France Looking For Way Out Of ‘Walled Meadow’ In Africa

Commentary

By Greg Mills

VETERAN French mercenary “Colonel” Bob Denard’s death this week signals more than the end of an era when soldiers of fortune believed postcolonial Africa to be their playground. It also comes at a moment when French foreign policy towards Africa is striking out in a fresh, more positive direction. Indeed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech to students in Senegal this July offered an early, if controversial, indication of change in his government’s Africa policy. The first part of his address identified the wrongs committed by France in Africa. Then he made comment on what was wrong with Africa. “The problem is that Africans have never really entered history,” Sarkozy told his audience at Cheikh Anta Diop University. “The African peasant who has lived with the rhythm of the seasons for millenniums, whose ideal is to live in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal cycle of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world where everything starts over and over again, there is no place for human adventure or the idea of progress.”

According to his advisers, this is presidential longhand for three simple messages: France wants to get rid of its historical baggage and normalize its relations with Africa. Africa must take its share of responsibility for the past as well as the future. The future of the continent rests largely on what Africans, not the French or others, do.

On paper, France’s policy with Africa appears benign. Paris says it supports the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the African Union, particularly in the context of the Group of Eight’s aid commitments to the continent. It is rhetorically supportive of African development, and of African conflict resolution efforts. 15 billion — about half of France’s with China) in part reflecting the 200000 French citizens living on the continent, nor that most French aid (some 9billion annually) is devoted to Africa.

But there are other less positive aspects, ones which Paris aims to change.

There remain five resident French military bases in Africa (in Gabon, Senegal, Djibouti, and Chad), plus a further base in French Re union, altogether hosting about 10000 troops. There are also outstanding “land disputes”, including French rule of Mayotte in the Comoros, and “political” disputes with Angola and Cote d’Ivoire.

Even so, today’s relations represent a huge shift from the era of the Françafrique network, linking postcolonial France in a close commercial-political-diplomatic relationship with African leaders such as Senegal’s Leopold Senghor, Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon’s Omar Bongo and Mobutu Sese Seko of what was then Zaire.

During this era, Africa was promoted as a centerpiece of French foreign policy. Uniquely close relations with Africa were viewed as the differentiating aspect — and advantage — that separated France from other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

Jacques Foccart came to personify French policy during this time. The chief Africanist under Gen Charles de Gaulle in the 1950s, he served through into the Chirac years. His hands-on style never changed, being said to have telephoned African personalities on the subject of Zaire up to the week before his death in 1997, aged 83. At his trial for his 1995 coup in Comoros, Denard alleged that Foccart had provided support.

As secretary-general for the 80-strong Africa section in the presidency, Foccart also was a linchpin in the activities of the external secret service. Indeed, French ties with Africa were, with Foccart at the helm, stronger and tighter even than during the colonial era. There were a greater number, for example, of French technical assistants in sub-Saharan Africa after the virtually en masse decolonization in 1960 than there were colonial administrators before.

Under Chirac, France retreated politically from Africa, recognizing it had become stuck in a vicious cycle of African relations. Hence the Elysee’s preference to “multilateralise” French actions, and to seek African leadership for diplomatic peacemaking initiatives.

Today’s new generation has brought bigger changes. As of four months ago, the Africa presidential policy “cell” is no more. Instead three officials are seconded from the foreign ministry to the Elysee to cover Africa in a 10-strong global diplomatic advisory team. Gone is the mix, in an official’s words, “of Foccart’s secret relations with public and commercial interests”. And there is today a corresponding analytical focus less on “how” France should engage than “why”.

Three numbers are said to capture Sarkozy’s shift in French policy towards Africa: six, 14 and 1,2-billion.

The president was only six in 1960, meaning he has little of the emotional connection with Africa that bound his predecessors. The distance from Africa to Europe across the Gibraltar Strait is 14km. That sharpens French policy minds on preventing the spread of “bad” influences from Africa, they note, such as refugees, drugs, crime, and disease. More positively, Africa’s population will, at current rates, hit 1,2-billion in 2025, offering a large market for traders and investors, a burgeoning opportunity that France feels it is missing out on.

“Thanks to the Chinese,” an Elysee official commented, “we also rediscovered that Africa is not a continent of crises and misery, but one of 800-million consumers.”

Sarkozy’s policy towards Africa is thus said to be based on a hard-nosed appreciation of French interests in Africa — of European security, of the importance of doing business with an increasingly prosperous Africa, and of a more political “shared need” also to “regulate globalization” ensuring a “more multi-polar world”. For the latter read, a diplomatic bulwark against US perceived hegemony.

Sarkozy is expected to announce further changes to France’s Africa policy during his upcoming African trip in February next year. That this signal might occur in SA hints at two reasons behind the change: the need to de-emphasize the Francophone dimension in strengthening relations with SA, the country French officials view primus inter pares on the continent. The latter is not just because of its economic status (SA accounts for 40% of French trade with sub-Saharan Africa), but due to a recognition by Paris that “we need a politically strong back-boned partner in Africa, even if a sometimes difficult one”.

Of course there will be resistance to a less Francophone-centric policy in Africa. There is already pushback from the French-speaking African community. Sarkozy’s plan to introduce quotas for African emigration to France has apparently been met by demarches from the Francophone states that they receive preferential treatment.

Yet French officials agree their country needs to find a way out of its pre carre (literally, “walled meadow”) with a small number of African states and “get into Africa and engage with the continent’s major powers”.

There is talk of extending SA’s black economic empowerment approach to French companies in Africa. Ultimately, whether France is able to gain support at home and in Africa for its intentions depends on whether there are shared interests — for development, growth, security — that transcend a small elite. It will demand a shared perspective by African states towards all external actors of the key principles of development, including governance, transparency and the rule of law.

Just across from the entrance to the foreign affairs ministry on the Boulevard St Germain is a toy shop advertising Tintin’s adventures in space, undersea, in America and elsewhere. Africa is notably missing, the mythical Belgian’s exploits in the Congo being regarded as demeaning. Today’s foreign policy adventurer, Sarkozy hopes to put Africa closer to the centre of French foreign policy, speaking of the continent in terms of a “common destiny”.

The benefits and endurance of these overtures will, however, depend principally not on what Paris does, but on what it does together with Africa. The determinant of success will be mutual interest, not the urges of history, culture, language and emotion.

Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, and did not watch a single game of rugby while recently researching in Paris.

Source: Business Day

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