India has also offered to share with African nations its experience in using remote-sensing and satellite-imagery for weather-forecasting, natural resources management, land use and land-cover mapping and a variety of other applications.
What has not always worked as well as it might is the pace of implementation of many Indian projects in Africa. It is true that as a democratic country we have to have consultations and build consensus. Sometimes our overly strong bureaucracy takes too literally its obligation to act as a check and balance on decision-making. But if the government is sometimes accused of being slow, once it takes a decision to go forward, progress is steady.
There is an undoubted need, however, for more careful management and audit of disbursements made through the government’s lines of credit for Africa. In 2009, several reports appeared of questionable transactions relating to the export of rice at subsidized prices to several African countries, but these were never fully investigated and the allegations have largely petered out. Given that these lines of credit amount to considerable sums of money—more than $5 billion, or 25,000 crore—there is a fundamental need for greater transparency in the allocation of funds, the choice of projects, the drawing up of the requirements for bidders and the selection of contractors. This should not be allowed to slow the process down, but it is essential that India’s relations with Africa not be reduced in the eyes of some critics to an unsavoury boondoggle.
One way of compensating for the deficiencies of the governmental sector in this model of cooperation is India’s increased reliance on its burgeoning private-sector investment in Africa, which has acquired much greater visibility in the last few years. This has been more manifest ever since India liberalized its own economic system in 1991 and, in the twenty-first century, private Indian investment in Africa is giving the relationship a new vigour and impetus. Indian companies have made large investments in Africa running into several billion dollars in industry, agriculture, infrastructure and human resource development.
An illustrative example of an Indian private-sector success story is Vedanta Resources’ turnaround of Zambia’s copper mining industry—which had been nationalized in the late 1960s, driven into ruin, resold to the former owners, Anglo American PLC, the South African mining giant, which failed to revive them and were then essentially abandoned. Vedanta, an FTSE 100 Indian metals and mining group, came in 2004 to buy a majority shareholding in Konkola, the jewel in the crown of the Zambian mines, and other properties, and made them hugely profitable: its CEO, Anil Agarwal, likes to boast that he is ‘26 per cent of Zambia’s GDP’. Other examples, big and small, abound: Tata Steel’s $1.5-billion joint venture in an iron project in Cote d’Ivoire, Apollo Tyres’ manufacturing plants for rubber automobile tyres, and many ventures in the continent’s fastest-growing region, East Africa, which has the oldest historical links with India, and some of the largest communities of Indian origin.
Indian private investment is largely not government led or government subsidized but governed by the logic of commercial opportunities. And yet they are able to make a serious contribution to development. I never tired of telling my African interlocutors about the magnificent work being done by Indian entrepreneurs who have introduced low-cost Kirloskar irrigation pump sets in West Africa. These pump sets have made a significant impact in increasing the food production capacities of some African countries, particularly Senegal. It is a good example of appropriate technological and investment intervention, something which serves the felt needs of African communities without requiring them to make huge investments. This can be a good example for others to emulate.
Indian investors are respected across Africa because they are reputed to be effective in the local environment, to ensure the highest employment generation, to not be reticent on transfer of technology and to be quite willing to live among Africans and employ African managers. Their entrepreneurship and business skills—attributes for which the Indian private sector has long been well known—have been buttressed by India’s growing economic clout, which has added to the respect with which they are received. It helps, too, that they leave behind trained Africans well equipped to use the newly created assets.
The combined net flows from India to Africa emerging from governmental credits and private-sector investment, therefore, form another part of our sustainable model of cooperation with Africa, which has in turn given a huge incentive to many Indian companies to seek opportunities in Africa. Cumulative Indian investments in Africa rose to $90 billion in 2010 and are likely to grow significantly in the years ahead. Indian investment in Africa is contributing to the fulfilment of domestic demand in African countries, intra-African trade and foreign exchange earnings through exports. The pharmaceutical sector is a good example. Indian pharmaceutical companies like Ranbaxy and Cipla are not just supplying low-cost generic drugs, particularly anti-retroviral drugs to combat AIDS, across the African continent; many also have production facilities in Africa. The Indian pharmaceutical industry has established such a significant reputation for providing Africans with urgently needed health care, at affordable prices, that Chinese knock-offs of Indian drugs have been found smuggled into several African countries, with fake Indian packaging. If imitation is the best form of flattery, counterfeiting is the ultimate confirmation of the indispensable role Indian pharma is playing in Africa.
Indian investment in agriculture and horticulture, on the other hand, contributes mainly to exports, with Indian firms increasingly attracted by the large tracts of fertile land available in many African countries, especially in regions blessed with abundant rainfall and sunshine. The idea that Africa could become a breadbasket for India, as Indian domestic demand outstrips the country’s capacity to produce the food it needs, has begun to make Africa an important element in Indian thinking about long-term food security.
This has led, perhaps inevitably, to what Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi described as ‘ill-informed and even ill-intentioned loose talk’ about Indian farming companies conducting ‘land-grabbing’ in his country, charges that had indeed been aired in the Indian press. When I met Zenawi in 2010, he was quite open about the fact that Ethiopia has 3 million hectares of unutilized land, which it intended to lease out to foreign agricultural enterprises. An Indian investor, Krishna Karaturi, had already made a reputation for himself by growing roses in Ethiopia for export to Europe, and in 2011 he was awarded a lease of 300,000 hectares in the Gambela province to produce maize. ‘We want to develop our land to feed ourselves rather than admire the beauty of fallow fields while we starve,’ Zenawi declared, adding, ‘I want to reassure Indian companies that they are welcome here. We want them to come and farm what is virgin land.’ Similar offers from Mozambique, Liberia and other countries indicate a productive future for Indian investment in agriculture, horticulture and floriculture in Africa.
All these investment flows are matched by a multi-tiered cooperative partnership which involves, almost uniquely, a major engagement with pan-African institutions, notably the African Union (AU). While India has had successful bilateral partnerships with most African countries over decades, its willingness to inject multilateralism into its relations with Africa has been broadly seen as reflecting a more complete partnership and greater respect for Africa than other partners offer. A substantial amount of the funds committed for capacity building in Africa is being channelled through the AU in a joint action plan involving shared decision-making on the allocation of resources. In West Africa, India has devised a regional initiative called the Team-9 framework for cooperation, which has brought in a regional focus for its development projects and concessional loans; African countries in the region have been clamouring to be included. This co-equal multilateralism is an important feature of India’s new model of engagement with Africa.
India’s trade with Africa has been growing rapidly. Two-way trade rose from some $5.5 billion in 2001–02 to over $46 billion in 2010–11, which represents an almost ninefold increase in
as many years. There is even talk of aiming for $70 billion by 2015. Even so, the true potential is much greater and the spread and the composition of the trade have to be substantially diversified. With a view to increasing trade flows between India and Africa, India has also extended a duty-free tariff preferential scheme for the fifty least developed countries, thirty-four of which are in Africa. This covers 94 per cent of India’s total tariff lines and provides preferential market access on tariff lines for 92.5 per cent of the global exports of all least developed countries.
India and Africa are also engaging closely on trade policy; there has been systematic coordination with African countries on the Doha Round of negotiations, especially on agriculture. India has been particularly close to South Africa in concerting positions on international issues of global interest, a process that has been accentuated with the establishment of IBSA, which launched the India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue Forum, a gathering of three large developing countries aiming to reify South– South cooperation. IBSA negotiated successfully together in the Doha Round and at other trade talks, and the three countries meet regularly, though insufficient progress has been made on concluding trilateral trade agreements among themselves. IBSA has set up its own cooperation fund, launching initial projects in Equatorial Guinea and Haiti, though the need for individual country branding of aid projects may still limit the possibilities for IBSA development projects. India also supported the inclusion of South Africa in the BRIC grouping, thus making that Goldman Sachs creation into ‘BRICS’. But so far both BRICS and IBSA have been forums for meetings rather than incipient international organizations; no institutional structures have been created for either group.
In case most of this chapter seems to provide too economics-oriented an analysis, it is worth pointing out that India has also been extensively involved in peacekeeping efforts in Africa over the past six decades. At present, India has over 7000 peacekeepers serving in Africa, including a 5000-strong contingent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The fourth batch of India’s first all-female formed police unit is currently deployed in Liberia. In addition to peacekeeping, this unit has been successful in reaching out to the most vulnerable sections of society—women and children—and in inspiring women who have so often been victims of war to see themselves also as sources of succour and strength in this recently war-torn society. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected President on the continent, told me when I met her that the Indian women police had inspired many young Liberian women to volunteer for their country’s security service.
The presence of Indian-Africans adds an intriguing element to the relationship, especially when their numbers are a significant percentage of the population, as in Mauritius, disproportionately influential, as in South Africa or Nigeria, or visible and sometimes contentious, as in East Africa. I had the pleasure of visiting Mauritius in 2010 to participate in the Aapravasi Diwas—a historic date steeped in poignant memory, which marked the arrival of the first Indian labourers to that country. History is unforgiving to those who do not remember the forefathers and foremothers who sacrificed so much to convert a new, rocky, inhospitable land—in the face of both nature’s fury and human cruelty, and through lives of unimaginable torment and drudgery—into a flourishing paradise. Commemorating the Indian connection reifies le devoir de mémoire (‘the duty to remember’) and of course unites the mother country with its diaspora. Similar stories can be told of the Indian presence in South Africa.
There are, on the whole, an estimated 2 million people of Indian origin living in Africa. Indian businessmen, teachers and even missionaries can be found in every African country. Though there have been no incidents of racial tension in recent years to mirror the dark days of 1972 when President Idi Amin threw ethnic Indians out of Uganda, the Indian diaspora has tended to remain distinct, engaging with but often not integrating into the political and cultural environment of their host countries. There is all too little intellectual or cultural exchange between India and Africa; journalists and academics from each are rarely to be found in the other. One point of cultural contact, amusingly enough, is the popular cinema of Bollywood. I have lost count of the number of African leaders I have met who spoke to me with nostalgia of growing up in small towns or villages in Africa, looking forward to the arrival of the latest Bollywood movie in the nearest town. This is an affinity India can, and should, build on.
A vibrant India and a resurgent Africa are thus witnessing an intensification of relations and growing convergence of interests in their common quest for sustainable economic growth and development. Our partnership encompasses priority sectors integral to the developmental goals of Africa in the twenty-first century. The potential for growth and development in this relationship is considerable. There is a growing demand in Africa for developing infrastructure, new technologies, engineering services and manufacturing capabilities for local value addition. These offer excellent opportunities to Indian businesses in Africa, and to millions of young people in Africa who can be employed in the manufacturing and services sectors.
Some suggest that India and Africa have little in common. Nothing could be further from the truth. We face emergent common challenges of food security, energy security, pandemics, terrorism and climate change. Africa and India also share a common societal commitment to pluralism, to inclusiveness across distinctions of region or religion, tribe or clan, language or class, and to the creation of a world that is fair to all its inhabitants. Our shared vision of the world should enable us to work together on the vital challenges facing our peoples, and for the world as a whole, whether in our bilateral relations or multilaterally. In my own experience, I have found that African leaders look at India not the way they look at the West or China—with admiration bordering on awe, and with gratitude admixed with resentment. Rather, they see India as a sort of kindred spirit—a country that has faced problems very similar to those confronted by most African countries, and which has managed in no small measure to overcome them through methods which strike African leaders as replicable in their own lands. From an African point of view, the successes of America and China may be intimidating; those of India seem accessible. The queue of African heads of state and government seeking to visit India is extraordinarily large, given India’s limitations in accommodating more than a modest number of state visits every year.
Ironically for a country focused on capacity building in Africa, India suffers from its own capacity limitations in the continent, with far too few embassies in crucial countries, and the existing ones far too thinly staffed. At a time when I was spearheading a major thrust into improving relations with Liberia—newly emerging from civil war but overflowing with minerals (notably iron ore) and large tracts of lush agricultural land, to name just two assets—India relied there entirely on an intrepid businessman who served as our honorary consul-general, while our official diplomacy covered the country through an embassy situated in the French-speaking Cote d’Ivoire. Indian companies and citizens need the reassurance of a supportive embassy presence if they are to be encouraged to work in a new country. There is also a case to be made for India’s embassies in Africa to be staffed by a larger number of young and energetic diplomats anxious to establish their reputations, rather than by those promoted from the ranks or at the tail end of their careers, who might tend to regard an African posting as a punishment and who are disinclined to develop much interest in the local language or culture.
On frequent visits to Africa in pursuance of the many consultative mechanisms that have been established with New Delhi, Indian officials have made it clear that India envisions an Africa that is self-reliant, economically vibrant and at peace with itself and the world. In saying this they could look to a familiar source of inspiration. While highlighting the vitality of the African continent, Jawaharlal Nehru had said, ‘Of one thing there can be no doubt, and that is the vitality of the people of Africa. Therefore, with the vitality of her people and the great resour
ces available in this great continent, there can be no doubt that the future holds a great promise for the people of Africa.’
It is this promise that our partnership with Africa seeks to fulfil. It has become fashionable these days to ask openly what we expect of each other. This perhaps overlooks the fact that India and Africa have been close to each other over so many centuries that our relationship is not one of immediate give and take but has been that of a family where each one provides the best advice, the best support and the best sharing of experience, so that when we walk the same path, we learn from each other and do not make the same mistakes. India will offer its fullest cooperation to harness the great potential of the African people for the cause of Africa’s progress and development. As I stated when addressing the UN General Assembly in 2009 on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development: ‘The objective of our partnership is to cooperate with all the countries of Africa, within the limits of our capacities and capabilities, in their efforts towards achieving economic vibrancy, peace, stability and self-reliance. Towards this end, it is our intention to become a close partner in Africa’s resurgence.’
In the process, a global debate has arisen as to whether India and China—the other Asian power that has made major inroads into Africa in recent years—are engaged in a new ‘scramble for Africa’, reminiscent of the one among European powers in the nineteenth century. Africa’s mineral wealth and energy resources are undoubtedly of interest to both countries, but the notion of a competition for Africa, let alone a scramble, is considerably exaggerated. While it is true that each country has sought advantages for itself across the continent, they have also cooperated with each other; India and China are jointly exploring and developing a Sudanese oilfield, for instance. And when China decided to set up an embassy in Liberia, it was India’s honorary consul-general, a long-standing presence in Monrovia, who facilitated the Chinese ambassador’s efforts to establish his embassy.