‘If you DO want to come and invest in Guinea, you will have in the president himself, and in his senior team, partners who can make it happen.’

– TONY BLAIR ADDRESSING A CONFERENCE IN ABU DHABI, NOVEMBER 2013.

The scene was a crowded conference hall in an upscale hotel in Abu Dhabi in November 2013, where a large number of representatives from Guinea had congregated to hear Tony Blair sing the praises of their much-neglected country to an audience that also contained some very wealthy local sheikhs and financiers. At last, they could see their way to reach out to people who could provide some very greatly needed investment. The audience listened in a reverential hush to Blair as he spoke about the opportunities in one of Africa’s poorest countries. Blair’s image filled huge TV screens around the platform. The short speech was greeted with acclaim.

Blair was thanked in generous terms by local dignitaries as he descended from the platform. All eyes turned to him as he passed the President of Guinea: how would he celebrate the partnership with President Alpha Condé that Blair had just described so passionately in his speech?

What occurred next could only be described as a calculated letdown, even snub. Blair briefly shook the President’s hand and disappeared out of the room in a trice, followed by his entourage, to the President’s evident bafflement. (We’ll come back to this conference later in the chapter.)

What did those in the audience conclude about Blair’s attitude towards Africa? Many in the room questioned Blair’s enthusiasm for the subject. Was he just doing it because he was paid? Was he more interested in his local business interests than in Africa’s welfare? Whatever the truth, the audience felt short-changed, their expectations of the great British leader dashed.

On one level, the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) umbrella under which Blair’s team works constitutes Blair’s bid to bring British ‘standards of governance’ to Africa. On another, the AGI gives Blair the chance to make contact with and attract the adulation and acclaim of African leaders, reliving the adulation that he has lost at home, said one observer of Africa. ‘It is an ego trip for a leader that is history at home.’

It is ironic, and not a coincidence, that Blair is seeking to trespass on the ground that Gordon Brown, his long-term adversary as Chancellor and then Prime Minister, made his own while in government. After leaving power, Brown himself has paid particular attention to Africa as the UN’s special envoy for global education.

Blair sought to tap into the growing interest in Africa when he was still Prime Minister. In 2004, during his last government, he set up his Commission for Africa, its board populated by the great and the good, including Bob Geldof, Michel Camdessus (a French banker) and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi Asres (the President of Ethiopia) and members of NGOs. The Commission published its report ‘Our Common Interest’ on 11 March 2005. According to the Commission’s website, the report ‘recognised that everyone would benefit from – and has a role in creating – a strong and prosperous Africa. It put forward a coherent package of measures to achieve this goal.’ A report five years later examined how far its goals had been achieved.

Blair created his own African initiative in 2008, after he had left government, and called it the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI). This became a registered UK charity on 5 November 2009. AGI’s first chief executive Kate Gross died at the end of 2014. Blair’s work in Africa for the AGI is done on a pro bono basis; Blair’s office insists that Tony Blair Associates has no commercial clients on the continent, so Blair could not be trading advice to governments for a commercial payback. On the other hand, representatives of JP Morgan Chase have been known to accompany him on trips to Africa, for example to Nigeria in 2010. Nigeria is Africa’s most dynamic economy and AGI has connections to that country.

How seriously should Blair’s commitment to Africa be taken? One observer in a leading African charity is highly sceptical. She told us that Blair sees African leaders through a very simplistic prism. ‘He sees good guys and bad guys. John Kufuor, who used to be the President of Ghana, Museveni of Uganda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia are all good guys. But a lot of these people didn’t turn out so well.’ (One might include Colonel Gaddafi in that list.) Blair thinks he can have a unique effect on Africa, going where others have failed, and that was the prompt for the launch of his Commission on Africa, in 2004.

For all Blair’s haughtiness on the public stage, as we saw in the investment conference in Abu Dhabi referred to above, the AGI’s mission, as expressed on its website, makes every effort to appear unpatronising. The language embodies the rhetoric and clichés of the professional aid donors, replete with largely vacuous jargon.

It goes as follows:

Elsewhere, the AGI website says,

We work at two levels: At the political leadership level, Tony Blair draws on his ten years as Prime Minister to offer leaders the kind of advice on reform that only someone who has stood in a leader’s shoes can give. At the same time our teams, based permanently in each country, work shoulder-to-shoulder with counterparts to put in place the ‘nuts and bolts’ needed to get things done.

The AGI says it provides the systems for African leaders to build centralised cabinet-style structures around the country’s president to give him more power over his fellow ministers. It acts as a form of shadow civil service, discreetly and with a very low public profile. The AGI seeks to impress the President by saying that the same systems enabled Blair to carry out his transformation and modernisation of Britain, for which he is famed.

Critics of the AGI say its mission of ‘capacity building’ and ‘focus on governance’ is a euphemism for market liberalisation, making the countries more business-friendly for foreign investors (JP Morgan clients are now more involved in Sierra Leone and Rwanda, for example) at the expense of the infrastructure reform that would make a serious difference to poverty and human rights.

AGI AND THE EBOLA CRISIS

AGI policy towards its activities in Africa shifted sharply with the Ebola outbreak in the middle of 2014. The disease took root at the very heart of the AGI empire, in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, and the organisation moved staff from the more familiar role of advising ministers of commerce on trading policies and bureaucratic efficiencies to roles more targeted at improving responses to the Ebola outbreak. The well-educated output of top American and British universities brought their technological expertise to the systems used by the local populations to report their suspicions of symptoms of Ebola as well as the deaths of relatives, whose bodies need to be removed for burial.

The AGI staff occupy government offices in Freetown in Sierra Leone and Monrovia in Liberia, isolated from any risk to health, but, as one official told us that ‘at last they have found a raison d’être. It may not be governance exactly, but the leaders find they are doing good works’. AGI staff are serving as technocrats in a region that is missing many technical skills. Their language is detached from the human tragedy, although that is not to say that these young Westerners whom Blair has put there are not affected by the trauma they see around them.

AGI talks about how it organises ‘surveillance operatives’ to visit the homes of the sick and dying to ensure they are observing the quarantine requirements. Victoria Parkinson, an AGI executive in Freetown, told us, ‘The burial needs to be mobilised. We have to set that up, in conjunction with other partners, through a command-and-control structure. There is a big piece about ensuring that anyone who has died of Ebola is quickly and safely collected and buried in a dignified medical burial.’ Parkinson operates a system of whiteboards from her ‘command-and-control’ centre to check that the response to a report of a case of Ebola is efficient.

Cries for help using the emergency 117 number in Sierra Leone are described by the AGI staff as ‘phone data’ that needs to be analysed by upgraded communications systems. Call centres are now staffed by ever larger numbers of operators in Freetown. Emily Stanger, a Harvard-educated Texan who works for AGI, told us, ‘The number of calls using the 117 hotline has grown sixfold since August.’ Stanger, who works out of Freetown, says operators must prioritise the severity of the call. ‘We are receiving so many calls a day and there are not enough health workers and beds and community surveillance operators to visit everyone on the same day. We are in the unfortunate circumstance where decisions and priorities need to be made by operators.’

Yet the sick and suffering are happily benefiting from this access to Western expertise. Stanger says, ‘We put in a new software system to allow us to track the calls and quickly analyse the data. During the house-to-house campaign in August 2014, the call volume went up to over 1,500 calls Ebola-related a day. It is now 1,200 calls. The response has improved. Before, people might need to call the line four or five times while people waited for a response, to pick up a body or waiting for someone to come to their home after reporting someone sick. Now we are much quicker.’

An incident-management system in Monrovia enables Elizabeth Smith, a UK-educated Blair consultant, to process results using metrics. These are then passed to her political masters in the office of the Liberian Government’s chief of staff for action. ‘We make sure people are clear about different pillars of our response. These pillars are case management, tracing contacts of the sick and looking at and analysing data. We check that information flows to the incident-management meeting in a form government can understand.’

For all the management speak, Blair’s consultants feel torn by the terrible human tragedy. On their way to their government offices, they see bodies on the streets. Parkinson says she feels most pain turning on the television at her Freetown apartment and seeing bodies being removed to morgues. ‘There are hard days for us but we need to maintain focus. We need to keep plugging on. It is not just names or numbers on a whiteboard: it is people. I am not as hardened as some people. It can be really tough.’

While the experiences of Blair’s teams are clearly traumatic, they are little shared by the patron. He had made just one flying visit to the region by the middle of November that year, when he met the presidents of the affected countries and gave a series of interviews, including one to the BBC, giving some magisterial (and pessimistic) comments on the state of the battle against Ebola.

Curiously, AGI has not been involved in Guinea, leading some to surmise a rift between President Condé and the former British Prime Minister. AGI is seen by Blair (as shown by a passage on the AGI website) as a continuation of the UK’s commitment to Sierra Leone following the establishment by Blair of a two-thousand-strong military force in the country, supporting its government when he was Prime Minister. This intervention in the country’s civil war was regarded as his most (and only) successful foreign intervention.

Since being PM, I’ve had a team here in Sierra Leone helping the government, they have been here for 6 to 7 years now. We have a good relationship going back over a long period of time. The tragic thing for the country is that before this Ebola crisis, it was making a lot of progress on the economy. And you can really see the difference in Sierra Leone today from a few years ago. They are going to lose some time because they will have to pick their economy back up and make sure the country goes on a forward path again.

For the most part, Blair prefers to see his African troops as champions of his philosophy of business-oriented reform. Media in African countries have not warmed to the message, complaining that this is another form of colonial exploitation through a local, corrupted elite.

It is a consistent theme of Blair’s business that the water is muddied between charity and political intervention. This AGI ‘charity’ is now bidding for a slice of the UK’s £8 billion foreign-aid budget to help rebuild war-torn countries, with African countries among the most needy. The highly sensitive move has prompted concerns over a possible conflict of interest with Blair’s complex business dealings.

In addition, according to a private source, Blair appears to have taken advantage of his relations with Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to create a favourable environment for the introduction of faith schools. Blair talks in terms of ‘globalisation of faith’ and to this end has established partnerships with universities around the world.

The AGI (for all its protestations) can also appear to be the former Prime Minister’s door opener to big and lucrative deals for his commercial organisations. AGI enables Blair to gain an introduction to a country’s leaders and power brokers by offering assistance. The payoff for the pro bono governmental assistance comes in contracts involving natural-resources projects, major banks and global companies. Here, Blair is the fixer. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Guinea, which we will come to later.

The AGI has twenty employees in London and thirty-eight in Africa, split across seven different countries; the staffing levels in Ebola-hit countries has recently been increased. The latest accounts available, which are for 2013, show that it had an income of £4.79 million, up greatly on the previous year when it received £3.16 million. It has however been criticised by human-rights NGOs for colluding with some of the continent’s corrupt and brutal regimes.

AGI receives millions of pounds in donations as a charity, through a complex funding structure. AGI employees are embedded in the governments of at least four African countries – Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia – with a significant presence in finance ministries. There are further links between Blair and the leaders of South Sudan and Malawi.

Many of these are countries with presidents who have a close and longstanding personal friendship with Blair. This is not so in Guinea; but, in other respects, Guinea is a perfect example of how Blair operates in Africa.

AGI IN GUINEA

In the often forgotten and desperately poor African country of Guinea, Blair advises President Alpha Condé, whom he met after Condé won the presidential election in November 2010. Guinea borders Mali and Côte d’Ivoire (among other countries) and ranks among Africa’s poorest countries, as half the population lives on $1 a day. Dictators took over the running of the country from the French in 1958, and they ran the country into the ground.

Condé is a socialist academic and politician born in 1938. He was the first Guinean leader to espouse democracy and open capitalism that favoured investors, and he was quickly courted by icons of Western capital, such as George Soros, Bernard Kouchner and Tony Blair.

Blair’s name is now mentioned in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, in hushed tones. No one knows quite why he takes an interest in Guinea. All suspect that big capital, massive natural resources and mining companies with their global strategies out of reach of their leaders, let alone the ordinary person, are involved.

Guinea’s desperate state – now compounded by the Ebola scourge – is as much due to its failure to develop natural resources as it is to its history of naked corruption. Guinea, with its population of 10,600,000, has mines of massive potential, with minerals including iron ore, diamonds, bauxite and rare earth metals. On top of that, it has very fertile agriculture and considerable rainfall. To realise this much-needed value of the commodities buried deep under its ground, much under forests, Guinea needs vast quantities of capital. Blair provides the connections to the wider business and political worlds, where money can be found, albeit at a price.

The President of Guinea is thought to have been introduced to Tony Blair through George Soros – the billionaire hedge fund manager who combines making hundreds of millions of dollars out of currency movements in the global financial markets with political activism on a global scale through his Open Society Foundations. In fact, the original contact may have been made by Bernard Kouchner, a contact of Alpha Condé from his days in Paris. Kouchner is a French politician, and a doctor, and the former French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the centre-right François Fillon government under President Nicolas Sarkozy. Kouchner was himself a socialist, but that didn’t stop him teaming up with the neo-conservative (and indeed friend of Blair) Sarkozy. Kouchner appeared to share with Blair the capacity to bridge ideologies (while being committed to none), in a French style similar to the Third Way. The Guinean President himself had worked as an academic in law at the Sorbonne in Paris while he was in exile from Guinea.

The relationship between the President, a fiercely independent man greatly respected across Africa, and Blair has not blossomed, according to sources inside the Guinean government. One adviser, who did not wish to be identified, said Blair ‘is not that close to Condé and certainly not a friend. He has a limited influence on Condé. He has a lot of partners [other than the AGI] working with him. The President is using Blair primarily to deal with the issue of governance over mining contracts. When the tender is launched for Simandou [Guinea’s massive bauxite mine embroiled in a controversial contract], Blair’s influence will decrease.’ The legal ramifications of this case continue to rumble on, and it has been widely mooted that Blair has a commercial role connected to one of the mineral companies involved in the deal. It is thought that Blair serves as an introducer of global banks to the country – which inevitably includes JP Morgan. The company is bidding to take a role in the development of Guinea’s mining industry.

Blair did, however, take the opportunity of a meeting with Condé to propose that he hire Michael Klein, the former senior executive at Citigroup, who, as we have already seen, had been a ‘strategic adviser’ to both parties in the successful merger of Xstrata and Glencore, a deal in which Blair was a participant. These are two behemoths in the natural-resources field, the former being more of a mining company, the latter a trader of commodities. Blair and Klein assisted in the financial negotiations that created a vastly larger global behemoth.

Curiously, Klein was also on the periphery of the wheeling and dealing that took place in the UK Treasury at the height of the 2008 banking crisis, when City and Wall Street investment banks were being consulted to save the UK’s banking system.

Klein’s appointment would make sense as part of Guinea’s pursuit of investment for its natural-resources sector. But Condé declined to take on Klein, saying he was concerned that such a hiring would bypass local procedures, and it did not go ahead, according to a very close adviser to the President with detailed knowledge of the proposal. The subtext to the rejection is that it came from Blair, whose commercial aspirations in Guinea Condé suspects with a vengeance.

Blair’s connections with Michael Klein are well established and described in Chapter 9, where we discuss Qatar, and a merger between Blair’s and Klein’s operations has been discussed. This has been denied by sources close to Blair.

Blair’s operations in the presidential offices of African countries can be separated from those of his foot soldiers in the AGI, whom he can deploy to put down his marker in a country. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that they also give him intelligence on the makeup and positions of government officials and politicians inside the country.

This group of intelligent young men and women, most of whom are only shortly out of university and no doubt enthused by the thought of working in far-flung countries (the connection with the ex-Prime Minister will do no harm on the CV for an application to an investment bank or management consultancy), perform mundane administrative tasks for their governments. One official close to the President, who did not wish to be identified, told us, ‘We used to use technical assistance from the World Bank and others like that, right? So what we get from AGI is almost the same thing. Here the goal is to improve governance. That means how to increase efficiency in our presidency, delivery, results related to the President’s vision. They are helping to find efficient systems for delivering electricity. One of the Guineans they recruited is assisting different commissions with the process of making sure that the right design is in place.’

The AGI has no brief to rock the boat or deal with a country’s tough issues. The same official says that AGI does not get involved in rooting out corruption or other social ills. ‘They don’t play police. It is purely technical. They are working on behalf of Tony; so they are supposed to be able … Tony is supposed to be able to report to the President if he sees any wrongdoing. I am certain he does it.’

One adviser, employed by AGI in Guinea, finds such administration difficult, ‘yet he builds and controls a centre, to make sure everything is effective. He is getting Condé to control his government. Tony enjoys it. Condé benefits from it as there is a tendency for all government ministers to go off in their own directions. This happens in the West [too]. Why is Blair doing it? That is a question I cannot answer.’

The AGI is very conscious of the danger of ministers pursuing their own private interests and agendas at the expense of the President’s. This may explain why the country ranks relatively poorly in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. The 2014 Index shows the country ranking 145 out of 175 countries listed, an improvement of five places on its 2013 ranking of 150.

Officials from the Guinea government suggest that the AGI has implemented some very rudimentary systems for the presidency. One said that AGI provided furniture for the President’s office, which was empty when he first moved in. AGI has brought in a number of expatriates to assist with the administration of the presidency, but it is understood that the NGO is looking for talented Guineans living abroad and with positions in Western companies to replace their own people.

One presidential adviser, who did not wish to be named, told us in the course of the Abu Dhabi investment conference mentioned above that, ‘They are now holding open tenders to find Guineans who can replace the people inside the system. We define the profiles [of the people we want to hire] and then publish the announcement. So they are helping in actually replacing themselves.’ This does indeed conform with the AGI mission statement appearing on the website, quoted earlier.

Presidential advisers assess that Blair visits Guinea at least twice a year. One said, ‘I know from what I hear from his people that he watches closely what is happening.’

Basic bureaucracy has also been introduced by the AGI, to focus the President’s resources. So systems to sift and prioritise mail directed to the presidency have been introduced. The Blair team has targeted President Condé’s reluctance to delegate minor matters (a habit acquired over long years as an opposition leader with a small team in exile). It sees this as a stumbling block to his efficiency as a leader of a newly composed government. One adviser to the President told us, ‘They help us improve the management and coordination systems for the presidency. The Blair people do not get involved in particular dossiers but help improve the efficiency of the overall system.’ Such statements indicate the vagueness of AGI’s purpose or contribution to the country. This is underlined by Condé’s own analysis of the AGI role.

In an interview with the authors, he described Blair’s contribution to the country in the following terms:

The implementation of governance in Guinea is performed by a number of young postgraduates experienced in the fields of development. They work for the Africa Governance Initiative, whose catchline reads ‘Five years supporting effective governance in Africa’.

Since November 2011, the organisation has been headed by Shruti Mehrotra, an establishment figure in a number of NGOs. As AGI’s projects director, she has the task of organising meetings for President Condé at the World Economic Forum, where she had formerly worked. Mehrotra came up through the ranks of the NGO Global Witness, serving as an independent adviser on resource scarcity, sustainable development and political stability. She started her working life, like so many of Blair’s international representatives, at the now-bankrupt Monitor Group in Massachusetts.

According to the website of the World Economic Forum, Mehrotra is ‘special adviser to the office of the President of Guinea’. Her biographical entry says,

She worked with the President of Guinea to help achieve the government’s vision of inclusive social and economic development for the country. This includes offering support for the country’s democratic institutions, mining sector reform, and improvement of energy provision and access, agricultural development and food security for all Guineans.

In 2013, Mehrotra is understood to have handed over the main AGI role in Guinea to Pierrick Judeaux, a former management consultant at Arthur D. Little, who was educated in France – although Judeaux had already left the AGI by the start of 2015. Judeaux is around six foot seven and his large mop of straight black hair towers above even Blair’s now silvery mane when the two are seen together. This was the case when Blair attended that conference in Abu Dhabi on 24 and 25 November 2013 on the subject of investment in Guinea, with which we opened this chapter. Guinea was apparently seen as too remote for investors, but perhaps it also lacked the amenities they require. Abu Dhabi is a major investor in the African country’s minerals, so there is a logic in the Gulf location.

Alpha Condé and Blair both spoke to the conference but that was where his contribution to a very large and dynamic event ceased. Many suspected he was more interested in the meetings he likely held later with senior officials at Mubadala (and perhaps the ruler of Abu Dhabi himself). That certainly was the impression many would receive from his behaviour at the conference, noted earlier.

Blair’s presence at the conference was heralded by the appearance of a bevy of advisers, including Judeaux, accompanied by their leader as they scurried through the hotel’s public area in a huddle, absorbed in each other and oblivious of the residents and others on the sidelines. They were in search of a more private space for their high level deliberations.

The Jumeirah at Etihad Towers hotel, where Blair was speaking, had been scouted out by his security attachment as early as the day before the event. Spotted on the sidelines was a watchful, grey-suited British policeman, sporting a Union Flag button in his lapel. He confirmed that he was Blair’s security detail from Scotland Yard, working at the taxpayer’s expense.

The hotel, with its multiple towers and escalators, is one of Abu Dhabi’s largest and most luxurious, ‘more Dubai than Abu Dhabi’, says the brochure. The conference itself was entitled ‘Guinea is Back: Guinea’s Development Partners and Investor Conference’, and its primary aim was to introduce Condé to international investors and tell them that the country was open to investment ideas and wanted their money to develop his country, one of Africa’s poorest. Blair was billed on the conference programme as ‘Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Founder and Patron of the Africa Governance Initiative’.

A packed room awaited the speech of the British leader. Blair was seated next to Bernard Kouchner in the front row of the conference and a short way away from Condé. Gestures of affection or even recognition were sparse. Guinea’s Minister for International cooperation introduced him with frequent references to ‘His Excellency’, but Blair did not have headphones to hear the translation. Some were hastily provided.

Dressed in a sombre, almost funereal, black suit, Blair strode to the platform. He made a token effort to speak French (the language of the conference and of most Guineans), for which he apologised, before returning to English and his prepared address. An acknowledgement to his host was formal. ‘I was asked a few years ago to help President Condé when he first came to power … We know what happened those past years. The reason I am here today is because I have a profound respect for the President, for his country, and for what he is trying to achieve for his country. And also for apparent optimism about the chances for his success …’

The exaggerated head, hand and arm movements were familiar to those who watched Blair in the House of Commons or on the political stump. This was the inclusivism with which he had persuaded Britain to go to war in Iraq, something much valued by his Gulf sponsors, who approve of his tough rhetoric and actions on the terrorism that rocks their comfortable and well-furnished gilded boat.

The speech reading was word-perfect, carrying with it the appearance of a specious authority. Blair was shown on a large screen to an audience apparently hanging on his every word.

Researchers, perhaps his own, perhaps those in the Ministry of Finance, had laboured long on the economic detail he would present. ‘On finances, as you know, the [Guinean] deficit has come down sharply, from 30 per cent of GDP to 1 per cent,’ he said. ‘Several European countries should be envious of that figure! Inflation has halved, reserves are up …’ He reminded the audience of the opportunities in agriculture and in natural resources. He heaped praise on the President as a partner: ‘… from my experience of the past few years, if you do want to come and invest in Guinea, you will have, in the President himself and in his senior team, partners who can help make it happen.’

He nodded in passing to the corruption risk, but he treated it in a coy, roundabout way. All in the Guinean garden was rosy for their British inspiration! ‘There is a new mining programme to ensure that things are done in a proper and transparent way.’ He also made a claim to understand the investors in the audience. ‘Investors need confidence. People know that if they make an investment they will get a proper return. But in Guinea, as elsewhere in Africa, we can see the new Africa rising.’

His sign-off reiterated his friendship and interest in the country, as if any of the audience had doubted it! ‘Three years ago I knew very little about this President or his country; today I know a reasonable amount about Guinea. And I can tell you, I am proud to be working there, and I hope you can be part of the story as well.’

The speech lasted no more than ten minutes, before Blair descended from the platform, shook the President’s hand and departed the crowded auditorium. President Condé looked slightly bewildered, uncertain if he should follow Blair or stay with the audience. Blair was next seen disappearing down an escalator and out of the hotel, accompanied by Judeaux, Mehrotra, other advisers and the security man.

It is no exaggeration to say that the audience saw this as a slap in the face to their country. After the speech they muttered how disappointed they were that this was the extent of his involvement in the conference, whose importance to Guinea we have already noted. Yet, as far as Blair was concerned, his duty to Guinea had been done. Perhaps the next appointment on his day’s crowded agenda included meetings with the government of Abu Dhabi, one of his clients. Would it be too cynical to speculate that the fee he received for appearing at the conference (if indeed he did receive any at all) allowed him no more than an hour or so at the hotel? Whatever the case, the resultant impression was hollow and demeaning.

The impact of the conference was not completely without importance. Links were in fact strengthened between Abu Dhabi and Guinea, with the announcement that Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala state company would invest $5 billion in Guinean bauxite. The agreement, said Mohamed Lamine Fofana, Guinea’s minister for mines and geology, included $1 billion for extraction and exports of bauxite to the UAE as well as a $4 billion aluminium refinery and a port. It fitted nicely with the UAE’s expansion plans for its Emirates Global Aluminium business, set to become the world’s fifth largest aluminium company by output by the close of 2015.

AGI IN RWANDA

The AGI has no fewer than ten employees working at the heart of President Paul Kagame’s regime, including young executives from JP Morgan. Yet the man they work for is of questionable record and character. Paul Kagame has been accused of human-rights abuses, and Human Rights Watch has said that Blair’s support of Kagame has emboldened the leader to continue corrupting elections and suppressing opposition and media.

Kagame is also suspected of involvement in genocide. Kagame’s legitimacy is questionable, as the Tutsi leader represents only 12 per cent of the country, with the remainder Hutu; Rwanda is run by the Tutsi elite. One source in the NGO sector, a frequent visitor and commentator on the country, observed that, while Kagame claimed that he was the saviour of the country, his Rwandan Patriotic Front (the ruling party of the President in the country) had killed 200,000 people. This was in the wake of the genocide in 1994 that left 800,000 people dead and ripped apart the country. Western leaders failed to act on the genocide and a residual guilt continues to affect policy.

Blair is part of Kagame’s so-called ‘2020 Vision’ for rebuilding the country, whose goal is to create an African Singapore, focused on high technology. The same NGO source notes that ‘Kagame pitches this sort of image at foreign leaders visiting the country, like Blair. He knows exactly what foreign donors want to hear, like anti-corruption and transparency, and people like Blair buy it. A lot of the foreign donors have lost patience with the corrupt African dictators.’ This source goes on to say that, beyond the capital city of Kigali, the poverty is widespread and untouched. ‘People like Blair are swept on rapid tours of these countries, they are swept from one perfect project to the next and they think they’ve seen the country. They meet the Rwandan elite. They don’t ask the questions. They accept what they are shown. I have seen the African laugh when they put the white man back on the plane. The African leaders manipulate the naïveté of Western leaders like Blair, who have a superficial understanding.’

And in 2013 came one of those moments of synergy, quite frequent in Blair’s post-prime-ministerial career, when two parts of his life come together. He wants to help Rwanda; he is a consultant and paid to help JP Morgan Chase. It so happened that JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s CEO Jamie Dimon announced an investment in Bridge2Rwanda’s Financial Analyst Training Program.

The investment made business sense for CEO Jamie Dimon. He said in 2010 he was ‘incredibly impressed’ by opportunities in South Africa and the rest of the continent. ‘The growth rate of banking in emerging markets is set to be two to three times faster than that of the United States and Western Europe where most of our investment banking is currently focused.’ The comment was made after Dimon had visited South Africa with his adviser, none other than Tony Blair.

Blair is an enthusiast for Rwanda as well – repeating data supplied by the government without challenging the fundamentals – although this is an economy largely sourced from overseas aid and from the smuggling of minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country’s limited indigenous economy is provided by mining and manufacturing; the country’s lack of infrastructure and of a literate population impedes the creation of a real economy.

The NGO source quoted earlier doubts the effectiveness of the Blair project in Rwanda. ‘The AGI people move into a ministry with people who don’t have much experience of Rwanda, and they tell civil servants what to do. Those civil servants say it’s a marvellous idea. The moment they leave, everything returns to what it was. There is a mirage of government, but nothing is done. They go along with it, because they know their aid depends on it. They also receive a per diem payment for turning up. They pay people for attending a training session. They will also hope for a reciprocal conference in London.’ She continued, ‘Nobody pretends it is anything other than a cosmetic exercise. We are all playing the game. We pretend to learn, you pretend to teach us.’

Blair is a personal adviser to Kagame, whose Rwandan Patriotic Front is thought to also have been behind brutal killings of opposition politicians and journalists, and Blair has access to a private jet leased by Kagame. AGI has its own office in the capital Kigali, and Blair has visited the President six times since leaving office.

Kagame, like another Blair protégé, Thein Sein of Burma, is a far more sophisticated international operator than most dictators. A private 2010 UN report, leaked to Le Monde and the New York Times, documented atrocities committed by Rwandan government troops in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. There were also charges that the Rwandan government is increasingly authoritarian after the opposition was effectively barred from challenging Kagame in the presidential election in August that year – an election he won by a remarkable 93 per cent of the votes. He managed the same sort of majority the time before, in 2003.

Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch reported in 2010,

Kagame has denounced the UN report as fabrications from the very institution that stood aside and let the Rwandan genocide happen back in 1994. He’s also threatening to pull Rwandan peacekeepers, among the best-trained in Africa, out of Darfur.

The UN Secretary-General paid an emergency visit to Kigali to try to repair the damage, and has delayed formal publication of the report until October 1, when the General Assembly will be safely over and done with.

But that won’t stop Kagame from having to face awkward questions while he’s in [New York]. The UN report accuses the Rwandan army of systematically murdering tens of thousands of Hutu civilians in Congo following its invasion of Congo in 1996.

Meanwhile, back in Rwanda, tens of thousands of civilians are estimated to have been murdered by Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front in its march to power in 1994. Kagame’s government has thwarted any attempt by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up by the UN Security Council, to prosecute the crimes of 1994, to prosecute officials of the RPF.

Then there’s the steady crushing of political dissent. The New York Times has doggedly reported on the lopsided election in August 2010 that gave Kagame 93 per cent of the vote; the exclusion of opposition parties from the race; the shooting of a Rwandan general who has broken with Kagame in broad daylight in South Africa; the fatal shooting of an independent journalist reporting on the South African incident; the grisly murder of an opposition politician; the closure of two opposition newspapers.

Kagame’s supporters say the evidence is unscientific, and none of it has stopped Tony Blair praising Kagame’s ‘visionary leadership’ and talking of ‘my good friend Paul Kagame’ – any more than it has stopped former US president Bill Clinton from calling Kagame ‘one of the greatest leaders of our time’ who ‘freed the hearts and minds of his people to think about the future’.1

Kagame’s cheerleaders are almost a roll call of Blair’s international chums: Blair himself; Clinton; Pastor Rick Warren of America’s Saddleback Church, the very conservative and hugely wealthy American evangelist who sits on the religious advisory board of Blair’s Faith Foundation; Michael Porter, business guru and founder of the bankrupt Monitor Group. Blair’s commitment to Kagame has certainly puzzled the far-from-radical Economist magazine. Commenting on an article (published in the Guardian) written by Blair about the country on the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, The Economist said,

In fact, there are signs the US may be losing patience with Kagame (as indeed it is with Blair). It is cutting aid to Rwanda and warning Kagame that he could face criminal prosecution over meddling in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. The White House has criticised Kagame for the suppression of political activity and made clear that it does not regard Rwanda as democratic.

But Kagame has one high-profile international friend he can rely upon. Tony Blair is willing to defend the Rwandan president regardless of allegations of human-rights abuses, political oppression and rigged elections. He told a Rwandan press conference in 2009, ‘Our consultancy is not to tell the people of Rwanda what to do, but to help get done what the President wants.’

However, many large Western banks have yet to seriously consider Rwanda a dollar destination. ‘For the most part, big banks don’t have a presence in Rwanda,’ said Bridge2Rwanda’s managing director Clay Parker. ‘This was a good way to involve JP Morgan. They are sponsoring an educational program for finance – something where they can see their impact.’3

Blair’s AGI operation is so fraught with political and commercial undertones that much of its evident positive import is lost. While the work his willing team of highly competent young staff in combating the Ebola epidemic makes a worthy, if limited, contribution to the international effort, the patron’s apology for the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame is highly damaging. Kagame has arguably more blood on his hands from the killing of Hutus than Ebola will ever claim. Blair will argue he is backing a ‘moderniser’, while quietly forgetting the means he used to obtain power.

Pragmatism infuses the former Prime Minister’s thinking as he trumpets the good deeds his AGI organisation does in Africa. Africans are too canny to see Blair as more than fellow traveller who forever mingles opportunity with promotion, self-enrichment with self-righteousness. They do not make comfortable companions.4