Labour's Africa reset is a huge opportunity – and a test of progressive realism

David Lammy and Tanzania foreign minister Mahmoud Thabit Kombo at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Apia, Samoa, October 2024 (Credit: AP Photo/Rick Rycroft/Pool)

This week, the Foreign Secretary’s visits to Nigeria and South Africa have confirmed the start of a five-month consultation, but this momentum will need to be sustained and deepened.

Over the years following the Commission for Africa’s launch, the UK took strategic action to strengthen relationships and support shared progress and prosperity. The leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown delivered action on debt sustainability, public health and education, and tackling corruption and illicit finance, to the benefit of millions.

Moving away from outdated and patronising images of the continent is essential to understand just how much Africa offers the UK in return

Sadly, after the financial crisis, and then sharp aid cuts and strategic incoherence under Tory governments since 2010, most of the benefits of stronger relationships went into reverse. Other states have grown their influence massively through a concerted focus on Africa, including the rapid spread of brutal Russian power in parts of the continent over the past five years. UK interests have already been significantly harmed, and as African countries continue to grow in power, this weakness will become ever more damaging without change.

The potential opportunities are significant. The IMF projects that within the next 10 years, most of the new workers helping workforces to continue growing globally will be in Africa. Africa’s natural wealth is a source of vast opportunity too, from solar and wind potentials, to critical minerals, to uncultivated arable land.

If Africa meets the ambitions of its talented young people, it will drive the prosperity of the future. The UK can play a vital supporting role in making this happen, and reap the mutual economic benefits from doing so.

African diaspora communities, diplomats and business leaders alike have high hopes for the new government. Realising these hopes will require an open, respectful offer of partnership between equals, backed by consistent focus from ministers and civil society alike. The far greater diversity now represented in Parliament, including many new MPs who, like me, have personal connections to the continent, creates further opportunities to show a new face of Britain to Africa.

I recognise other international priorities alongside, including closer European ties. But the long-term importance of Africa to our security and prosperity at home should not be understated. The government’s essential missions on economic growth and clean energy can be achieved all the more effectively if they’re properly supported by renewed trade and critical mineral partnerships in Africa. Labour government objectives on climate action, supply chain security, and geopolitical engagement require integrated and consistent implementation in Africa policy.

There are challenges for the government in pushing this agenda forward. A disastrous Tory decade, with 10 ministers for Africa over the 10 years since 2014, has significantly reduced partners’ trust and confidence in the UK. At the same time, many African partners have long deplored the UK’s lack of focus on our relationships, and are eager to re-engage.

Repairing this is not all about money, but about a set of policies and principles that are relevant and workable, and sticking to that with stability over time. This makes it all the more important to approach a ‘reset’ by fully engaging African partners and diaspora communities, as well as traditional stakeholders, in that process.

The Commission for Africa rightly combined expertise and political heft from the government with a majority of African leaders. This government needs to do still better, recognising and drawing on the wealth and diversity of African leadership in governments, civil society and diasporas alike.

Surely, this is the best way to ensure the UK’s reset is solidly focused on supporting Africa’s priorities and ambitions, because these are shared interests for our own communities. Most importantly, African leaders are rightly clear that the emphasis for re-engagement must be far wider than traditional development aid. This has been recognised by our new government, but I would argue we need to be supporting this with action in Parliament, the media, and in our communities, otherwise a return to business as usual could follow.

UK partnerships for development are an essential and valued part of our offer, particularly if this includes support to strengthen institutional capacity, including public services. But equally we need to be supporting investment that creates good jobs at scale, and that works with the grain of Africa’s national and regional industrial strategies and economic integration plans. This has real promise as a more durable and effective way to realise the developmental, diplomatic and economic mutual benefits of our partnerships in Africa.

A UK with stronger, more confident financial markets, forward-looking industrial strategy that guides private investment, and fast-growing expertise in clean power and related technologies will have far more to offer Africa economically. Long-standing UK strengths such as our higher education and cultural institutions provide equally powerful bases for partnership.

Ultimately, Labour’s mission-driven government has a lot to offer Africa. Moving away from outdated and patronising images of the continent is essential to understand just how much Africa offers the UK in return.

The success of the government’s Africa reset will provide one of the most important tests of David Lammy’s progressive realism, which rightly recognises how the world and Britain’s role in it have changed since the last Labour administration. Labour’s manifesto started in the right place, with an explicit recognition of the growing importance of Africa and the opportunities created. Now, we need the government to deliver on a strategy to seize them.

Calvin Bailey is the Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead

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