Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  Blair’s consultancy business is less active in North America, but the month before that 2010 meeting with Santos he had signed a £700,000-a-year contract to advise Khosla Ventures, founded by Indian-American billionaire Vinod Khosla and based in California’s Silicon Valley. Khosla Ventures invests in green technology.

  Its mission is to ‘assist great entrepreneurs determined to build companies with lasting significance.’ Khosla says his goal is ‘to be the best assistant there is for anybody trying to build a large, technology-oriented company.’

  It is not at all clear what Khosla needs Blair for. The former PM has no expertise in green technology or management consultancy, and it is not immediately obvious what use Khosla might have for his expertise in governance and government relations. In fact, the only area of government relations Khosla seems to be involved in concerns a public beach in California which he has apparently decided to annex.

  All California beaches are, by law, public between the ocean and the high-tide mark – but you have to be able to get to them. The previous owners of Martins Beach let people use the road to the beach on payment of a small fee, but Khosla has bought the land and put up a sign that says, ‘Private Property: Keep Out’.

  People have been coming to Martins Beach for decades. There are public toilets, a café and a car park. The California Coastal Commission has tried to sort the issue out with Khosla, but he is not, apparently, interested in negotiation.2

  Doing a deal with the state of California is something Blair might have some useful advice on. But, in California, a billionaire can quickly exhaust the legal resources of a small, underfunded state agency without the need for the political sophistication of a former British Prime Minister.

  While business in North and South America is not as extensive as it is with the rest of the world, it shows a similar pattern: much of the money for Blair’s services comes from old chums.

  Notes

  1 Daily Telegraph, 18 November 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

  news/politics/tony-blair/9685253/Tony-Blair-

  strikes-business-deals-in-Brazil-and-Colombia.html

  2 www.npr.org, 27 January 2014: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/27/

  264901370/california-fights-billionaire-s-

  keep-out-sign-for-beach-access

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFRICA: MORE COMMERCE THAN CAUSE

  ‘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:

  AGI is working for a future in which Africa’s development is led by Africans, with governments that are capable of setting and achieving priorities that reflect the rising aspirations and expectations of their citizens. To achieve this vision, we provide practical advice and support to help African leaders to bridge the gap between their vision for a better future and the capacity of their governments to achieve it. We work with countries – currently Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Guinea, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Senegal – that are at turning points and where we have had an invitation from the Head of Government to provide capacity development support.

  Our model combines the experience of AGI’s founder and patron, Mr Blair, with on-the-ground teams of professionals permanently based in our partner countries, working shoulder-to-shoulder with senior leaders in the heart of government to develop capacity and put in place the skills, systems and structures needed to drive the delivery of results on th
e ground. AGI is a dynamic and fast-growing charity, celebrating its 5th anniversary in 2013.

  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.