Just across the road from the imposing headquarters of the African Union in the centre of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is a block of housing and several Chinese cafes.
This is where the Chinese workers live who maintain the Union’s huge conference centre and 20-storey office building, opened in 2012 amid controversy about why it had been built by a Chinese company with Chinese labour, rather than by locals.
With the UK government claiming £40bn of new business as a result of last week’s state visit from China, there are similar questions for British civil servants about the role of this undemocratic nation, with a poor record on human rights, in building and controlling parts of the UK’s infrastructure. This includes seven potential HS2 contracts, worth almost £12bn, which the chancellor, George Osborne, opened up to Chinese investors on his recent trip to China, and the controversial billion-pound deals agreed last week for a Chinese state-controlled company, with a minority French state partner, to build nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point, Bradwell and Sizewell. There’s more, too: a UK/China cybersecurity deal that could pave the way to closer security cooperation between the two countries; and UK/Chinese work in the technology and creative industries. Details of these deals are likely to remain opaque under the auspices of commerical confidentiality.
On the other side of the world, however, Cameron’s government tells a very different story. Mexico City is the venue for this week’s annual conference of the Open Government Partnership – the alliance, set up in 2011 of countries committed to more open and transparent government.
China does not belong to the OGP. The UK is a founding member and co-hosted the annual OGP conference in London in 2013. Eleanor Stewart, the UK government’s head of transparency, will be in Mexico City to consider progress on the national plans set out by all member countries.
One of the key elements in making governments more open is finding out more about the deals they sign and who they work with. Every year, trillions of dollars are spent around the world on deals between governments and businesses; deals that result in roads, schools, hospitals – tangible assets that citizens really care about. “When government and business meet, rules need to be clear and deals made public,” say Georg Neumann, senior communications manager, and Gavin Heyman, executive director of the Open Contracting Partnership, both of whom will be at the Mexico conference to push through ideas to make all governments more accountable.
Open contracting – knowing more about how governments work with business and the kinds of deals they do – is one of the most vital aspects of open government. Neumann and Heyman say in a blog ahead of the conference that corruption could see up to 20% of government procurement budgets being wasted. “Corruption … hurts those who do not have a choice over which road to travel, where to be treated when sick or in which school to enrol their children.”
Open government campaigners in the UK have long called for the Freedom of Information Act to be extended to private companies delivering public services. But despite the apparent commitment to openness and the UK’s membership of the OGP, the Conservatives seem barely committed to preserving FOI, let alone extending it. A review of the FOI Act, out next month, is expected to suggest ways to curb public access to government information.
In Mexico City, global open government campaigners calling for sweeping changes in order to shine a light on the too often murky relationship between government and business, are making three basic demands: government deals should be open by default, as in the case in Slovakia, where a government contract is not legal until it is published; governments should provide standard, open data on public procurement, for ease of comparison; and governments should get everyone – citizens, businesses, experts and journalists – more involved in monitoring public procurement. Three simple steps to make public contracts open and accountable. Three simple steps that seem further away than ever.
