BRITAIN: Mr Tony Blair's mission to rescue Africa from poverty and conflict was under fire yesterday when the Scottish nationalists insisted the message should come with a ban on Britain's arms trade, writes Rachel Donnelly, in London
The Prime Minister left Britain for a four-day tour of Africa, taking in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal, stressing the West had a moral responsibility to address poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world and warning that failure to do so could breed international terrorism.
Before leaving, Mr Blair told MPs during Prime Minister's Questions it was important to put Britain's 1 per cent of the total world arms trade into context and it was equally important to "take care as to who we sell arms to - we do". Mr Blair was responding to the SNP leader, Mr Alex Salmond, who suggested it would be a better start to his African "mission" if he banned the sale of arms to all groups engaged in conflict.
Illustrating contradictions between the arms trade and fighting international terrorism, Mr Salmond said on the same day the World Trade Centre was attacked, a Ministry of Defence sponsored arms trade fair disclosed it had customers from both sides in the Congo conflict for "state-of-the-art weaponry".
Downing Street is describing Mr Blair's African visit as a "stepping stone" in the run-up to June's G8 summit in Canada and agreement with 15 African countries on the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) initiative, which encourages conflict resolution and economic development linked to education and health.
The theme of tackling African poverty was made clear in an interview in yesterday's London Times, when Mr Blair compared Africa's problems with Afghanistan's ten years ago as it struggled with poverty and drugs, saying: "In the end the impact was felt on the streets of America." Earlier, as Conservative MP, Mr Tony Baldry, opened a debate on Africa with a warning that "one man on one visit will not solve Africa's chronic problems", International Development Secretary, Ms Clare Short, who is joining Mr Blair in Africa, said she hoped the visit would "mobilise real energy" within G8 and the UN to solving its problems.
Mr Blair is expected to make a major statement on how rich nations can support a new African initiative to end poverty on his arrival in Nigeria.
British officials said he would meet President Olusegun Obasanjo today and then make his most important statement on Africa in an address to Nigeria's parliament.
"This will be the first real coherent speech on Africa from the prime minister," one British source said. "It will be a major policy statement. What he wants to try and get at on this trip more than anything else is how the New African Initiative is going to develop and how he can deploy that argument within the G8."
Late last year African leaders, with Mr Obasanjo at the forefront, launched a plan, modelled on the post-war US Marshall Plan for Europe, to target yearly investments of $64 billion to revive ailing African economies.