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 in Africa 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. If so, it is not the first time France has sought to regain influence in Africa by involving itself with English-speaking 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).

I happen to be quite familiar with what France did in Uganda in 1995, 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 then proceeded to annex huge swatches 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 a senior economist in the Expenditure Department in the Ministry of Finance & Economic Development (MFED), which was based in Uganda House in Kampala, Uganda. 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 geopolitics, 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 standards a little-used airstrip in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu.

In almost all respects, Gulu's airstrip was no different from any other airstrip in remote rural parts of northern Uganda. In 1995, northern Uganda was rural, poor, and frequently destabilised by attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army, a particularly nasty guerrilla outfit led by the war lord Joseph Kony. For these reasons, there were almost no flights to and from Gulu, perhaps two or three a week, either military aircraft or chartered single-prop aircraft of the six-seater variety.

However, Gulu differed from all other Ugandan airstrips in one important respect. Originally built in 1959, Uganda's former dictator Idi Amin Dada upgraded Gulu airstrip for military purposes in the 1970s, turning the narrow dirt landing strip into a tarmac monster measuring more than 3 kilometres in length and 45 meters in width, which could accommodate very large aircraft indeed, such as Boeing 737s or 767s, and, of course, large military transport planes.

As I turned my attention the Gulu Airport project, I noted that it was an ambitious proposal, which involved resurfacing of the runway, establishing brand new navigation and air traffic systems, new safety and rescue facilities, as well as many other facilities. I also soon concluded that the Ugandan government should turn down the project for three main reasons.

First, no feasibility study had been done. A feasibility study is a technical analysis to determine if a project is economically viable and it was 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. Indeed, this is the likely reason why the French had not included a feasibility study in their submission.

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

The answer is that Gulu airport would soon become a millstone around the neck of Uganda's severely finance-constrained government. Once construction had been completed, the Ugandan government would be saddled with the cost of running and maintaining an international airport with no international flights and no revenue. The government would therefore pick up the annual outlays towards maintenance of buildings, equipment and the runway as well as the fire station plus the salaries for a team of flight controllers, fire fighters, and all the other auxiliary staff ranging from cleaners to runway maintenance people.

The third and final reason for turning down the project was that the French money could be used far more effectively elsewhere. French grant money would have far more bang for the buck in terms of eradicating poverty if it was allocated to, say, primary health care, primary education or rural feeder road maintenance, all of which were Ugandan government official top spending priorities at the time.

Based on these considerations, I therefore recommended to Development Committee (DC) that the project be shelved. The DC was a technically able committee consisting of senior MFED officials responsible for approving or rejecting projects for inclusion in the government budget.

As I had expected, the DC did not take long to agree with my verdict on Gulu. As the desk officer for transport, I was then instructed to write to the French government to explain the rationale for our rejection of their project and to propose that the French government instead channel it's generous funding towards 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. We had just prepared the government's Budget for next financial year and it was 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. I soon learned that all hell had broken out in parliament, where the government was facing a full-scale rebellion by MPs from northern Uganda, who were irate that the Gulu Airport project had been excluded from the Budget.  

I was baffled! How did northern MPs even know about this project, which had never been discussed outside of the MFED? I called a few people and soon got the story. It turned out that 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 local MPs that the government in Kampala was deliberately sabotaging development in the north by cancelling donor projects.

Clearly, the French Ambassador had not been content merely to not accept our decision on the project. He had actually gone significantly further by directly interfering in domestic Ugandan politics in a bid to force MFED to accept his project through political pressure. He had spread 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 project by appealing to the good nature of other donors, who funded about half of the Ugandan government budget at the time. 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. The Gulu Airport project was such a colossal waste of money that it would have broken almost every conditionality in the book.

Perhaps if I could get donors to back the government's decision on Gulu and maybe even get some of them to commit more funding for poverty alleviation in the north then I could stop the crisis and we could get the budget passed in parliament!

The rest of the week was hectic, but ultimately disappointing. I frantically visited the heads of every major donor in Kampala, including the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Union. I also paid a vist to all the major bilateral donors, such as Denmark, Britain, Germany, and others. I knew many of these people personally, because we met regularly, whenever new projects were proposed. I knew most of them agreed with me, at least in private.

The meetings typically went as follows: I started by explaining about the Gulu Airport project and its questionable economic feasibility. Then I explained how the project had gone through the regular 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 spending priorities agreed with donors. Finally, I asked them each to kindly put their mouths, where their wallets were by having a quiet word with the French to encourage them to officially withdraw the Gulu project and noted in passing that any new funding for proper development projects in Gulu was strongly encouraged.

Young and naive as I was at the time, I soon found myself both surprised and horrified to learn that not a single donor was willing to take our side against the French over Gulu. To the donors, it was clearly far more important not to jeopardise relations with France than to stand with Uganda on principle over "a silly little airport project" as one of the donors put it to me.

And so it was that, as Friday drew to a close, I had no choice but to conclude that MFED was losing the Gulu battle. Despondently, I reported to my boss, the larger-than-life Permanent Secretary and 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 pressure on the French. We were alone and powerless and would, it seemed to me, have to build France's stupid white elephant airport project in the middle of nowhere, with all its negative financial consequences.

Those were the conclusions I put on in Loose Memo, which I left with PS/ST's secretary before I left the office (Loose Memo was the term we used for internal written communications in the MFED at the time). Once at home on Buziga Hill, I drank a lot of beers and felt properly depressed the rest of the weekend.

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I was back at my desk in the MFED on Monday morning, where I found that PS/ST had already replied to my Loose Memo. I could not believe what I was seeing! In his characteristic handwriting, PS/ST had scribbled on the cover of the memo that the French had withdrawn the Gulu project and that the Budget crisis had been averted. He even put a 'thanks' on the memo, which was atypical as PS/ST 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, but 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 also happened to be present. In the course of the evening, 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 all 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. Besides, African countries are poor and weak, while the French are strong, extremely determined, and completely ruthless. And most other donors are too cowardly to stand up on principle if it means jeopardising relations with France. So what if a small poor African country ends up building yet another white elephant project?

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 did it out of narrow self-interest and necessity. France had just been kicked out of Rwanda and DRC, so the French 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 build an air traffic tower and other facilities with French equipment, because they had dual military and civilian use.

Now, let us circle back to last week's Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, where I suspect something very similar took place to what happened in Uganda in the mid-1990s. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by The Economist and the BBC, the French did not participate in the summit out of genuine desire on the part of l'Élysée to redesign French-African relations. Rather, they were there to find new strategic partners after being kicked out of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which have turned to Russia.

If I was a Kenyan political leader, or the leader of any other English-speaking African country and if was being approached by the French government right now I would be very, very wary 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, in my view. 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, air navigation systems, and traffic control systems. This time there is no donor funding. In 2019, President Museveni announced that Gulu airport should also be upgraded to international standards. Yet, as of May 2026, Gulu Airport still receives less than one scheduled flight per day.

The End