France and Africa: How much change?

Phillip Isakpa

France’s media have made a grand incident of a recent speech by former opposition presidential candidate Segolène Royal in Dakar, seen as a counter-speech to one made by President Nicolas Sarkozy, also in the Senegalese capital, in July 2007, during his first African tour after becoming President. The two Dakar speeches’ present different concepts of French policy in Africa, in the context of history, colonialism, and Africa’s present position in the world. Both condemned colonialism, but Sarkozy made disparaging and ill-informed remarks about Africa’s place in history, which annoyed many thinking Africans. Madame Royal even went as far as apologising for Sarkozy’s speech of two years before, which infuriated the Sarkozy camp.

Why should such an academic-sounding argument be important? Perhaps because France, of all European former colonial powers, has had the highest profile and most controversial policies towards its former possessions. This goes back to the circumstances of independence fifty years ago, when France built a special relationship with former territories in Africa that was close and paternalist, in both economic and military spheres, which has prevailed and adapted itself over the years. There have been attempts to change and modernise these relations, but the sphere of influence, sometimes referred to as the backyard (pré carré) or La Françafrique, has proved remarkably resilient. French presidents have come and gone, but all have found the silken bonds of the relationship in place, and have chosen not to untie or dismantle them.

Read Also: Update1: Nigeria bans Lufthansa, KLM, Air France, others as international flights resume

President Pompidou reformed the neo-colonial cooperation agreements and the franc zone, and attempted a modest military disengagement, but he was still a Gaullist, and depended on the value his party placed on the African connection, President Giscard d’ Estaing was not a Gaullist, and started by partly dismantling Gaullist structures (such as removing the powerful adviser Jacques Foccart), but he became entranced by the drama of playing gendarme in Africa with a series of military interventions (Chad, Zaire), and his relations with the reprehensible Emperor Bokassa eventually helped cause his undoing. The socialist François Mitterrand promised fundamental reform, but he too realised the system’s value, and backtracked after pressure from African leaders, becoming the most Gaullist of all Fifth republic presidents. Nonetheless, it was the right- wing (but not Gaullist) Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, at the end of Mitterrand’s reign, who executed the most surgical changes to Françafrique (heavy currency devaluation, and surrendering economic control to the Washington institutions). Even so, the idea survived, if increasingly under criticism. This survival was partly due to the veteran Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who understood the family spirit fuelling the special relationship. Sarkozy has no such emotional connection, viewing African relations as purely pragmatic, something to take advantage of if it enhances France’s role as a high status middle-ranking power. This was seen in his latest African tour (his fourth since coming to office in May 2007, when in both Niger and Democratic Republic of Congo the most important issue appeared to be France’s recent uranium deals with both countries.

Although the Dakar debates have been a fascinating exercise in Gallic polemics, it cannot be said that Madame Royal’s Socialists in practice have had a vastly different approach, especially under Mitterrand, but the government with Lionel Jospin as Prime Minister, which co-habited with Chirac from 1997-2002, showed stronger reformist inclinations. It was Jospin who deterred Chirac from intervening to save the deposed Konan Bedié in Côte d’Ivoire in December 1999, although Chirac himself initiated a measure of military disengagement in the 1990s. This was in keeping with the mood, both in France and internationally, that followed revelation of a certain French complicity with the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
The buccaneering interventionism that France practised in the first thirty years after independence no longer seemed possible. Even after sending troops to Cote d’Ivoire after 2002 the umbrella of both ECOWAS and the UN was sought, and despite support given to President Idris Déby of Chad in the face of rebel attacks from Sudan, France has done its best to seek cover from both the European Union and the UN. There may still be an unchanging agenda of propping up client states, but the methods are more subtle and more inclusive, and the criteria less insistent. French magistrates have also become more willing to pursue court-cases concerning properties allegedly acquired with corrupt funds by African presidents, which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

Sarkozy may float grand designs, such as the vague Mediterranean Union, but in practice he will always adapt to contingencies. Evenso, he still clings to the sometimes useful cronyism of Françafrique, which he came in vowing to dismantle. Erratic, given to spectacular gimmicks, his foreign policy is a mix of mercantilism and strutting the world stage posturing on such issues as terrorism, piracy, the Anglo-Saxons, but showing no Gaullist complexes about returning to NATO. But no African issue has really come to test him, so the jury is out on how far he represents change.