UK slashing aid budget sends out 'damaging signal'

As someone who has spent quite a lot of time in Africa reporting on China's engagement with the continent wherever you went you would often see a familiar logo.

This was that of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, known best by its abbreviation DFID, which would always be working on some aid development project somewhere.

Being British myself the aid department had a particular resonance but nonetheless it was a significant player alongside China, the World Bank and other international organizations.

It was therefore sad to see that in the recent autumn statement delivered by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak that the UK was reneging on its commitment to spend 0.7 percent of its GDP on overseas aid and will now spend just 0.5 percent instead.

This amounts to a£4 billion ($5.38 billion) cut but one that is effectively£7 billion because the UK economy is forecast to contract this year by 11.3 percent from the impact of the pandemic.

The move was seen as throwing red meat to his right wing Conservative backbench MPs who have never liked the target anyway.

It comes on top of DFID being absorbed into a new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office with the plan for aid now to be used as a tool of foreign policy.

Former UK prime minister David Cameron, whose government enshrined the United Nations Millennium Development Goal target in UK law, was saddened by the move.

"It said something great about Britain, not just that we care about tackling global poverty... it was that we were going to do something about it and that we were going to lead and show the rest of the world," he said after the announcement.

One of the depressing aspects about the debate on aid in the UK is how countries like China and India become dragged in about where the UK should give its aid.

In the last DFID annual report, it was revealed that£71 million was spent in China and that this was somehow wasteful, even though it involved education and other collaborative projects.

China is deemed by the outraged British tabloid press to be a rich country when, in fact, it is an emerging economy with a per capita income a quarter of that of the UK. The whole aid relationship between the two countries also obviously began when that disparity was much greater. India, also bizarrely seen as wealthy in this parallel universe, has some of the poorest people on the planet.

The proposed cut is likely to have serious consequences. By some estimates it could lead to nearly 1 million young girls being deprived of education and as many as 100,000 avoidable deaths due to millions being deprived of clean water and vaccinations and that in the middle of a pandemic.

The move though is already popular with those who are the first to vent their fury at asylum seekers who cross the English Channel in makeshift boats.

They are blinkered, however. By some estimates the population of Africa is set to double from now to 2.5 billion by the mid century. Even if you didn't believe in any concept of shared humanity, you would have a vested self-interest to support development.

China is one country that has always believed in supporting development, even when it was a very poor country itself.

A shining example of that was the construction of the 1,860-kilometer Tanzam railway in the 1970s which connected the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania with the town of Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

In terms of Africa alone, this commitment has grown to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, at which China committed $60 billion of new funding at its last summit in Beijing in September 2018.

I remember interviewing Meles Zenawi, the late Ethiopian prime minister, at his residence in Addis Ababa in 2013, who was particularly critical of the West's policy to replace aid with private sector investment.

"Well, we have waited 30 years and nothing much has happened," he told me.

He was far more impressed in what China was doing to his country in terms of building roads, telecommunications, light rail and the new gleaming headquarters of the African Union headquarters.

China has, of course, since upped its engagement with the developing and, indeed, developed world with initiatives such as Belt and Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

It recognizes the importance of development because it has seen the benefits of it for itself over the past 40 years with its own miraculous transformation.

As for Sunak, he may have gained popular support for his miserly slashing of the UK's aid budget, but he has also shown no vision and sent out a very damaging signal at a time when his country post-Brexit should be reaching out to the world.

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn