Newsroom

SPEAKER High Commissioner

DATE 31/07/2009

"It is a privilege for me to be here today to lecture the cream not just of Ghanaian Staff Officers, but also those from other West African and wider sub-Sahara African countries. (Note: over 50% of this course is made up of students from allied African countries).

British Military Advisory Training Team (BMATT)

GAFCSC has a great reputation for both its academic excellence and its regional reach, attracting many students from neighbouring countries. This greatly enhances the diversity of experience and therefore the richness of learning on the course, as well as helping to increase the understanding between countries in the region.

I am proud to say that the UK has been involved with the teaching here at GAFCSC for over 30 years in one way or another. In recent years this relationship has been especially close and fruitful with a team of 3 British Officers based here permanently as part of the British Military Advisory and Training Team (BMATT).

It is therefore with considerable sadness that the UK is in the process of reducing its level of support to GAFCSC and its neighbour, the Kofi Annan International Peace Keeping Training Centre (KAIPTC). This is the last Course that will benefit from the presence of these full time trainers. So make the most of them.

This change is partly a consequence of success. A whole generation of Ghanaian and other staff officers have been trained to a level equivalent to that which we provide to our own officer corps. Here you now have your own trainers and lecturers who can maintain the same standards. But it is also, to be honest, partly a consequence of the considerable financial constraints that affect our own government as much as they affect yours. It reflects a need to introduce greater strategic prioritisation, which I shall discuss in a minute. It is solely the fact that there is no longer money available in the UK that has caused this change to happen more swiftly than any of us had anticipated, and more swiftly than is ideal for either of us.

I must stress that it certainly does not signal the end of our relationship with Ghana Armed Forces nor with the Staff College itself. But it does place it on a somewhat different footing. Our aim now is to continue to provide training for the trainers, through courses in the UK not available regionally, in order to help the college maintain the high standards it has always achieved. We are also keen to encourage continued, regional participation in these courses, though undoubtedly on a smaller basis than now. GAFCSC is and will remain a regional centre of excellence.

British Foreign Policy

To understand these changes, it will help if I give a fuller picture of Britain’s global priorities in general and in Africa in particular. British Foreign Policy is geared around two fundamentals: Ensuring global peace, and global prosperity. This sounds altruistic, idealistic. But it is based on a hard-headed assessment of our self interest, allied with some core principles, including the international rule of law, the commitment to seeking the common good, and keeping your friends. The safety and wealth of our own citizens, at home in the UK and everywhere overseas, is dependent on that of citizens and countries everywhere. We have learnt long since that autarky – just trying to keep things going at home, independent of the rest of the world – simply does not work. Hence the Foreign Office’s motto: “ Better world, better Britain”.

The world itself is changing fast, and therefore so must we too. As has been said that “The only constant in this world is change”. When the pace of change accelerates, the game will go to the nimblest.

Globalisation has been a long process. It began when the ancestors of Lucy migrated north out of Africa through the Middle East and beyond. Migrating north to find a better life has since become a bit of a habit.

There have been a number of eras of globalisation: under the Persians, the expansion of Greek influence under Alexander the Great, Roman Empire encompassing much of the then known world, the explorations of the sea captains of early modern Europe, established the European empires overseas; the industrial imperialism of the 19th century; the financial imperialism of the 20th century; and of course the technological revolutionaries of the last 40 years that brought communications and information technology to every corner of the globe.

Paradoxically the dissolution of European empires has led only to closer integration, powered by the inexorable logic of the market.

Through all this, what anthropologists call the scale life has grown. Any of us here can be in Accra today, London tomorrow and New York the day after, and we can talk to people in all three simultaneously on the phone. Similar factors effect the lives of people from Stockholm to Sydney.

In this increasingly integrated and overlapping world, how can the UK, or any nation, pursue its national interests? I argue you can do so in three ways:

Firstly through engagement with international organisations. In the UK’s case this means the United Nations, The European Union, and the Commonwealth – the last an increasingly community of values in the diverse world. Alongside these three a panoply of smaller but crucial organisations, from the NATO to UNESCO, from the IMF to FIFA, from the WTO to the IMO. The great thing about international organisations is that they have rules. Rules are very interesting. They are the fundamental basis of human society, as anthropologists have shown, and equally of international society. My son is a lawyer to the extent that he is obsessed by rules. Though one famous text on international relations, by Hedley Bull is called The Anarchical Society, it is not quite so. Everybody likes rules. But international organisations provide a context where even if the rules are fuzzy, there is a process and a place where they can be arbitrated and settled without recourse to war.
A competitive economy. The UK has always been a nation of traders and shopkeepers. That is because we are a lot of people living on a small island, and we could not survive otherwise. Recent studies of the industrial revolution have shown that it was trade more than anything else that provided the motor, and the recent experience in China, India, Singapore, Mexico and 101 other cases demonstrates that this is still the case. To engage in trade, an economy must be globally competitive. Many countries complain the UK benefits from a first mover advantage. But history demonstrates this is not true. Later movers have an advantage by being able to leapfrog technology and exploit their lower cost of production, as Korea and Singapore did. It is argued that they only developed their industries through protection. This is true, but not forever. Those that try to protect their economies indefinitely suffer stagnation (as India did) or disastrous decline, as in the Soviet Union. It was only when India, China, and Mexico, for example, opened up their economies and able to compete globally that their economic growth took off.
My point is that the UK’s open economy is both its strength and its weakness. We have been hard hit by the global recession. But we shall be one of the first economies to bounce back. Already the green shoots of recovery are appearing. It is because we are an open economy that we continue to thrive. And the same goes for the world. It is the consistent and determined liberalisation of trade since the Second World War that has enabled the global economy to grow faster and poverty to be reduced more swiftly than ever before.
Friends: Everybody needs friends, and the UK as much as anyone values the warm bilateral relations that we have with many other countries. They are in practice the lifeblood of our diplomacy.

Africa

Many of our friends are in Africa. Africa is critical to the UK for a whole host of reasons:

Firstly there are deep historical links. Nowhere deeper than here in Ghana, where our two peoples have interacted for some 400 years.

Secondly, Africa is a vast continent with many millions of people and a wide range of resources. It faces great challenges in building a politically stable environment and eliminating the poverty that still afflicts too many. But it also has great potential in its human and natural resources. It has an important part to play in the community of nations and in the global economy.

Nkrumah, one of Ghana’s founding fathers was correct in urging his people to “seek ye first the political kingdom……”. But his philosophy begs the question, what then? Do you seek the political kingdom solely to secure control over the distribution of resources for personal gain or for the benefit of the community? I would argue that he was philosophically correct: that until you have established a stable polity, until you have an accountable and balanced politically structure in which people have trust, it is impossible to build a prosperous economy and a peaceful region.

Nothing destroys wealth faster than war. So avoiding war is crucial to progress.

Much of Africa has suffered from its precipitous integration into the global economy. Beginning with the slave trade in both East and West Africa, the initial impact was largely negative. The outside world disrupted the pre-colonial entities. These were relatively fluid but worked on their own dynamic. They nevertheless broke down under the impact of external intervention, both economic and military, leading to a period of colonial rule. This provided a form of government that could cope with the integration of Africa into the global economy. But it bore within it the seeds of its own destruction, because it was not accountable to the people.

Since 1950 Africa has experienced a period of intense instability from which some countries are at last beginning to emerge. Colonial rule lacked accountability and this led to a loss of trust amongst the people ruled that undermined the government of the state. Nationalist movements acquired legitimacy, but experience in the 50 years since independence has illustrated that it has taken rather longer to establish both balance and accountability within these new states.

The process of political evolution has been conditioned – some would say constrained – by the fixing of borders along colonial lines. In Europe the process of nation building was the product of wars and coups, dynastic marriages and Machiavellian murders, in which borders were about the last things to be fixed. Here, they were the first. In Europe the process was characterised by wars between states; in Africa by wars within states.

People in Africa are increasingly conscious of the cost of allowing political differences to become military struggles. Increasingly people are seeking alternative ways of resolving disputes over resources using democratic political structures to achieve it.

And this is where Britain’s interests, Africa’s future, and the role of GAFCSC coincide.

Firstly, the UK has been at the forefront of international efforts to promote African development. Since independence, Britain’s aid programme has been one of the largest and most effective. We currently provide aid to developing countries of around £6bn pa. Britain has played a crucial role in developing the policies and supporting the work of international development agencies, from the IMF and World Bank to many UN Agencies and the EU. Our commitment to eliminating poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals is second to none, as set out by the current government soon after it came to power in 1997. The Conservative Party has also pledged itself as solidly to maintain Britain’s aid programme and development support. And British investors are keen to bring their own money into Africa to help develop resources, create jobs and value added products that can be sold on the world market.

But they will only come if they are reasonable assured there will be open markets and peace and stability.

A great deal of British effort in the continent has therefore been focussed on trying to resolve conflicts and promote a peaceful political environment.

In West Africa good progress has been made by the UK working in partnership with local governments and regional organisations (ECOWAS and the AU), in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and supporting the peace process in Cote d’Ivoire. We have always tried to support solutions in conflict situation which allow people to choose their own governments, as history suggests that those countries following a Ghanaian path to participatory democracy will do better than those that do not.

The UK, Ghana and other countries in the region have played their part in supporting UN peace-keeping operations. Ghana is the fifth largest contributor of personnel to UN operations in the world, and the UK is the third largest contributor to the peacekeeping budget in the world. We have worked together on a number of operations and will continue to do so. But it is the proliferation of such operations, to which we are committed to contribute 20% of the total budget, that has put pressure on the money we have available for bilateral support to individual countries. We have therefore had to undertake a severe prioritisation exercise.

Britain’s focus is inevitably directed towards where the fire is hottest. And at the moment the fire is hottest not in West but in East Africa. Hence our resources have been prioritised in those areas rather than here. We need to put out the flames in the DR Congo, in the Horn of Africa, and it Sudan, so that they can begin to benefit from the dividend of peace that is beginning to filter through in West Africa.

But we understand that peace is a fragile plant. The consolidation of peace, stability and democracy is just as important as stopping the fighting. This is where we will to continue to work with all the countries of West Africa to support democratic processes, train forces in the arts of peace as much as war, and encourage countries to pursue paths of development that will eliminate poverty (and eliminate the potential causes of conflict –capable and reliable armed forces are crucial in the support of the democratic process).

Here again, in Ghana, you have armed forces that have shown the way in support of the democratic process. The last Presidential elections in December 2008 were a model of the way security forces should act to enable the exercise of democratic choice, not constrain it. Allowing people to live and vote in freedom from fear or intimidation is a key role for the police and armed forces. Acting within the mandate of the Government, being even-handed and level-headed, is a credit to the forces and a benefit to the people. The UK provided funds to help train the police in the arts of policing elections. But we did not need to support training for the Armed Forces, because they knew their role and how to fulfil it already.

I could give you chapter and verse, fact and figures. But the message would be the same. We are here to help, because it is in our interests as much as yours for Africa to develop in peaceful democratic ways towards a more prosperous future. With that shared vision, I look with confidence towards the future.

And I thank you all for your attention and congratulate you on the completion of your course of studies."

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