Prime minister resisted calls to abandon tour for fear of missing out on a new Scramble for Africa
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David Cameron pictured with Jacob Zuma, the South African president, at Union Buildings in Pretoria on the first day of his brief tour of Africa on Monday. Photograph: Jerome Delay/AP
LAGOS
When a prime minister faces calls to consider his or her position, wise heads usually counsel against leaving London. An overseas trip is considered foolhardy, as Margaret Thatcher found out when she pressed ahead with a visit to Paris on the day of the first – and ultimately last – round of the 1990 Tory leadership contest.
David Cameron is showing once again his knack for finding himself outside the country at a sensitive moment. When Sir Gerald Kaufman raised questions about the prime minister's future on Monday the prime minister was in Johannesburg and Pretoria on the first day of a two day visit to Africa. There were shades of his visit to Rwanda in 2007 during the severe summer floods in England.
Critics said Cameron showed an arrogance by failing to fly to home early. Some said he should have scrapped the trip altogether when the phone hacking scandal erupted.
Cameron appears to have struck a careful balance. The trip went ahead but Downing Street acknowledged the seriousness of the crisis back home by cutting the trip in half from four days to two, thereby abandoning a return visit to Rwanda and his first trip to the newly created state of South Sudan.
On Monday afternoon No 10 decided to cut short the trip again by abandoning a visit to a Lagos power station on Tuesday afternoon to allow Cameron to fly home from Nigeria in good time to make a statement to MPs on phone hacking on Wednesday.
In the end the prime minister pressed ahead with his visits to South Africa and Nigeria – the two largest economies in Sub-Saharan Africa – for a simple reason. In the world of high diplomacy and international business a cancellation, other than after the death of a relative or a disaster, would have made Britain look weak.
Britain needs to show it is a serious presence if it is to play a role in the new Scramble for Africa – catching up with China which now dominates the continent. Cameron and Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary who accompanied the prime minister on the visit after flying down from North Kenya where he was overseeing Britain's response to the growing famine in the Horn of Africa, are seeking to refashion Britain's approach to the continent.
Aid, as Cameron will argue in a speech in Lagos on Tuesday morning, remains at the heart of Britain's commitment to Africa. Britain is directing around £90m to help alleviate victims of the famine, a figure which dwarfs what Mitchell describes as "derisory" contributions by some European countries.
But there is a second pillar – using Britain's aid programme to help promote economic growth. Mitchell outlined this approach before Cameron's trip in a speech to the London School of Business on 11 July:
British aid and debt forgiveness have, over the years, helped many African economies to stabilise and grow. Now, the coalition government is refocusing its aid programme to fuel the engine of development – the private sector – to help provide Africa's poorest people with the means to create their own wealth.
Ministers acknowledge this is a difficult argument to make while disturbing scenes play out in the Horn of Africa. But they believe that promoting free trade across Africa, which has six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world, could stimulate even more rapid growth. It was just a decade ago that Africa had little or no growth.
Mitchell illustrated his point in a vivid way:
As a single market of one billion people, Africa could rival China or India. But Sub Saharan Africa is a jigsaw of countries, many of them landlocked, and the tariffs and regulations created by national boundaries, get in the way.
The geography isn't great but the solution is clear. African economies need to be more closely integrated with eachother.
Britain hopes that an African free trade area, covering 26 countries from Egypt to South Africa, could boost GDP by $62bn a year. Mitchell added:
If, as some say, world markets are reaching saturation levels then Africa is the next, maybe even the last, big market.
So the prime minister's trip took place after a great deal of thought about how to approach Africa. This reflects the thinking in other European countries, notably Germany. Angela Merkel, the chancellor, last week visited Angola, Kenya and Nigeria. On Saturday Merkel briefed Cameron at length about her trip to Africa on his mobile phone while he watched his children horse riding.
Merkel would probably have been surprised and wondered about Britain's commitment to Africa if the prime minister had abandoned his trip. The German chancellor does, after all, face a challenge which dwarfs anything troubling Cameron. She is looking at the possible collapse of the euro and a deep reluctance among German taxpayers to cough up if, as is often the case, their wealth and expertise are needed.