Meeting with the Africa Commission in Rome on 27 May 2005

1 June 2005

The Prime Minister met with the Africa Commission in Rome on 27 May 2005 in Rome.

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Read the Prime Minister's opening statement:

Prime Minister:

Thank you very much indeed Julio, and also thank you very much for having me here in Rome this afternoon. I am delighted to come along and say these few words to you and to participate in the seminar, the workshop, the discussion you have been having.

This book by the Commission for Africa, which is our common interest, arose originally out of a conversation which I had with Bob Geldof when he suggested to me that it was time to try and put down in one place a proper and comprehensive plan for Africa, and he and Anna were both part of the Commission that then have written this document. And I just want to explain to you very briefly what I think the G8 has got to be about in July this year. What is happening in Africa today is something that if it happened in any other continent in the world, there would be outrage, it would be on our television screens leading the news every night, there would be immense and sustained pressure on the leaders of the world to act.

Unfortunately, because it is in Africa, that is not the case. But that is a very sad statement on the state of our politics, and those of us who believe passionately in the cause of Africa, believe in it for two reasons. First of all, it barely needs saying, but it cannot be morally right that so many people die when their deaths could be prevented. That I think is obvious and we would all share that. I also however believe that it is in our interests, in the wealthy nations of the world, to change Africa. Africa is a continent of many hundreds of millions of people. It is a continent where life expectancy is declining. It is the only continent in the world over the past few decades that has moved backwards, and its people are some of the most extraordinary, and creative, and capable people in the world. And if we do not work with Africa to change this situation, I believe it will not merely be morally wrong, I think it will be a very big mistake for our world in this century, because what we know increasingly is our world's inter-dependence, and if we allow one continent of the world to exist in such a state, then the consequences ultimately in my judgment will be felt by all of us, not simply by the people of Africa. So I think there are powerful reasons for acting.

And what is more, there is no real secret about what needs to be done. It is very clear what needs to be done, and there is a responsibility, not just on wealthy countries, but also on African nations to help, and Africa is prepared to give the leadership to its own continent, but it needs our support and solidarity in order to do it. And what we have tried to do in this commission report is to put together a comprehensive agenda for Africa. It deals with debt, and aid, and trade, but it also deals with governance, and corruption, and conflict resolution, it deals with issues to do with health, and HIV-Aids, and malaria, and TB, and the killer diseases of Africa. In other words, it is a plan for the continent, and a plan shared by the leadership of Africa, and hopefully after the G8, with the leadership of the developed world as well.

What we need to do is very clear. We need to make sure that we write off the debt of these, the poorest countries of the world. We need to increase our aid, and we need to reach the .7% of GDP on the timetable the European Ministers have just set out. Britain has recently trebled our aid over the past few years to Africa, and much of that aid now goes on supporting African governments to make the changes they need to make. We need to make sure that our markets are open to African goods. We need the World Trade Round to be an immense step forward in helping African countries, not just being able to sell their raw commodities into our markets, but also the finished product too. We need to support African peace keeping and peace enforcement missions.

Any of the conflicts in Africa are preventable, if we have sufficient numbers of forces, from Africa, trained in order to do it. When Britain intervened in Sierra Leone some years ago, it took only just over 1,000 troops to prevent Sierra Leone changing from a democracy to a dictatorship. In Sudan today, if there were sufficient numbers of Africa Union peace-keepers, we would not have the problem that we have. So we need to do that as well. We need to make sure that the African countries adopt a peer review group mechanism for ensuring that there is good governance and no corruption. People in Africa need to feel the benefit of the aid. We need to make sure that it goes to the places it is supposed to go, to the people it is supposed to go to, and there is a responsibility on African governments, which they are prepared to accept, in order to ensure that that is done.

We need specifically to make sure that the treatment and help necessary for diseases like HIV-Aids are given to African countries. We have that capability in the western developed world. We must make sure that it is transferred to those African countries so that they can help their citizens who are dying in their thousands every day from HIV-Aids.

And we need to make sure, finally, that if we adopt the principles and the programmes set out in this report, that we ensure that we follow it through, that we implement it. The United Nations set out the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, on education, across a range of indicators for Africa. The whole of the United Nations voted for this. It is our duty to make sure that the commitments that we gave internationally then are translated into effect. If we keep on the present path, and do not change policy, they won't be met. We will have failed therefore in the obligations we undertook. So we have to do it, and I think it is possible to do. And when people sometimes today are cynical about politics, for reasons I understand, and people ask: Where are the great causes of the world? This is the biggest cause there could possibly be in our world today, and I want to make sure that at the G8 this year the leaders of the wealthy countries of the world come together and make sure that this is a cause we adopt, we agree to, and we then carry through.

Thank you.

Read the subsequent question and answer session:

Question:

Sir, I can try with my English. So just one question for you, I am speaking on behalf of the Italian Coalition Against Poverty, and I work with Action Aid International. My question is very simple. A few weeks to go, we have five weeks to go, we have a real understanding that the final result of the G8 summit is going to be little, compared to the expectations. So I really would like to have your assurances that something big will happen, something big like a collective agreement on debt is possible and is in the pipeline. We are doing other paths, we are raising awareness, we are raising the public interest, but to date we need your help and we need you to do your job. Thank you.

Prime Minister:

Thank you. I am sorry about that. Obviously as the British Prime Minister I attend a lot of international conferences, and each time they set you a sort of technology test at the beginning, and I always fail it, so my apologies for that. And also it is very kind of you all to give us a seminar and a sauna at the same time. You asked for my assurance. Look, I will do my best, I can't do more than that. But I think the fact that people are meeting here, and I understand there is a meeting tomorrow in Rome as well, and the fact that the work that people like Bob are doing in different parts of the world is generating an enormous amount of support in civil society, that helps. I think what is necessary is for the leadership of the wealthy countries to understand that they have the full support of the people in making these changes. And I feel a particular responsibility in relation to this, not just because I have got the Presidency of the G8, and actually I am lucky enough to have the Presidency of the European Union at the same time, which is great, but I also feel it because I think that when we think of all the things that we spend money on, we are not asking for a great deal. All we are asking to happen is really a sum of money collectively that the world can afford, and policy changes that are long overdue. So I can't assure you that I am going to get the right result, what I can assure you of is that I am going to do my very utmost to achieve it.

Question:

Thank you very much. My name is Injera Mangi (phon), I am from Kenya, but I am representing the Global Call to action against poverty in Africa, and my congratulations to the team of Commissioners, and to you Prime Minister Tony Blair. I remember during a media session in London I had asked you how you were going to mobilise the rest of the G8 to actually support the recommendations made in the report. I have no doubt that you have embarked on that mission, and I am hoping that one of the successes of the G8 is that that report will be owned by the rest of the G8. Now my colleagues today, the Italian government, because we have heard what Bob has had to say today, and sitting here with colleagues, having interacted with some of my colleagues here, you know I think that the Italian government has the responsibility of moving beyond words and rhetoric, to real action. For me, I don't think that you need an extra year to actually get to 0.7% of your GNP, you could do that before the end of this year, because Africa needs that money, Africa needs that partnership. And I just wanted to share with you that inasmuch as colleagues up north are mobilising - inasmuch as colleagues up north are mobilising - we are mobilising down south. We want to collect the voices of our colleagues, because not everybody will be going to Gleneagles. I work with Action Aid International, and we have had this ... that has moved from Johannesburg all the way up to Scotland, it is collecting the voices of Africans, and I am hoping that the priorities, the recommendations, that will come out of that particular project will actually find some audience in the G8.

My question, Mr Prime Minister, is how do you see the G8 moving towards at least an agreed framework for this consultation, because some of the points that I had yesterday were to do with you know dealing with countries on a one to one basis, which is all right, but I think we need to go beyond the risk of having some countries that may appear rich, but are not necessarily rich, enjoin that consultation. What we are calling for as GCAP in Africa is for a 100% debt cancellation, irrespective, because for historical reasons there are blames for both the north and the south, but if we move on a country to country basis and apply different conditionalities and some countries may not enjoy that consultation, and it is the citizens that are going to suffer. I am hoping that you are can tell me whether you plan to have that common framework agreed at the G8, I think that would be very good. Thank you.

Prime Minister:

I hope we can get a common framework agreed for debt cancellation. It won't cover all the different countries, that is just the reality of the situation, but I think that we can make siginificant progress there, and the discussions that we have been having already with other countries indicate that. I also think that the decision by the European Union Development Ministers was very, very important the other day, and that was a common decision across the whole of Europe, including Italy obviously, but I think that makes a significant difference. I also think, and this is why I welcome the participation of the G8 that several of the African leaders will be coming to the G8 as well, you know people sometimes say to me: What is different now about this plan, as opposed to all the other plans, as opposed to all the other reports? The two thing that are different in my view are: one, we have for the first time put everything together. My honest view is that you won't get the agreement of the public in wealthy nations to pay more money out in aid, unless there is a responsibility on issues like governance, you know democracy and so on, on the other side. And I think putting everything together, conflict resolution as well as trade, you know goverance as well as debt relief and debt cancellation, I think that is one important difference. And the second important difference is that there is a real and genuine commitment on the part of African leadership to this. And I know Bob often makes this point that it is possible to be too pessimistic about everything that has happened in Africa over the past 10 - 15 years. For the first time many countries in Africa have had changes in government, democratically, that have occurred in a way that would have been unthinkable maybe 30 - 40 years ago. So there are countries that have made real changes. If you take a country like Mozambique for example, or even your own country in Kenya where there have been changes, you know there are positive and optimistic things happening in Africa today, as well as great difficulties. So that is the reason why I think that it is all the more important therefore that we are bold this year so that we are giving support to those African leaderships that are taking decisions. You know this Italian government, my government, governments in Europe, we take what we think are difficult decisions. No decisions can be quite as difficult as the decisions that African leaderships and governments have to take. They are dealing with a different scale of problem, and therefore this is the moment I think to help that African leadership by coming up to the mark with the things that we need to do.

Question:

Tony, as you know we are working as APRs, I just came back from London last night, for the G8, for the summit. And we know that you are asking for tangible commitments and for this big push that you are asking for, and you are very committed, and I want to thank you for the impetus that you put on Africa as the main issue of the G8, with the environment. We are working, and I imagine that until the last minute before the summit we will work. I agree with you, with the links you said until now, but I want to ask you, I want to suggest one project. We have the occasion now with the environment and Africa to link the two issues. For a project for the equatorial African forests are 11 countries, of a ... , and they need a lot of work. I don't know when in the next future we will have another occasion like this one for the summit. Among the other issues, do you think it is possible for the British Presidency to present a project on, I have one, I gave also to Michael Jay and the others, I have distributed it already, but I think it could be a project of the Presidency, because we all, we will be with you in this project, one of the others of course. Thank you.

Prime Minister:

Well first of all thank you for the work that you have been doing, and the cooperation that has been given to the G8 process. Yes, I do think it is possible for us to consider this and to look at it in the context of sustainable development. And we should never forget that there was a logic to putting these two issues together for the G8, so certainly we will look at it.

Question:

(Interpretation inaudible)

Prime Minister:

Well the issue of how we increase the finance is one that we address with the International Finance Facility, and I think a sort of prototype, if I can call it like that, of the International Finance Facility is, and will be agreed, for the immunisation programme, and that is the idea that we make a forward commitment on the spending that we are going to give, and then on the back of that actually make sure that we raise the money in the financial markets in order to increase the aid dramatically, and we can do that. There are other suggestions. The French have put forward suggestions, and I think there may be different ways that different countries try to meet the objectives, but the important thing is to get to the objectives. You see the first time that Africa came on the agenda at the G8 was in 1998, I think it was actually the first time when we held the G8 Presidency. It has been on every year since then, that is true. But there has been some progress though. Debt relief has yielded billions of dollars for Africa. Debt cancellation is now on the agenda in a way that it wasn't before. And sometimes what happens is, as with many political causes, is that people struggle for several years and then there comes a point at which the political pressure is such that action is taken. And I think that this year is the year for Africa. You know this is the year when people, if we do not do it this year, it will not be done, in my view. So this is the moment for decision. And look, if I can say this to you very frankly, I have been involved in many international decisions in the past 8 years, some have been very controversial, but when there has been a will to do something, the international community can do it. Now sometimes they agree with what is done, and sometimes they disagree, but my point is that if we can find the will to do some of the things that are very difficult and controversial, we could surely find the will to do something that most decent rational people can all agree upon, and that is why this thing should be done this year.