In the footsteps of Jack McConnell, John Swinney’s African expedition will have changed him

PA

For nervous flyers, and I am one, the approach into Malawi is always a bit of a roller coaster, as it was on Wednesday when I landed in Lilongwe, the capital. I am no aviation expert, nor do I profess to understand the mechanics of flight, but there must be an air current above the country that causes aircraft to roll about like a women drunk on the local gin. On my very first visit 20 years ago, our South African pilot missed the small runway and had to climb back up into the cloudless sky in an almost vertical movement. “Sorry about that,” he quipped from the cockpit. “We just need to go round and try again.” I have never been so relieved to land as I was that April sunny afternoon.

My trip in the spring of 2005, as the UK was gearing up for the G8 and to make poverty history, was to set up the visit for Scotland’s then First Minister, Jack McConnell, who had just announced a new international development policy and a partnership with Malawi. My visit over the next two weeks, where I will be meeting hundreds of Malawi schoolgirls, is as an adviser to McConnell’s charitable foundation, which provides scholarships for girls so that they can complete four years of secondary education. Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries according to the World Bank, is so starved of tax revenue that its government cannot afford to provide even national examinations for free. Every secondary pupil must pay fees to attend school and to sit their MSCE – roughly the equivalent of our Nat 5s - and uniforms are compulsory. Little wonder then, when the majority of the population live on less than £1.50 a day, that girls, even the brightest, are often denied a secondary education, simply because their parents cannot afford to pay for them to learn.

McConnell, a former maths teacher and education minister before becoming First Minister in 2001, understands the power of education to transform individual lives. But more than that, he knows that no country will develop a sustainable economy and a thriving, healthy society if its population is barely literate. As he said in his address to a Commission for Africa conference in the Scottish Parliament in May 2005, the world loses out when children go uneducated. He said “…there is artistic talent forever untapped, scientific discoveries never found, sporting achievements not reached, musical compositions never created, and we are all the worse for it.” That is why he, 20 years after he signed a co-operation agreement with President Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s president, the focus of much of his work is on international development and Malawi in particular.

But why has Scotland’s current first minister John Swinney followed in Jack McConnell’s footsteps? In one of life’s strange coincidences, I am in Malawi at the same time as Swinney dropped in for a few days on his first visit to Scotland’s partner country and the first time a First Minister has made the journey since McConnell. He has visited several times, there have been a handful of ministerial visits - including by a young Humza Yousaf - and thousands of Scots have travelled the five thousand miles to Malawi since 2005, but Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon showed scant interest in the small, landlocked nation where 22 million people scrabble to live on land degraded by climate change.

Yet, John Swinney, who has not paid much attention to international development during his long parliamentary career, has suddenly become a champion for Africa. In the press release announcing his visit to Malawi and Zambia, which also receives support from the Scottish Government, he described the 20-year anniversary of the international development policy established by Jack McConnell as “a landmark that we should be proud of”. He goes on: “At a time when governments across the world are cutting aid programmes overseas, internationalism, and international solidarity, has never been more important. Scotland will continue to stand with the international community and to do our bit for a fairer, more equal world.”

There we have it. Tomorrow, as John Swinney visits the site of Malawi’s first dental school in Blantyre, Malawi being built because of the Maldent Project, a partnership between Glasgow University’s Dental School and Kamuzu University of Health Sciences, he will have one eye on the voters in Blantyre, Scotland. The Labour government’s short-sighted, morally offensive decision to cut the UK’s aid budget from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of gross national income handed Swinney and his advisers an easy dividing line as they go into the 2026 Holyrood elections.

Despite attempts by Scottish Conservatives and others to drum up opposition to international aid by framing it as a waste of money while Scotland’s schools and NHS service urgently require more investment, Scots are far more supportive of international aid than populist politicians would have us believe. They understand the concept of being a ‘good global citizen’, even if most of us don’t describe it in those terms. We want a world where all children can get a decent education, where women don’t die in childbirth for want of a simple intervention, where countries like Malawi flourish.

Swinney’s African expedition will have changed him. Even a few days in the continent where human life began, transforms your perspective on the global economy and the parlous state of the world. But his visit to Malawi is more about winning the hearts and minds of Scottish voters and nation-building than it is about international development. Swinney’s aim is to make Labour history, and he has just recruited Malawi to his cause.