The former UK prime minister turned international envoy talks about his latest initiatives for improving African governance. Interview by Peter Guest.

It is just shy of 18 months since Tony Blair left Parliament after a decade as prime minister of the UK 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, and has instead 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 that he pursued during his time in office.

It was the summer of 2005 that defined Mr Blair’s approach to Africa. With the G8 meeting convening in the Scottish resort of Gleneagles, public attention was firmly fixed on the notion of poverty reduction in Africa by a well-orchestrated media campaign led by the musician and activist Bob Geldof. While that grassroots interest proved transient, the Gleneagles summit laid down a fresh, multilateral approach to Africa’s development and welcomed a parade of new actors into the discussion.

“The important thing about Gleneagles is that it put Africa right at the epicentre of global politics for the first time,” says Mr Blair. “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.”

Debt relief

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 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 those countries 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.”

Capacity building and governance are now the main thrust of Mr Blair’s work. Teams from his staff are present in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, assisting the nations’ governments in building stable institutions that will improve the environment for foreign direct investment. However, Mr Blair is critical of the structure of multilateral organisations.

Test bed

“These two projects – Rwanda and Sierra Leone – are in a sense a test bed for a different way of doing things,” says Mr Blair. “What I am trying to do in an ad-hoc way is to prove that if you were to invest smaller sums of money – actually, much smaller sums of money – in building the capacity of these places to govern themselves to, for example, attract in private sector investment, actually we might be doing better with that than putting large aid programmes in.”

Under president Paul Kagame, Rwanda has experienced significant economic improvement, growing at an average of 7.4% a year between 1995 and 2005, albeit from a low base. In 2007, there was 6% growth and, following investments in agriculture and manufacturing, 2008 figures could reach 10%, if central bank reports are to be believed.

Sierra Leone, with a relatively new, business-savvy president and a large diamond industry, could replicate Rwanda’s success, says Mr Blair. “It is potentially a dynamic, wealthy country. But they need critical infrastructure investment, they need the right relationship with the private sector, and yes, the type of institution to develop that doesn’t exist at the moment. That’s why I am interested in the work I am doing now.”

This is an abridged version of an interview carried in the current issue of This is Africa, a sister publication of The Banker.

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