Chidgey: Just a few questions
on NePAD. We have touched on it so I will try and be succinct.
You have already made clear to us that there is a feeling that
NePAD suffers from being different things to different people,
both within and outside the continent. Some see it as a tool for
securing better governance, particularly donors, and others see
it as a means of securing more aid for African nations. Can those
two needs be satisfied, or is it a game of chess?
Professor Simon: Yes, as they
say.
Chairman: A good game of doubles—not
a ball between you!
Q36 Mr Chidgey: Let me be specific. Really
it is a question of whether you believe Western donors will continue
to support NePAD without an effective Peer Review Mechanism. I
want to couple that with an interesting contrast and that is that
the United States administration does not support NePAD, it has
its own Millennium Fund which has a rather more commercial approach
to assisting Africa.
Professor Simon: Yes.
Q37 Mr Chidgey: I would like your views
on, will we support that Peer Review, and is the American approach
the best way for Western donors?
Professor Simon: I think the answer
to the latter is probably no. There is an important role for a
multilateral approach and the broad strategy of trying to co-ordinate
an EU policy is probably right. The critical question, which I
alluded to earlier, is to what extent the EU in general or Britain
in particular is prepared to put something up-front beyond saying,
"We are waiting for evidence of development on the ground",
and this Peer Review Mechanism is precisely one of those thresholds
which people are carefully waiting to be crossed. There again
we see differences within NePAD as to how readily the individual
member countries are prepared to sign up to that sort of thing.
It comes back to this earlier difficulty which many governments
have, about being seen publicly and especially now through some
kind of formally instituted African mechanism to be rebuking and
reprimanding other countries. I think the one glimmer of hope
is that they would probably prefer to do it in that more specifically
African-centred forum than either the Commonwealth or the UN,
which is a kind of north-south global forum where the pressure
to stand united might be even stronger.
Professor Barber: All I would
add is that the American view since Bill Clinton's time has been
to emphasise private enterprise not aid. They have been pushing
that very hard.
Professor Simon: And the principal
beneficiaries of the African Growth and Opportunity Act in the
first year or two of its operation have been only two or three
countries—South Africa, Nigeria and to a lesser extent Kenya—which
again reflects minerals and mineral-based manufacture.
Q38 Mr Chidgey: On this Peer Review Mechanism,
you will be aware that President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal was
recently reported as calling into question the Peer Review Mechanism.
He apparently believes it will be undermined by the length of
time needed, the absence of objective norms and the lack of sanctions
to make countries comply. That is very interesting because South
Africa and Ghana are the first two countries to volunteer to be
subject to this, so are we going to see South Africa as an example
of best practice? Will it mean that, in fact, effectively it will
not change significantly poor governance in African countries?
Will it be in effect toothless? Is this a huge challenge for South
Africa or will it just pass by?
Professor Barber: Yes, I think
it is a big challenge.
Q39 Mr Chidgey: Is there anything we
can do in the UK as British foreign policy to aid this process?
Professor Simon: Assisting South
Africa to play a leadership and catalytic role in respect of mechanisms
like that could bear some fruit.
13 AU-African Union. Back
14
ECOWAS-Economic Community of West African States. Back
| 
