Lord Boateng has told an audience in Marlborough that Africa’s future needs a ‘Strategy for Success’ to build on recent progress. Giving the thirtieth annual Marlborough Brandt lecture, the former labour cabinet minister and former High Commissioner to South Africa, referred back to Willy Brandt’s report North-South: a Programme for Survival.
It was Brandt’s 1980 report on the needs for innovative development policies which prompted the formation of the Marlborough Brandt Group (MBG). Lord Boateng gave his lecture the title: Africa – from Poverty to Prosperity – beyond the Millennium Development Goals.
Over 350 people came to the College’s memorial Hall on Thursday (May 3) to hear Lord Boateng. Among them were students from Swaziland on an exchange at the College, members of Bristol’s Gambian community and students from the College and from St John’s – some of whom are preparing to go on MBG’s summer visit to Gunjur in the Gambia which has a long-standing link with Marlborough.
Lord Boateng was introduced to the audience by Lord Joffe who in 1963 was part of Nelson Mandela’s defence team at the Rivonia trial. Mandela and ten other opponents of the Apartheid regime were tried on sabotage and conspiracy charges and received life sentences.
Paul Boateng was looking beyond 2015 when the current Millennium Development Goals run out of time and to the coming negotiations on how the next set of goals for Africa’s development should be decided and what they ought to include: “The last set of Millennium Development Goals emerged from an opaque top-down process generated out of the UN Secretary General’s office – through the UN machinery.”
This time, he declared, it must be a bottom up process. The action the new goals will demand “needs to be rooted in the experience of those whose lives are still circumscribed by poverty and/or environmental depredation that continue to haunt our world.”
As an example of what should not happen, he cited the case of the recent appointment of a new head of the World Bank. He had been Addis Ababa at a meeting of African finance ministers when the Nigerian finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, announced her candidacy – and it was well received there.
But in what Lord Boateng called the “carve up” that followed, she was ignored by the dominant western nations and yet another American was installed at the World Bank. “Made in Washington, London or Paris simply isn’t good enough anymore…the balance of power is shifting – unreversably and rightly so.”
Paul Boateng illustrated his analysis of Africa’s future needs with evidence provided by his grandfather, a cocoa farmer in Ghana. He had benefitted from a rail line to the port and, right on his doorstep, from the West African Cocoa Research Institute. Now the railway had gone and the Institute had become a Ghanaian rather than a West African concern.
Africa he said needed investment in infrastructure and, through stronger tertiary education, in research and development. It also needed co-operation between its states.
Lord Boateng based his optimistic forecast for Africa’s future on the strides it has been making: Africa’s GDP is growing by about six per cent a year and over the past decade six of the world’s fastest growing economies have been in Africa.
Africa has a huge workforce available and a huge area of land ripe for arable use – it should, said Lord Boateng, shrug off the ‘basket case’ label, and become the world’s bread basket.
