If Africa presents a difficult policy problem for any American president it presents a particularly difficult problem for President Barack Obama, who actually knows something about the continent, to some degree firsthand.
Although Mr. Obama has never lived there, his father was Kenyan and he has traveled to Africa four times. When he visited his father's family in Kenya he saw the way life is among ordinary African villagers. Since his father's tribe were Luo, not the dominant tribe in Kenya, he even saw the way life is among non-elite Africans, the ones who don't loot their countries' economies and drive Mercedes. (In Kiswahili, those people are called wabenzi, the people of the Benz. In the Lingala of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they were called the Ewingi in the 1970s, after the Texas family in the TV series "Dallas.")
Mr. Obama, in setting U.S. Africa policy as president, is between a rock and a hard place. He is under pressure from Africa to help take care of the continent. This means paying attention to African issues and, in particular, rounding up aid and investment. He did a certain amount of that on the trip he just completed, which included stops in Russia, Italy for the G-8 summit, the Vatican and, his last stop, Ghana in West Africa. At the G-8 he put the heat on the donor nations present to raise the $15 billion they had intended to provide over three years to $20 billion.
He also is under pressure from African Americans to do something positive for Africa. They voted for him and expect him to raise Africa from the bottom of the policy heap where it has rested at least since the administration of John F. Kennedy (although George W. Bush was relatively generous in fighting disease in Africa). But Africa, for logical reasons, always comes after Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and now South Asia in U.S. policy considerations. That's too bad for Africa, but let's not kid ourselves. Mr. Obama certainly shouldn't. Still, he will want to help.
On the other hand, the president knows from his reasonably broad and deep knowledge of Kenya the profound problems involved in trying to do something for Africa. The continent lags in terms of development and in everything that goes with it -- education, health care, infrastructure. In his excellent speech in Ghana last Saturday, Mr. Obama put his finger right on the sore: the need for democracy, economic opportunity, decent health care and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Development comes from good governance. Both are missing pretty much universally in post-independence Africa. What is needed, he said, are "capable, reliable and transparent institutions." America is willing to help, and will in particular support efforts to combat corruption. But, in the end, he said, "Africa's future is up to Africans."
What was really interesting about Mr. Obama saying this to the Africans was the fact that he can. African leaders, in spite of sometimes pretty words, rarely speak home truths to each other about such matters. There is an almost institutionalized taboo against criticizing each other, no matter how egregious the fault, because each of them is vulnerable. President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola is going to accuse President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo of stealing his country's oil money? Well, both do.
There are other taboos as well. One of them is being seen as questioning the actions of former anti-colonial "freedom fighters." That is the reason why no South African president, including Nelson Mandela, has yet told Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe that he has utterly ruined his country and should step down -- or commit ritual suicide if one is thinking of really appropriate fates.
Mr. Obama is not bound by any of these constraints. We will assume that no African leader could cite corruption by Mr. Obama in his own country, even if he is from Illinois. Nor could any of them take some rebel guerrilla leader from the United States under his wing and seek to organize the overthrow of Mr. Obama by supporting an insurgency, as African leaders sometimes do to each other. (Read a new book by Gerard Prunier called "Africa's World War" to get an idea of the complexity and depravity of what African leaders do through insurgencies, assassinations and various misdemeanors.) Thus, the American president is able to tell hard truths with impunity.
What is more, he is able to attach conditions to U.S. aid based on a country's performance using appropriate measures of democracy, economic opportunity, health care and other social services and, perhaps most important of all, peaceful resolution of its internal and external conflicts.
The one weak point in Mr. Obama's presentation in Ghana was his lame defense of the initiative launched during the days of the Bush administration to create an Africa Command -- AFRICOM -- as part of the Defense Department. What he said was, "Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world."
Africans have resisted the insertion of AFRICOM into their affairs, seeing it as an American effort to militarize U.S.-African relations. The Bush and now Obama administrations have denied that, but in the meantime AFRICOM's headquarters staff has grown to 2,000, the fiscal year 2010 Defense Department budget proposal would double AFRICOM's funds and more than 2,000 U.S. troops have been stationed at the American base in Djibouti on the horn of East Africa.
All in all, Mr. Obama's trip to Ghana, preceded by having passed the hat for Africa at the G-8 summit in Italy, has plunged him into the bubbling water of U.S. Africa policy. He should know what he is doing, but it won't be easy.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09196/983854-374.stm#ixzz0LOTWi8CP
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