"HE is the first African leader to be facing impeachment in his own country over allegations of corruption. His people are facing famine after successive crop failure.
Now Bingu wa Mutharika, the President of Malawi, is the focus of a growing political row in Scotland after Jack McConnell, the First Minister, refused to withdraw an invitation to him to come to Edinburgh to attend a conference next month aimed at supporting the development of democracy in the African state.
The bitterness between Mr McConnell and his opponents over the issue escalated last night when the First Minister described his critics’ attacks as “the worst, possibly the most dangerous, political stunt since the creation of the Scottish Parliament”. He accused his opponents of “playing politics with the lives of people in Malawi”.
Scottish Nationalists hit back, saying that by “wining and dining” the Malawian leader, Mr McConnell was prepared to ignore the wishes of millions of ordinary Africans who were fighting
political corruption in the continent. "
The difficulties here were entirely predictable (indeed I predicted them in this blog in June - here). They may be attributed to the fact that neither Scottish Ministers nor their officials are sufficiently well-versed in the traps and pitfalls associated with international relations. They have neither the training nor the experience. They are innocents abroad - and, whatever criticisms one might level at the Foreign Office, I rather doubt that they would have got into the same mess.
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