Anthony Sampson: Blair must listen to the African people, not to their governments and economists

The remarkable ability of Africans to improvise and survive the worst disasters can never be explained by purely economic equations

Are we at last listening to what Africans need and want, as opposed to what we think they need? That is the real question behind Tony Blair's Commission for Africa, which met in Ethiopia this week, and will soon be preparing its report. The British government is emphatic that it is listening closely: half the members of the commission are Africans.

Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development, has compared it to the 1980 Brandt commission on North-South relations, chaired by the former German chancellor Willy Brandt, but Benn explained that Brandt was looking at the South, while the Blair commission would be working with Africans, and listening.

The distinction is very misleading, as I know, because I served as editorial adviser to the Brandt commission, over two years. Like Blair's commission, half its members came from the developing world, and the members from the North - including such sceptics as Ted Heath and Katharine Graham from The Washington Post - spent endless meetings listening to the African and Asian members making long speeches about the need for a fair deal between North and South.

But the real communication between the two sides was constantly frustrated by entrenched positions. Many members from the South felt committed to represent official viewpoints, and to uphold the "New International Economic Order", which aimed to change drastically the balance of power between North and South, after the apparent victory of the oil producers in Opec.

The viewpoint of the North was too heavily influenced, I thought, by the dogmatic theories of economists at the IMF and the World Bank, who had their own procrustean remedies involving "structural adjustment". And the secretariat was dominated by economists - to Brandt's regret - who played the major role in preparing the evidence and recommendations.

The eventual Brandt report included bold proposals, including increasing aid from the North to 1 per cent of GNP by 2000, requiring a "transfer of resources on a very considerable scale". In Britain the report became a bestseller, taken up by passionate campaigning groups. But the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher, with their harsh economics and Cold War perspective, dashed the hopes that the report would be implemented.

And over the next two decades the Western governments, including Britain, continued to see the developing world, and particularly Africa, in their own image, without listening much to Africans. They protected their own farmers to exclude African exporters from world markets They gave more attention to selling arms and buying oil from Africa than in overcoming famines or preventing civil wars.

British governments were listening much more to their construction companies or to British Aerospace than to small African enterprises. The monuments to British aid were the unnecessary convention centres and arsenals of weapons, rather than increased crops and revived villages.

Ordinary Brits still had a deep-felt desire to give practical help to the African grass-roots, which showed itself in their support for Bob Geldof, who launched his spectacular Live Aid movement in the wake of the Ethiopian famine 20 years ago. And the fruits of that campaign can be seen in many rural projects, including the revival of Ethiopian agriculture which was celebrated this week.

But the enthusiasm of idealistic Brits can have its own limitations. The image of the "good man in Africa" provides an important motivation but it brings the danger of missionary zeal, which can easily ignore what Africans really want. And it is always harder to find articulate representatives for ordinary Africans than heads of governments, who have their own ambitions and agendas.

As conditions in Africa worsened, Tony Blair took up the challenge to do something for Africa, "the scar on the world's conscience". He had been encouraged to intervene by the successful military intervention in Sierra Leone, for peacekeeping. And it was Bob Geldof who persuaded him to set up the Commission for Africa.

There is no reason to doubt Blair's genuine commitment. But has his commission really ensured that they will be listening to the African people in the villages, as opposed to the governments in the capitals who are part of the problem? And can they can avoid the deadly embrace of officialdom?

Blair has emphasised that his commission is made up of serving ministers, as opposed to the ex-ministers like Heath in the Brandt commission, who will be in a position to implement their proposals. But serving ministers are also more likely to be constrained by the conventional attitudes of their own bureaucracies.

And the Blair commission's secretariat appears once again to be dominated by economists, with strong backing from the Treasury, headed by Nick Stern from the World Bank. Gordon Brown assures me they are human economists, and it is true that Stern, and some others in the secretariat, have seen Africa's problems in the field. But anyone who has travelled through Africa knows the limitations of the conventional wisdom of the World Bank.

The remarkable ability of Africans to improvise and survive the worst disasters can never be explained by purely economic equations: it is often better explained by anthropologists, sociologists or reporters. It is the resilience of African culture, with its strengths as well as its weaknesses, that provides the greatest hope for the continent.

And it is African women, with all their fortitude and arduous work, who hold the keys to the continent's development, more than the men who prefer theories and giving orders. The Commission for Africa has three women, including the American senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker and Linah Mohohlo, the governor the Bank of Botswana. But only Anna Tibaijuka, the director of UN Habitat in Tanzania, can claim to represent ordinary black women.

All official commissions are liable to exclude the inarticulate human voices and the unquantifiable social, religious or tribal elements, which can never be neatly defined like economic statistics. Yet it is just those elements that will determine Africa's future.

Of course, the Blair commission must rigorously work out how to implement new economic arrangements which will ensure a fairer deal for African farmers and traders to compete in world markets, and this can be done only by experienced economists and strategists who can negotiate with the other industrial powers of the G8, when Britain assumes the chairmanship next year. But the greater problem is how to translate international agreements into African behaviour on the ground. And that requires the kind of understanding and presentation that can be expressed only by Africans, or by people who have worked with them at close quarters.

So as the Blair commission now prepares to write its report in London, I implore it to avoid the deadly economists' jargon that crept into the Brandt report, about "indigenous technological capabilities", or "redistribution of productive resources". It needs to put its case in words that make sense not only to British voters, but also to the only people who can really implement it: the Africans in the field, particularly the women, for whom the recommendations mean life or death.