British officials are engaged in a sharp debate over how to scramble back into Africa
HOW TO PROMOTE a “global Britain” after Britain leaves the European Union? One step is to try to regain some of Britain’s influence in Africa, where it had once been the leading colonial power. Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, will be hosting about a third of the continent’s leaders at an “investment summit” in London on January 20th. Many of them are en route to a bigger shindig in Davos; a handful from pariah states such as Zimbabwe have not been invited.
Partly this is because of cash. Whereas the FCO’s core budget, now £1.1bn a year, has shrunk greatly in the past decade, DFID’s has swollen steadily, since by law it must be at least 0.7% of GDP, a figure enshrined in an act of Parliament in 2015. In 2018 Britain disbursed foreign aid worth £14.6bn, mainly through DFID.
Still, it is tiny compared with what it was, and about a sixth the size of France’s diplomatic operation. According to a report issued last year by the British Foreign Policy Group, a think-tank backed by former ambassadors, in 2017 Britain had 231 diplomats in 31 out of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries. In 16 of those British missions, only one or two diplomats were in situ. Missions to five more countries have since been opened or reopened.
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