Britain in Africa

"This slim booklet has hardly been reviewed anywhere, but it deserves to be. Porteus is a former BBC journalist who worked for the Foreign Office but now he runs Human Rights Watch UK. He is a very good journalist who knows Africa extremely well. Over the last 12 years the humanitarian imperative has come to dominate British policy. It is an approach rooted in the American economist Jeffrey Sachs’s work , but then supported by Bob Geldof, Bono, Live Aid and Band Aid. The theory is that Africa needs to be jolted out of the poverty trap with a massive injection of aid. No realpolitik is necessary in Africa – we can just do good. That approach was part of the bubbling optimism of Blair and Bush, who thought they could sort out the world’s problems, a trend which reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq. This is a simple, short, calm book which tracks the good intentions that lay behind this policy. Things are now going to change. That grandiloquent Blair vision of global intervention finally crashed on the rocks in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve got the credit crunch, which is drying up global generosity, and we also have a generation of African writers – people like Dambisa Moyo, Andrew Mwenda and Moeletsi Mbeki – who are saying that aid is part of the problem. I think aid is often necessary, that it can make a small positive difference to growth rates, but it is not where Africa’s salvation is going to lie. To me, Dambisa Moyo and Jeffrey Sachs lie at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum, and the truth is somewhere in the middle."