Richard Bourne

A Commonwealth of ideas: A valedictory on leaving the headship of the CPSU

Abstract At the end of his term as Head of the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit, the author assesses the strengths and weakness of the organization, arguing that, in a globalized world, the Commonwealth and its agencies are paradoxically not truly global, but trapped in an outmoded geographic framework. He detects signs that this balance of power within the Commonwealth, for decades dominated by the vestiges of Empire and the organizations UK base, is changing. But he warns that the Commonwealth dimension is often a minor strand in international diplomacy.

The Commonwealth and civil society: deepening foundations, or appreciating limits?

Recent years have seen a deepening relationship between the official Commonwealth and the non‐governmental and civil society world. Nevertheless that relationship has been complex, uneven and open to differing interpretations. The author traces the recent history of the relationship, highlights some of the key problems and issues involved, compares the relationship with what is happening elsewhere at the international level, and suggests some ways in which it might usefully be developed in the immediate future.

Ivory towers or driving forces for change

The significance of education in Commonwealth debate has diminished over the past 30 years, as the position of universities in many developing country members has become increasingly fragile. For many institutions, the sheer pressures of day-to-day existence, and the relative weakness and lack of finance, impair their ability to build on Commonwealth links and to enhance their capacity to use their full potential for technological, economic and social progress. A commission of inquiry into the crisis affecting higher education in developing countries examined the obstacles and the opportunities that universities meet in fulfilling a development rôle. It set out to identify the opportunities for university cooperation throughout the Commonwealth. While not challenging the need for a commitment to basic education, it urged Ministers of Education and the Commonwealth Secretary-General to take the opportunity of the triennial conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 2000 to speak up for the significance of universities.

Buhari: The Making of a President

attack in November 2008. Although the Indian reaction was less robust militarily than that in 2002, and despite protestations of innocence at government level, Pakistan was once more portrayed as the instigator. These events took place nearly a decade ago, but the mistrust and hostility between the two countries has remained, fuelled by continuing minor confrontations and terrorist attacks. The Jammu and Kashmir issue lingers on as a painful reminder of India and Pakistan’s opposing viewpoints and mutual failure to come to terms with the de facto situation as opposed to the de iure one. Even in this era of post-modernism which claims that truth is a construct developed and maintained by power through structuring discourse, it is hard to contradict Myra MacDonald’s thesis. While India is striding into the 21st century as a promising regional power, Pakistan appears to be side-lined. An uncertain variable, however, is the beneficial impact of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). While MacDonald is right in claiming that China has had ‘no patience’ with Pakistan’s ‘risk-taking’ (p. 240) against India, the new boost to their economic relationship may leave Pakistan as less of an orphan than her narrative suggests, although Pakistanis will have to contend with a strong streak of Chinese paternal interest. Unfortunate as MacDonald’s analysis may be for those who would like to believe that Pakistan is the victim of a succession of international conspiracies, India should also not be portrayed as an innocent player in their failed relationship. The genuine casualties of the longstanding enmity between the two neighbours are their respective societies, whose members have had to endure the political, social and economic consequences of seventy years of hostility, especially those living in Jammu and Kashmir.

Far From Healthy? The State of Nigerian Media

Abstract This article traces the important role of the media in Nigerian history from the nineteenth century to the present, in anti-colonial and independence movements, through military rule and under uncertain democracy. Successive governments have sought to restrain and control print media and broadcasting. Today, the proliferation of social media, technological change and dependence on advertising-based revenues all raise new questions of accountability, reliability and power. The overall state of Nigerian media is far from healthy.

West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song

‘Cape colonialism’ as Rhodes advocated it (p. 376). Imperial ambitions in a commercial guise return as a theme in the book’s last chapter, a glancing consideration of China in Africa. Crucial historical facts about Africa would give pause to any reflective person, so that, for instance, ’Joseph Conrad described the activities of Leopold’s Congo Free State as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”’ (p. 456). Or again: ’The business of selling slaves remained largely under African control’ (p. 120). There are contemporary facts about Africa that would tend to reinforce and prolong this pessimistic analysis, such as that ‘40 per cent of Africa’s private wealth is held offshore’ (preface, p. XVII). The United Nations, quoted in the book’s last paragraph, appears to share something like that bleak estimate and outlook for Africa: ’The urban population of Africa expanded at a faster rate than on any other continent ... The unfolding pattern is one of disjointed, dysfunctional and unsustainable urban geographies of inequality and human suffering, with oceans of poverty containing islands of wealth’ (pp. 674–675). Yet these conclusions—historical and contemporary—are open to challenge. The synoptic approach of a book like this often results in a kind of ‘diagnostic overload’. And the attempt of a book of this kind is essentially to try to embrace all of the African reality—that vast sprawling complex fact—while employing an allegedly neutral and clinical method. Just where this method delivers us in the end is unclear. A different history with a different, altogether more luminous survey of prospects for Africa could be written with at least equal claims to truth.

Must British-based Commonwealth Institutions Fail?

This year Patricia Scotland QC, a British legislator and arguably as Dominican as Prince Philip is Greek, becomes the sixth Commonwealth Secretary-General, and the United Kingdom looks forward to hosting the 2018 meeting of Commonwealth Heads. Nor is she unique. Akbar Khan, the energetic new Secretary-General of the international Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, is a British lawyer on secondment from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Professor John Wood, formerly principal of the engineering faculty at Imperial College, is Secretary-General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. For nearly two decades Carl Wright has been running the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, and Karen Brewer has headed up the Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association. Is the UK, in David Howell’s telling phrase, about ‘to re-enter the Commonwealth’? If so, or if not, it is time to examine soberly the various failures among British-based organisations devoted to the Commonwealth over the past two decades, which were not truly pan-Commonwealth. Did they fail due to bad management, or lack of public or governmental commitment? What does this experience say about wider weaknesses in the Commonwealth idea, or the way it has lacked traction in a country now several generations away from decolonisation? There are several examples, of many of which I have direct knowledge: the closure of the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, in 2000; the closure of the modern club facilities of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS), just off Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, in 2013; the closure of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol in 2008; the closure of the Commonwealth Advisory Bureau attached to London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies (for most of its life it was the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit) at the end of 2012; and the merger of the Commonwealth Exchange think-tank into the RCS in 2015, which had already taken over the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council. Although the Commonwealth Institute and the RCS have venerable histories, many of these deaths followed too quickly after birth.

Ramphal on Record/The Record on Ramphal: A Review Article

It is incumbent on Commonwealth Secretary-Generals to write their memoirs. Arnold Smith set the trend in 1981 with Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics. Emeka Anyaoku followed up with The Inside Story of the Modern Commonwealth (2004) and Don Mackinnon with In the Ring: A Commonwealth Memoir (2013). Yet the second Secretary General procrastinated. ‘For at least twenty years’, he writes, ‘relatives and friends, among them, scholars, have been asking me, then insistently urging, about “memoirs”. My answer invariably was that I had not lived my life for a diary and had no plans for memoirs. I could have added that I had not truly retired; the story was not ended; it was not time to look back’. Eventually in 2011 he concluded that it was his duty, if not exactly his joy. The resulting volume is attractive with its endpapers—an 1840 print of mountains in Guiana and the Robert Batchelor painting of Marlborough House from Carlton Gardens —and many photos, mostly from the author’s own collection. Even if closer examination reveals a few typos, it is good to find so much for such a reasonable price (£17.99 for a fat hardback). Fortunately, Ramphal had already deposited his archives, organised and accessible at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies. Readers may be tempted to skip over the acknowledgements but should not do so as these give an overview of the resources and memories, personal and archival, on which Ramphal was able to draw. He has structured the book thematically, more than chronologically, but he has a strong sense of the past, particularly his own Caribbean/South American heritage as also of the present and the future. In this review article three members of The Round Table offer differing perspectives on this important book. Terry Barringer

Boko Haram: Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency

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Editorial: The Commonwealth’s First Peoples

It is now a decade since the then Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit, at London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, completed a three-year research project on Indigenous Rights in the Commonwealth. Supported by the European Commission and the Department for International Development, UK, it carried out four regional consultations and worked closely with the Commonwealth Association of Indigenous Peoples (CAIP), coordinated by the Australian indigenous leader, Les Malezer. While the project raised the profile of indigenous rights in the Commonwealth, its call for official Commonwealth attention to indigenous issues, made to the Abuja meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in 2003, went unheeded. So too had been its representations to the high-level review, chaired by President Mbeki, two years earlier. It is timely to consider how far matters have changed, and the different perspectives in this special issue of The Round Table provide up-to-date snapshots of the situation of populations now between 180 and 200 million in total, of whom over half are India’s Adivasis, discussed in this issue by Walter Fernandes. Any serious discussion of the indigenous peoples in the Commonwealth must recognise that, in general, their economic and psychic position remains poor, and their rights are easily trampled on. The fact that increasing numbers have access to mobile telephony and the internet, or can access secondary or higher education, does not alter a broader picture of blight and inequity. The extraordinary wealth of a handful of casinoowning first nations in the United States, who have exploited persisting treaty rights, merely throws darker shadows elsewhere, even across the border in Canada.