Obama and Africa

Jul 13, 2009 Editorial

Last Saturday, US President Barack Obama made his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, the part of the continent from where his father had left to attend university and not so incidentally had met his mother. The country actually selected for the one-day trip – Ghana – and not Kenya the country of his father was a studied move.

Since Ghana has done comparatively well economically as apposed to so many of the other countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the choice was intended to send a strong signal to the rest of the continent that governance issues would be emphasised in the foreign policy of this new administration. Good governance is not an “abstract notion that we’re trying to impose on Africa,” Obama said. “If government officials are asking for 10, 15, 25 percent off the top, businesses don’t want to invest there.”

Nigeria, which supplies a growing percentage of oil to the US (overall Africa is expected to supply twenty-five percent by 2015) but is notoriously corrupt was obviously snubbed as was Kenya, where intense ethnic conflict broke out into the open after disputed elections last year. The verdict is still out on the shared-governance arrangement that was brokered between the government and the opposition.

The gist of President Obama’s message was that the problems of African had to be solved ultimately by Africans. He told AllAfrica.com that he was “a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa. Part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance, that this was somehow the consequence of neocolonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism,” Obama said. “I’m not a believer in excuses.”

However, he attempted to soften the stern words by highlighting his personal connection with Africa: “I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family’s own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story. Some of you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life.”

But in the end, even though we can say that Obama is obviously preoccupied with larger problems such as the global financial meltdown, there is some disappointment in his exculpation of the role that the west played in the present problems of Africa.

Even in the country that he was visiting, Ghana, one cannot for instance dismiss the effect of the ouster of the first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, because of his leftist leanings back in the sixties. Similarly, when Obama claimed that the US was not responsible for the “boy soldiers” of Africa, he was clearly eliding the earlier role of the US in ousting leaders such as Lumumba in the Congo and replacing them with corrupt leaders, which is directly connected to the present anarchy in several countries of Africa.

President Obama has tried to maintain the aid level to Africa established by his predecessor, George Bush, but his low-keyed approach to the problems confronting the continent stands a good chance of backfiring, even though he has considerable goodwill on account of his personal connection. America, after all, faces a growing Chinese presence in Africa. China has invested heavily in energy and mining interests and turned a blind eye to the excesses of the local governments it engages, especially such as conflict-prone and militaristic Sudan and Chad.

But Africa needs attention outside of the aid framework emphasised by President Bush and now continued by President Obama. A softening of the US position on agricultural subsidies by itself and other developed economies at the WTO talks coming up on concluding the DOHA development round can do more for Africa than all the aid it may donate.

Similarly, a principled position on the conflict in the Sudan would go a far way in convincing other African nations that the US is serious about the rhetoric on “good governance”.

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Obama and Africa

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