Tanzania: President Kikwete's plea to Brown

Obscene would be putting it too strongly, but it did seem odd talking about dead African children amid the gilded Louis XIV interiors of Lancaster House last week.

One of London’s finest townhouses, just across the road from Buckingham Palace, this is where Rhodesia’s independence from Britain was signed in 1979.
 
Robert Mugabe was a signatory 30 years ago, but the man who turned southern Africa’s breadbasket into a basket-case is no longer welcome here. Instead, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Presidents Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Jakaya Kikwete of Liberia and Tanzania were there on Africa’s behalf – begging DFID and anyone who would listen for more money, as the global recession begins to bite.

 
Johnson-Sirleaf put their case most simply and directly: “The cost of (economic) recovery is much less than the cost of peacekeeping and the return to conflict.”  In short: do you want Africa to go forwards or backwards?    
 
The leaders want Gordon Brown to bat for them at next month’s G20 summit. And as per my posting on Zambia, what that essentially means is freeing up more money from the IMF and World Bank and doing it in a hurry on a continent where falling income endangers lives.

“We are asking for a lot more speed of action,” was how Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s Finance Minister, put it, though I’m told that behind the scenes he’s far more blunt than that. 
 
Tanzania is a case in point. Forty per cent – yes 40 per cent – of its government’s budget comes from foreign loans and aid. And what income it can generate itself is falling.

Since last July, the price Tanzania can get for its cotton has halved to 41 US cents a pound. Its coffee and diamonds are also less in demand. Foreign investors have put two major industrial projects on ice.
 
A year ago, President Kikwete made a sweeping pledge: to spend 15 per cent of government revenue on a strategy to keep more newborn children alive in a country where 38 per cent of infants are severely malnourished.

In our interview in the Lancaster House dining room (above), President Kikwete concedes that this bold plan will need reassessing: “We may not be able to reach the revenue level because of the contraction of demand for our commodities.”
 
And he says he needs MORE donor support, not less: “We don’t have the capacity for the huge bailout packages that you have in the West. That’s why we want Gordon Brown to be our voice…”

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