Why Jubilee’s foreign policy falls short of global realities

What you need to know:

  • China’s population is forecast to start shrinking in just over a decade, while Africa’s is forecast to keep growing for a long time. In 2050 Africa will be more populous than both India and China
  • The last thing we need is a Government that throws tantrums at customers with ruined holidays. We need Western, Asian, South American, African tourists and investors—we need them all.

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or 40 hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”

“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.

“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”

“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.”

During his trip to China last year the President published a belligerent op-ed articulating his “Look East” foreign policy. 

He talked of the economic rise of Africa and Asia “that rekindles memories of an ancient world economic system of great duration” and of the importance of a secure Indian Ocean to Asian economic development “since it supports regional energy security.”

“Actions to secure the Gulf of Aden and to secure the Horn of Africa coastline from the grip of terrorist groups must be seen in this context.” He is talking about Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia, but makes no mention of Western military and financial support in it. 

“China,” he concludes, “is important to our trade and investment agenda” as are “India and Singapore, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and others such as Brazil, Ukraine and South Africa.” He leaves out Iran and North Korea — but you get the drift.

FLUID FACELESS CAPITAL

Like Cervantes' character Alonso Quixano who reads so many novels that he ends up living out his chivalrous fantasy as Don Quixote, Mr Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta seems to be living out a cloak and dagger diplomacy of a bygone era. He needs to snap out of it.

A man with a decent liberal arts education, the President seems to have forgotten the lesson from the Melian Dialogue, a required reading in Classics 101. 

The dialogue is a fictional account weaved by Thucydides into his History of the Peloponnesian War, of the debate between the leaders of Melos a small island city state, and Athenian emissaries.

The Peloponnesian War was a three decade long hegemonic war between Athens and Sparta.  Athens has besieged Melos and given the Melians the choice to either submit to Athenian rule or be laid waste.

In the dialogue, the Melians take the moral high ground, arguing that they have done no wrong, are entitled to their freedom and even contend that the gods will favour them to triumph in an unjust war.

The emissaries argue realpolitik, pointing out that failing to conquer Melos would make Athens appear weak, which it could not afford, as it would encourage others to defy it:

“For ourselves, we shall not trouble with specious pretenses—either of how we have a right to our empire, or are now attacking you because of the wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which will not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us that you did not join the Spartans, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The Melians chose valour. They were laid waste.

But it is in on the economic front that the President and his foreign policy handlers really tilt at the windmills.

Today’s globalized economy has no East, West, North or South.  It runs on global supply chains and fluid faceless capital that whizzes round the world in nanoseconds. Your adorable iPhone is assembled in China but most of the money you paid for it ends up in US. 

CHINA IS AGING

Kenya Airways is burning a serious hole in our trade balance, buying new planes to take Africans to China. Boeing.  Sure, the Embraers are made in Brazil, propelled by Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney engines. American corporations are the biggest foreign investors in China, and China is the biggest buyer of US Government debt.

The President talks of Africa “shaping into a globally indispensable source of raw and value-added materials for industries and consumers in Asia.”  Investors, including the Chinese, are not coming to Africa for raw materials— or rather that is not new, they’ve been doing that for more than a century.  What is new is that Africa is shaping into a significant market.

The engine of Africa’s economic resurgence is consumers. Investors are coming to Africa to sell stuff. African consumers are buying over a hundred million mobile phone handsets a year, and tens of millions of motor cycles, TVs, fridges and microwave ovens. 

They are making merry, quaffing rivers of beer and Scotch, making the Diageos and SABMillers of this world happy.

Sure enough, China needs raw materials, but these Africa will export regardless and China can buy them in the world market.  Oil and gas are popping up all over the place, and the world’s biggest consumer, the US is on course to become self-sufficient in less than a decade.

China like much of the West, is an aging society. “To be rich”, Deng Xiaoping said, “is glorious.”  China’s biggest challenge is that it will grow old before it grows rich.

China’s wage cost is already pricing it out of the sweatshop manufacturing that has been its growth engine for the last three decades.  So China needs to invest its current savings where they will yield the highest returns. 

NUMBERS ON OUR SIDE

At just over 900 million folk, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa today is two thirds of China’s 1.3 billion people.  China’s population is forecast to start shrinking in just over a decade, while Africa’s is forecast to keep growing for a long time.

In 2050 Africa will be more populous than both India and China. Africa will be approaching two billion people, India will be at 1.6 billion and China will be down to 1.3 billion, two thirds of Africa’s.

Africa’s 180 million workforce is a fifth of China’s 850 million today.  But between now and 2050, Africa’s workforce will grow five-fold, while China’s will contract by half.  Africa’s workforce will be twice China’s, and the World’s largest, and youngest.

Both China and the West need Africa to grow and prosper so as to become a big enough market for both trade and investment.  We are, as it were, their pension plans.

The tyranny of numbers is on our side.  We need neither shake fists at the West or suck up to China.  What we ought to be doing is calmly going about our business of positioning ourselves as the World’s gateway to Africa, and Africa’s gateway to the World by building a reputation as a country that is open for business.

The last thing we need is a Government that throws tantrums at customers with ruined holidays. We need Western, Asian, South American, African tourists and investors—we need them all.

If I were the President, each of the tourists evacuated from Mombasa would have left the country with a voucher for an all-expenses paid holiday at a time of their choice. And I would have been at the airport to apologize and hand it to them.

Spare us the theatrics Mr President and get on with the job.