British arms to Africa

The new British Conservative-Liberal Democratic government, the first coalition administration in the country since the end of the Second World War, is grappling with significantly cutting the record national budget deficit of £160 billion during the life of the current parliament. The deficit represents about 11 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. Massive cuts are therefore expected across the entire spectrum of government departments’ expenditure with only healthcare and overseas “aid” funding provisions preserved. But even on health services, positions of health managers and other administrators as well as hitherto powerful supervisory boards are being abolished.

So, not even spending on crucial departments as education nor indeed defence (despite the war in Afghanistan and the other country’s security commitments elsewhere in the world) is spared, such is the gravity of this crisis of the British budget deficit. This financial year’s (2010-2011) defence ministry’s core budget is £37 billion and the impending cuts mean that officials here are already looking for sources beyond the treasury (finance ministry) to offset any cash shortfalls. One source recently suggested by Peter Luff, minister for defence equipment, is to boost the export of British weapons. For Africa, a continent where Britain is currently the leading global arms exporter, Luff’s comments to the media on the future drive of his department on the subject is ominous indeed: “There’s a sense that in the past we were rather embarrassed about exporting defence products. There is no such embarrassment in this government.”

There is nothing in Luff’s statement which implies that the previous British Labour governments of 14 years (Prime Minister Brown’s and Blair’s) were anywhere “embarrassed” or ethically challenged on British arms sales/ transfers to Africa. On the contrary, it was indeed during the Labour party tenure that Britain acquired that unenviable status as “leading arms exporter to Africa”. As from 2004, Britain’s annual income from selling arms to Africa crossed the £1 billion threshold. Besides being a major arms supplier to such genocide-states as Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Sudan, Britain also sold arms during this period to 10 out of 13 conflict-stricken countries on the continent. These included states in east/central Africa then involved in the so-called Great Lakes’s War where London in fact sold arms to both sides of the principal protagonists (DRC, Rwanda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Uganda), which led Charles Onyango-Obbo, the respected Ugandan journalist, to reflect, at the time, that “Britain is supporting both sides [in the war] – it just robs them of any moral authority and a lot of people rightly do despise the British government on this affair.”

Britain should ban all arms sales to Africa immediately and comprehensively. This act should be a priority implemented by the new Cameron government. Africa must not be the arena where Britain wants to seek urgent financial resources, through arms sales, to ease its budgetary difficulties at home or achieve other goals. As I have argued severally in the past decade, British and other exported arms to Africa are used principally by the local recipient regime to murder its own people(s), often targeted constituent nation(s), as inter-state conflicts/wars have been more of the exception. 15million Africans across the continent have been murdered since May 1966 with the use of these weapons in genocidal campaigns and other intra-state conflagrations. We mustn’t fail to recall that the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide which claimed the lives of 3.1 million Igbo people (a quarter of the nation’s population), the foundational genocide of post-European conquest Africa, was carried out by the Nigeria state with the active involvement of the British government of the day – Labour’s Premier Wilson’s. British support for the campaign included steadfast supply of arms and other logistic and diplomatic backing to the genocidist regime in Lagos throughout the gory and devastating duration of the 42 months of slaughter.

In his major speech in Bangalore (India) last week on one of the prominent threads of the existential threat of our age, Prime Minister Cameron may have opened up a laudable, new vista in international relations discourses that requires statespersons to approach pressing global issues more openly, more honestly, more frankly. Arms to Africa is another prominent thread in this threat. Given Britain’s much embedded role in the thread, Africa and the rest of the world do expect the reforming Cameron to administer the Bangalore treatment to this problem at his earliest opportunity.