Andy Burnham is confirmed as leader of the Labour Party and is expected to be appointed prime minister on Monday, 20 July, succeeding Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street. For African governments, investors and the diaspora communities who watch Westminster closely, the succession lands at an uncomfortable moment. Mr Starmer entered office in July 2024 promising a reset in Britain’s relationship with the continent, built on partnership rather than aid dependency. Eighteen months later, that promise remains largely unrealised. The December 2025 framework, billed as a shift from “donor to investor,” was announced by the then Africa Minister, Baroness Jenny Chapman, alongside pledges to scale private capital for African development priorities and to reform the global debt architecture ahead of the UK’s G20 presidency in 2027. Yet aid cuts from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent of gross national income, driven by higher defence spending in response to the war in Ukraine, undercut the framework almost as soon as it was published, and analysts at the London School of Economics and elsewhere have since warned that the departure of Mr Starmer without a clear successor to the Africa brief risks stalling agreements such as the UK-Africa Infrastructure Fund altogether.
This is the vacuum that Mr Burnham inherits, and it is also the opportunity. A new premiership offers a natural point to correct course, not by reviving the language of partnership that so often accompanied so little delivery, but by reframing Africa engagement explicitly around commercial return. The Southern African Times and Sankofa Capital put forward the following recommendations to the incoming prime minister, grounded in the economics of the relationship rather than in sentiment.
The first recommendation is to treat Africa as a return-generating asset class in Downing Street’s own communications, because the evidence supports it. Research spanning multiple study periods has consistently found that returns on foreign direct investment in Africa exceed those available in other developing regions, with one widely cited analysis putting the African rate of return at above eleven per cent against roughly nine per cent for Asia and under nine per cent for Latin America and the Caribbean during the mid-2000s. Later work confirms the pattern has persisted, sub-Saharan Africa’s FDI-to-GDP ratio has, in some assessments, run ahead of Latin America and the Caribbean, and yet the region still receives a strikingly small share of global capital flows relative to the returns on offer. That gap between yield and allocation is precisely where a government serious about “investor not donor” positioning should be working, using guarantees, blended finance and export credit to close the perception gap that keeps British institutional capital on the sidelines while Gulf, Chinese and Indian capital moves in.
The second recommendation concerns timing against the African Continental Free Trade Area. AfCFTA is no longer aspirational infrastructure, it is operational architecture, and the ministerial forum on critical minerals value chains and beneficiation convened in Abidjan in July 2026 signalled how seriously African governments now take regional value chains over raw extraction. Full implementation is projected to lift intra-African trade by as much as forty five per cent by 2045 and add over a percentage point to continental GDP, while the shift toward beneficiation, cross-border processing of cobalt, lithium, platinum group metals and rare earths rather than their export as ore, is where the next generation of African industrial value will be captured. Britain’s competitive advantage lies not in competing with Beijing on extraction financing, a contest it cannot win, but in positioning UK capital, engineering expertise and financial services around downstream beneficiation, precursor materials, battery components, green steel and the professional services layer that surrounds them. A UK-Africa beneficiation finance facility, explicitly aligned with AfCFTA protocols and SADC mineral strategies, would distinguish London from both Washington’s transactional tariff posture and Beijing’s extractive orientation.
The third recommendation is structural rather than rhetorical. The seven-point framework published in December 2025 was criticised in Parliament, including by the shadow foreign secretary, for omitting the Commonwealth, which counts twenty one African states among its membership, and for offering no answer to Russian and Chinese competition on the continent. Mr Burnham does not need a new framework so much as a standing mechanism, a Prime Minister’s Africa Investment Council, meeting twice yearly and reporting directly to Downing Street rather than being absorbed into the Foreign Office’s broader bandwidth, which is what allowed the Africa brief to drift when ministerial attention turned to Gaza, Ukraine and China. Continuity survives changes in personnel when it is built into institutions rather than into the enthusiasm of whichever minister currently holds the file.
The fourth recommendation speaks directly to Southern Africa. Zimbabwe’s own re-engagement with international capital, the migration of dual-listed counters onto the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, the resumption of direct Air Zimbabwe services between Harare and London Gatwick, and a stabilising investment climate all offer Mr Burnham a low-risk, high-visibility early opportunity to demonstrate that “investor not donor” is more than a slogan. A bilateral trade and investment dialogue with Harare, alongside similar overtures to Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique, would cost little politically while signalling that the UK’s Africa policy is not solely a function of its relationship with Pretoria and Abuja.
None of this should be dressed up as generosity. The case for Mr Burnham is a case about returns, about positioning British capital ahead of a continental market of 1.3 billion consumers under AfCFTA, about aligning UK financial services with a beneficiation agenda that is already under way with or without London’s participation, and about building institutional memory that survives the next reshuffle. Soft power that pays a commercial return is durable in a way that soft power funded by a shrinking aid budget can never be. That is the argument Sankofa Capital and this publication will continue to make to Westminster in the weeks ahead.
Written by Farai Ian Muvuti is Chief Executive of The Southern African Times and Founder of Sankofa Capital Ltd, an advisory and investment diplomacy firm with operations across Africa and the United Kingdom.
