Editorial | Engaging Africa a foreign policy imperative

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ exhortation of African capital to look for investment opportunities in the Jamaican market is a timely, and positive, move about which this newspaper hopes he is serious, but as part of a wider process of political and economic engagement between the continent and the Caribbean.

We are, in that regard, happy for the coincidence of Mr Holness’ invitation and disclosure by Barbados’ prime minister, Mia Mottley, of her planned initiative along these lines.

Mr Holness, like Ms Mottley, was in Nairobi, Kenya, last week for a summit of leaders of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries, in whose formation, in the mid-1970s, as a vehicle for negotiating trade and economic-support agreements with the European Union, Jamaica played a critical role.

In recent years, though, the ACP has grown less influential as the Europeans have insisted on having a suite of so-called regional economic partnership agreements, such as the one it signed in 2008 with the Cariforum Group of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states, plus the Dominican Republic.

While the ACP continues to amble along, its character has changed fundamentally, and it is yet to find, or clearly articulate, a new, cogent mission. That, however, doesn’t mean the ACP is without use. Indeed, as we have suggested before, within it may be the embryo, or at least the stepping stone, towards reprising some old, but relevant, ideas for dealing with new global challenges, not least of these greater cooperation between countries of the global south, such as was championed by Michael Manley in the 1970s.

Mr Holness is right that while African and Caribbean countries speak in glowing terms about their relationship, “we haven’t really utilised the value of that relationship to layer on top of that the business opportunities”. Cooperation agreements signed between Mr Holness and Uhuru Kenyatta, when the Kenyan president visited Jamaica during the summer, or those with Namibia’s Hage Geingob during his 2018 stop in Windhoek are, potentially, significant for deepening economic relations.

It is not our sense, though, that this engagement is being framed in larger geostrategic terms, including possibilities for helping to fashion insulations for small, vulnerable nations against disruptions to the post-war, rules-based, multilateralist global order, led by America’s Donald Trump. This is not to suggest that the existing order is without need of reform. Quite the contrary. That reform, however, must have at its core the principle of multilateralism rather than a return to the 19th-century system of greater-power politics, in which the presumption of who, or what, is right rests on who is economically, or militarily, most powerful and the shunting of all others to the periphery.

GLOBAL WARMING

It must also take into account the problem of global warming and climate change and the existential threat it poses to the island states of the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Confronting these issues will demand a counterforce to Donald Trump and his notion of how global relations ought to be arranged and power apportioned. It insists, too, on countries with common interests, and having the most to lose from these disruptive forces, including those in the Caribbean and Africa, organising themselves to articulate their positions and to be effective participants in the global conversation on reform. Where possible, they should erect their own buffers against the marauding forces.

It is in that context that we welcome Ms Mottley’s promise, when she assumes chairmanship of CARICOM next year, to work towards ensuring that a proposed CARICOM-Africa summit takes place. The agenda of that meeting, says Ms Mottley, is to ensure that the two regions work to advancing their own “interests and not that of others”.

In the case of Jamaica, planning for this summit is an opportunity to begin a major review, leading, perhaps, to an overhaul of its foreign policy.

Prime Minister Holness should invite experienced foreign-policy hands to help in this exercise.