How France operates in Africa - Gulu Airport

Gulu airport in northern Uganda (Source: here)

France mostly does business in Africa with its former colonies, where Paris has important economic and political leverage, leading to frequent and largely justified accusations of French neo-Colonialism. It therefore raised eyebrows, when France last week co-hosted the Africa Forward Summit with Kenya, an English-speaking nation. Several important news outlets, including The Economist and the BBC, were quick to conclude that France has entered a new mode opératoire in its relations with Africa.

I seriously doubt that. The French leopard has not changed its spots. Rather, I believe France is deliberately seeking greater influence in the English-speaking part of Africa, because it is losing influence in many of its former colonies. In fact, it is not the first time France has sought to strengthen its influence by ingratiating itself with English-speaking African nations. What Macron sought to do in Nairobi last week looks suspiciously similar to what Jacques Chirac tried to do in Uganda in 1995 following France's expulsion from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This is a story I happen to be quite familiar with, because I was working as a civil servant in the Ugandan Ministry of Finance & Economic Development (MFED) at the time. In a professional capacity, I came face-to-face with France's way of doing business in English-speaking Africa and it was not a pretty sight.

Here is what happened.

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In 1994, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with the aid of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, put an end to the Rwandan genocide. The two leaders kicked the Interahamwe militia out of Rwanda and proceeded to annex huge swathes of the DRC. In so doing, the two presidents inadvertently caused great affront to France, which lost its most important strategic strongholds in the region.

At the time, I was an economist in the Expenditure Department in MFED, which in those days was based in Milton Obote's former headquarters in Uganda House, Kampala. One of my responsibilities was to vet development projects in the transportation sector for possible inclusion in the government budget.

I was blissfully unaware of the geopolitics involved, when, one day in early 1995, an unusual project proposal landed on my desk. It was an offer from the French government of a grant of several million EURs - basically free money - to fully rehabilitate and upgrade to international standard a little-used airstrip in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu.

Gulu - in the red circle (Source: here) 

In almost every respect, Gulu's airstrip was no different from any other airstrip in remote parts of northern Uganda. Gulu itself was rural, poor, and frequently destabilised by attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army, a particularly nasty guerrilla outfit led by Joseph Kony, a war lord. For these reasons, there were almost no flights to and from Gulu, perhaps two or three a week, typically military aircraft or the odd chartered single-prop aircraft of the six-seater variety.

However, Gulu airstrip was different from all other Ugandan airstrips in one important respect - it was enormous! Built before independence, Uganda's former dictator Idi Amin Dada had upgraded Gulu airstrip for military purposes in the 1970s, turning the narrow dirt runway into a tarmac monster measuring more than 3 kilometres in length and 45 meters in width, large enough to accommodate aircraft Boeing 737s and 767s, and, of course, large military transport planes.

As I began to examine the French project, it struck me how ambitious it was. The French wanted to resurface the runway, establish brand new high tech navigation and air traffic systems, put in place new safety and rescue facilities, and many other upgrades. While this was very impressive, I concluded almost immediately that the Ugandan government should turn down the project for three specific reasons:

First, no feasibility study had been done. A feasibility study is a type of technical analysis, which establishes if a project is economically viable. Feasiblity studies were a pre-condition for approval of new transport projects in Uganda at the time. Based on traffic numbers alone, it was clear to me that Gulu Airport would not be economically viable for the foreseeable furure. Indeed, the economic non-viability of the project was the most likely reason the French had not included a feasibility study in the first place.

The second reason for turning down the project was that it would entail a significant and permanent budget commitment on the part of the Ugandan government after the initial build. To non-economists, this may sound odd. After all, this was free money so why not just take it?

The reason is that Gulu airport would soon become a millstone around the neck of Uganda's severely constrained public finances. Once construction had been completed, the Ugandan government would have to take over the running and maintainance of an international airport with no international flights and therefore no revenue. Every year in perpetuity, the government would therefore have to pay for upkeep of buildings, equipment, the runway, and the fire station plus foot the bill for salaries for a team of flight controllers, the fire fighters, and all the auxiliary staff ranging from cleaners to runway maintenance people.

The third reason for turning down the project was that the money could be used far more effectively elsewhere. The government's top priority was to eradicate poverty. The French money would have far more anti-poverty ‘bang for the buck’ if it was allocated to, say, primary health care, primary education, or rural feeder road maintenance all of which were official spending priorities at the time.

Armed with these arguments, I put it to the Development Committee (DC) that the project should be shelved. The DC was a technically sophisticated committee consisting of senior MFED officials, which was responsible for approving or rejecting projects for inclusion in the government's investment programme. As expected, it did not take long for the DC to agree with my verdict on Gulu. As the desk officer for transport, I was instructed to write to the French government to explain the rationale for our rejection of the project and to propose instead that the generous funding be used for projects with greater potential to alleviate poverty.

And with that, I thought, I had heard the last of the Gulu Airport project.

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Fast forward a couple of months. During this time, we had been extremely busy preparing the government's Budget for next financial year, which was now making its way through parliament. Suddenly, I received a call from the office of the Minister of Finance & Economic Development demanding an urgent brief on the Gulu Airport project. Apparently, all hell had broken out in parliament, where northern MPs had launched a full-scale rebellion against the government over the exclusion of the Gulu Airport project from the Budget.  

I was baffled! How did northern MPs even know about the project, which had never been discussed outside of the MFED? I called a few people and soon got the story. The French ambassador, upon receiving news of our rejection of the Gulu Airport project, had taken it upon himself to drive (not fly, mind you!) all the way up to Gulu, where he had delivered an extremely divisive message to an assembly of northern MPs that the government in Kampala was sabotaging development in the north by deliberately cancelling donor projects.

Clearly, the French Ambassador had not been content to accept our decision to reject the project. He had chosen to directly interfere in domestic Ugandan politics to force MFED’s hand by upping the political pressure. He was tapping into misperceptions - widespread at the time - that the Museveni government was biased against the north. The government now found itself unable to pass the Budget due to northern anger and the Minister of Finance & Economic Development was demanding a speedy resolution.

There is only so much a civil servant can do to counter political pressure. My approach was to counter-lobby against the French by appealing to the good nature of other donors, who funded about half of the Ugandan government’s budget at the time. I knew that nearly all the donors placed conditions on their aid; some prohibited frivolous spending, others required certain percentages of the budget be allocated to stuff like primary health care and primary education. I figured I could use this against the French, because Gulu Airport was such a colossal waste of money that it would have broken almost every conditionality in the book. My hope was to stop the crisis and get the budget passed in parliament by mobilising other donors to back MFED's decision on Gulu, maybe even get some of them to commit more funding for poverty alleviation in the north.

The rest of the week was extremely hectic. I met with the heads of all the major donors in Kampala, including the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Union. I also paid visits to each of the big bilateral donors, such as Denmark, Britain, Germany, and others.

The meetings typically went as follows: I began by explaining about the Gulu Airport project and its questionable economic feasibility. Then I explained how the project had gone through the correct formal vetting procedure and been rejected by the DC. Then I reminded the donors of their own conditionalities and showed how - in rejecting the Gulu project - MFED had acted to defend the very spending priorities we had agreed with the donor community. Finally, I asked each of them kindly put their mouths, where their wallets were and have a quiet word with the French to encourage them to officially withdraw the Gulu project, noting in passing that we would welcome any new poverty-eradication projects in Gulu.

I knew most of the donors quite well, because we met regularly whenever new projects were proposed. I knew most of them agreed with me in private, so I was initially hopeful. Soon, however, I became deeply disillusioned. Not a single donor was willing to take our side against the French over Gulu. To the donors, it was clearly more important not to jeopardise relations with France than to stand with Uganda on principle against "a silly little airport project" as one of the donors put it to me.

And so it was that, as the week drew to a close, I felt I had no choice but to accept that MFED was losing the Gulu battle. Despondently, I reported to my boss, the larger-than-life Permanent Secretary & Secretary to the Treasury (PS/ST), Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, that none of Uganda's 'development partners' had been willing to partner with us in putting a stop to the Gulu project. MFED was alone and powerless and we would, it seemed to me, have to accept France's stupid airport project, with all its negative long-term financial ramifications.  

I put those conclusions in a Loose Memo to PS/ST, which I left with his secretary before I left the office on Friday evening ('Loose Memo' is the term we used for internal written communications in the MFED at the time). Once I got back to my little house on Buziga Hill, I drank a lot of beers and felt properly depressed for the rest of the weekend. 

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On Monday morning, I was back at my desk in the MFED. To my surprise, PS/ST had already replied to my Loose Memo, which was sitting in my intray. I picked it up and read what he had written. I could not believe what I was seeing! In Tumusiime-Mutebile's characteristic handwriting, he had scribbled on the cover of the memo that the French had withdrawn the Gulu project and that the Budget crisis was over. He even put a 'thanks' on the memo, which was highly atypical of PS/ST, who was usually quite terse in official communications.

Exactly what had happened over the weekend to make the French withdraw the Gulu Airport project is still a mystery to me. However, rumour has it that PS/ST attended a reception at the British High Commission on Friday evening, where all the major donors and the French Ambassador were also present. In the course of the evening, so I am told, PS/ST, who was very fond of Johnny Walker Black Label, apparently laid into the French Ambassador pretty hard. He also managed to corral the other donors to do the same. With no minute-takers or media present, everyone felt free to vent their true feelings about the Gulu Airport project and the French Ambassador had apparently finally relented.

The Gulu Airport project saga therefore had a happy ending. In most similar cases in Africa, however, I suspect the French get their way. Very few African countries have a PS/ST of the quality Uganda had at the time. African countries are heavily dependent on aid and the French are strong, extremely determined, and completely ruthless. Most other donors are usually too cowardly to uphold principles if it means jeopardising relations with France. So what if a small poor African country ends up building yet another white elephant project?

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When I look back at these events, it is abundantly clear to me that the French did not suddenly engage with English-speaking Uganda in 1995 in order to 'turn a new leaf' in French-African relations. Instead, they acted entirely out of narrow self-interest and necessity. France had just been kicked out of Rwanda and the DRC, so they needed a new base from which to project French power in the region. They settled on Gulu, because the runway was big enough to handle large French military aircraft. They offered to pay for an air traffic tower and other facilities with French equipment, because their gear had dual military and civilian use, thereby giving them the option to use the airport to advance their geo-political objectives in case they deemed it necessary.

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Now, let us circle back to last week's Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, where I suspect something very similar took place. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by The Economist and the BBC, the French did not participate in the summit out of genuine desire to redesign French-African relations. Rather, they were there to identify new strategic partners, because France has just been kicked out of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which have all turned to Russia.

If I was Kenya's leader, or the leader of any other English-speaking African country, who was suddenly being approached by the French government I would therefore be very, very sceptical indeed.

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The DC's rejection of the Gulu Airport project stood for a good twenty years, saving the government and Ugandan tax payers millions of Dollars. A fine achievement for MFED, in my opinion. In 2014, however, the Ugandan Civil Aviation Authority announced a USD 59 million master plan to completely renovate Gulu airport, including building a new terminal building, a car park, access roads, cargo operations facilities, runway lights, fire and rescue services, and air navigation and traffic control systems. This time there is no donor funding. In 2019, President Museveni announced that Gulu airport should be upgraded to international airport standard.

Yet, as of May 2026, Gulu Airport still receives less than one scheduled flight per day.

The End