Looking beyond President Barack Obama’s call to African leaders for improved governance, some analysts are arguing that his brief visit to Ghana offered little reason to expect significant shifts in US policy towards the continent.
The Los Angeles Times offered an assessment in an editorial last week.
“President Obama sounded a familiar refrain: Africa must be made and remade by Africans, and the United States will continue to support nations on the path to progress,” the Times observed. “To critics, that meant he had nothing new to say — it was the same message about good governance they’d heard from presidents Clinton and George W Bush. No new programmes or initiatives for Africa.”
But Obama did announce at the G8 summit in Italy just prior to flying to Ghana that the United States will provide $3 billion to enhance “food security” in poor countries worldwide, the Times pointed out.
Politico, a daily publication focused on the US Congress and the White House, pointed out that Obama said little — in Ghana or in Washington — about “the two biggest crises in Africa.”
Politico’s widely read website noted that Bush “faced withering criticism for doing too little to end conflicts” in Darfur and Congo but that Obama has so far not experienced such attacks.
Still, John Prendergast, a Clinton administration specialist on Africa, said just prior to the Ghana trip that “Obama’s record in Africa will, in large part, be judged by how effectively he addresses these two deadly conflicts.
Good intentions and an envoy are not enough. A clear policy is needed that prioritises the end of these wars and the development of potent pressures and incentives” to stop the fighting.
It’s too early in Obama’s tenure to tell how his Africa policy will be defined, added Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa programme at the non-governmental Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
She noted that his attention to international affairs has so far been monopolised by Iran and North Korea and other hot spots far from Africa.
President Obama’s approach to Africa may ultimately differ little from Bush’s, suggested Jennifer Widner, another analyst with a Washington-based think tank.
“Is it going to change US policy hugely? I’d say no, because they’re going to be constrained by the economic situation,” said Widner, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School.
Two of Obama’s critics took specific issue with his comparison between Kenya and South Korea.
The president had said in an interview with Allafrica.com prior to his Ghana trip that Kenya actually had a larger economy than did South Korea at the time of independence.
Kenya and other countries in Africa have been “badly outpaced” by some Asian economies in the past few decades, President Obama added in Ghana.
“President Obama repackaged the same old views in less diplomatic language,” Andrew Mwenda, managing editor of The Independent in Kampala, wrote in a commentary on the website of the Washington-based journal Foreign Policy.
“He had the courage to be more explicit on Africa’s ills because, due to his African heritage, President Obama can say as he wishes without sounding racist — a fear that constrains other Western leaders when talking about Africa.
“Even so, President Obama said nothing new.”
South Korea was not democratic when it rose to economic prominence, Mwenda noted on the Foreign Policy website.
That fact contradicts President Obama’s claim that authoritarian rule accounts in large measure for Africa’s underdevelopment, Mwenda argued.
Similarly, Ron Walters, an African-American commentator and retired professor, observed that South Korea “did not have Africa’s history [of Western colonial domination] and so it was able to benefit from foreign investment with which it instituted a system of mass general education that built a skilled work force.”
Kenya, on the other hand, has not attracted substantial foreign investment — “and not just because of the existence of corruption,” Walters said in a commentary for an African-American newspaper in Seattle.
“Global racism is, no doubt, one of the major factors why Africa has been excluded from robust foreign investment, but there is also the residual control that European countries still exercise over many African countries, their currencies and raw materials.”
Walters also likened Obama’s call on Africans to take greater responsibility for their plight to appeals he often makes to African-American audiences.
“It seems to be a theme that paralyses black criticism and plays well with whites who believe that the irresponsibility of blacks — and their African kin — is the major reason for their failure to achieve equality with other nations.”
Rather than calling for responsibility, Walters said President Obama would do better to support African “self-determination.”
That would mean helping Africans gain control over their destiny not just by promoting democracy but also by recognising that internal conflicts in Africa result from a lack of resources such as food, jobs and education, Walters added.
A more empathetic appraisal of President Obama’s comments in Ghana was offered by Ruth Levine, an analyst with the Centre for Global Development.
Writing in a blog on that think tank’s website, Levine drew a contrast between President Obama’s reference in Ghana to America’s “conscience” and Bush’s emphasis prior to his early 2008 visit to Ghana on America’s “compassion”.
President Obama said in his speech to Ghana’s parliament that his administration will develop “a comprehensive global health strategy because, in the 21st century, we are called to act by our conscience but also by our common interest.”
Bush had said a year a half ago that his aim in Africa was to show that “the American people are a compassionate people, a decent people, who want to help moms with — deal with malaria, and families deal with HIV/Aids, and the need to feed the hungry.”
Does the difference in the two sets of word choices reflect “just a switch in speechwriters or a fundamentally different conception of why US tax dollars should be used to support improvements in Africans’ health?” Levine asked in her blog.
“I think the word choice represents a significant shift. Compassion connotes a relationship between individuals, where one is empathetic and voluntarily chooses to ease the suffering of another. Conscience implies a duty, based on knowledge of right and wrong.”
Moreover, President Obama’s mention of “common interest” conjures “an image of us all in the same boat,” Levine said.
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