Obama in Africa: A Major Disappointment

[Graham]

I thought the following article was thought-provoking. What do you all
think?

Taken from:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090720/caplan

Obama in Africa: A Major Disappointment
By Gerald Caplan

July 13, 2009

As expected, President Obama used his twenty-four-hour trip to Ghana
to send messages about his thinking and his priorities for Africa.
This was a moment that progressives involved in Africa have been
waiting for, hoping for some clear thinking about Africa's many
challenges and the American role in addressing them. On the basis of
his interviews and speeches, they will be sorely disappointed. Once we
get beneath the eloquence and style, it's hard to point to anything in
any of his remarks that couldn't have been said, however
inarticulately, by George Bush.

In one interview, Obama, with no false humility, stated that "I'm
probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's
occupied my office". No question that's true. Still, the bar in that
particular competition was not exactly set very high. And as his
various comments demonstrated, he's not nearly as knowledgeable as he
thinks he is. Much of what he believes about Africa and how it can
meet its many challenges is simply wrong.

At every opportunity, the President emphasized internal African causes
for the continent's woes, highlighting especially the need for good
governance and ending corruption. So he argued, for example, that
"you're not going to get investment without good governance." That's
just wrong. For decades most foreign investment in Africa has gone to
South Africa first, even under apartheid, and then to such oil-rich
nations as Angola and Nigeria. First and foremost, western companies,
backed energetically by their embassies, are after Africa's resources--
oil, gas and to a lesser extent minerals. These are the very sectors
where we find vast corruption, environmental degradation, the vicious
exploitation of African labor, and, often enough, Africa's wars. In no
case does good governance play a role in investment decisions. Often
enough venal leaders are precisely what investors look for.

Similarly, Obama insisted that business won't invest where "government
officials are asking for 10, 15, 25 percent off the top." That's an
illogical assertion. If foreign businessmen weren't only too eager to
play the bribery game, those African officials couldn't get away with
demanding a cut off the top. Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Kenya,
Cameroon, Congo--everyone knows how to get a contract in these and
other countries. Which also should remind us that high-level
corruption in Africa could not and does not happen without intimate
western collaboration.

Obama's repeated insistence on this theme of good governance and
corruption is somewhere between ironic and farcical, given the eight
African leaders who were invited to last week's G-8 summit. Five were
from sub-Saharan Africa, three from North Africa. Every one of them is
ranked poorly or abysmally in Transparency International's 2008
Corruption Perceptions Index. Seven of the eight are considered only
partly free or not free by Freedom House in 2009; only one (South
Africa, led by the deeply corrupt Jacob Zuma) is deemed free. It was
an important if inadvertent lesson: Corruption and poor governance are
indeed widespread, if not quite ubiquitous, across Africa, and the
west cheerfully plays footsies with all those governments.

Obama says there is "a direct correlation between governance and
prosperity." That's why he chose democratic Ghana for his first
official state visit, rather than his father's country, Kenya. Heaven
knows that the ruling parties in Kenya are brazenly corrupt and
dedicated to little beyond enriching themselves and their supporters.
Ghana, on the other hand, after years of bad governments following the
CIA-backed coup that overthrew its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, can
now be said to be fairly stable and democratic (though hardly free of
corruption). Obama knows lots of interesting things. When his father
left Kenya in the early 1960s to study in the USA, he noted, the GDP
of Kenya was higher than that of South Korea; today, Korea is one of
the world's great economic success stories, while Kenya languishes.

The UN's Human Development Index backs this up. In 2008, of 179
countries listed, Korea was ranked an impressive twenty-fifth while
Kenya was 144. But the President should look at these ratings more
closely. Despite good governance, and though some real progress is
being made, Ghana was ranked 142, virtually tied with Kenya among the
bottom 20 percent of the world's nations. Something else must be going
on here that accounts for this depressing situation because Obama's
analysis can't.

Here's the heart of his diagnosis,: While the international community
"has not always been as strategic as it should have been [regarding
Africa]...ultimately I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible
for Africa...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 racist. I'm not a
believer in excuses."

This is really a startling argument for the head of a country whose
great political battles still rage around the meaning of its
Constitution, adopted in 1787 while the slave trade still raged, and
whose personal inspiration comes from a predecessor who was murdered
in 1865, twenty years before formal colonialism began in Africa. To
dismiss the slave trade and a century or more of colonial rule, to
minimize the impact of neocolonialism by France and the US, to ignore
the incalculable decades-long damage done to Africa as a pawn in the
cold war--all of this seems to requite willful blindness in order to
peddle a particular agenda.

Of course Obama's obsession about appalling governance is not wrong; I
share it completely. Africans have for decades been betrayed by a
veritable pageant of monstrous leaders, one more egregious than the
other. But another truth is that the United States actively backed
almost all of them, and if the US didn't, France did; that's part of
the neocolonial record. The west also supplied many of the arms that
were used in the appalling internal conflicts that have roiled Africa
for so long. Even today, the US, Britain and France continue to remain
close to many African leaders whose democratic credentials leave much
to be desired, as the G-8 meeting underlined.

The President raised Zimbabwe to make his case. The West, he is not
responsible for the destruction caused by Robert Mugabe and his
government. The destruction is only too true. The West's innocence is
not.

Had Britain fulfilled its clear obligations and ended white minority
rule in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in a timely fashion, fifteen years of
vicious civil war would have been avoided. Instead, the final African
victory left the country in the hands of an embittered, vengeful
Mugabe. America and Britain were collaborating with the apartheid
regime in South Africa at the very moment it was actively working
worked to sabotage Mugabe's new government. The IMF forced structural
adjustment programs on an unwilling Zimbabwean government, helping to
undermine its economy. All this is well known. So is the fact that for
the first twenty years of his reign, "Good old Bob" Mugabe was one of
the west's favorite "Big Men", blithely ignoring his ferocious
oppression of his opponents. Not until he began expropriating the vast
holdings of white farmers ten years ago--all of whose land was stolen
from Africans during the twentieth century (though not necessarily by
the current owners)--did western media and western governments decide
he was Enemy Number One. Can Obama know nothing of this record?

"Development depends on good governance," Obama lectured Ghana's
Parliament. "That is the change that can unlock Africa's potential."
With all due respect to the President, this is malarkey. The reality,
which surely Obama grasps, is that for centuries, year in and year
out, far more of Africa's wealth and resources pour out of the
continent to the rich world than the west provides Africa through all
sources, from aid to investment to trade. Good governance will not end
this perverse truth.

Beyond that, even if every African country was led by a saint, they
could do nothing about the severe environmental and economic damage
that global warming--for which Africa has no responsibility whatever--
is inflicting across the continent. Obama actually mentioned this in
his speech, yet ignores it with his obsessive fixation on Africa's
sole responsibility for its problems.

Even the most exemplary African leaders could do nothing about the
destructive impact on African development of the present worldwide
economic crisis, for which Africa has no responsibility whatever.

No African leader has the slightest influence on the drastic increase
in food prices that is causing such suffering, including outright
starvation, to millions of Africans.

Even a continent of Mandelas couldn't change the massive subsidies
that western governments provide to their agribusinesses. When they're
in Ghana, the Obamas should do some comparison shopping. They may be
taken aback to find that it costs more to buy a locally-bred chicken
than a subsidized one that's been shipped frozen all the way from
Europe. To this, Obama reassured his Ghanaian hosts, "America can do
more to promote trade and investment."

And nothing can be done about the enormous damage already done to
Africa by the destructive neoliberal policies that were imposed on
African governments by the World Bank and IMF over the past thirty
years. Even today, while their rhetoric has changed, these
institutions, deeply American-influenced, continue to insist on
discredited policies that have failed to promote growth while vastly
increasing inequality.

None of this was tackled by Obama. For him, the relationship between
Africa and the rich world is a one-way street. Africans are screwing
up, and if they want more American aid, they've got to get their act
together. This is the Obama analysis--simplistic, myopic, patronizing,
implicitly threatening, just what we expected and got from George
Bush. Like Bush, evidence based-reality takes a back seat to whatever
reality a president chooses to concoct.

For the past decade, it's been widely agreed that the US has three
overriding interests in Africa: exploiting natural resources, above
all oil and gas; fighting Islamists; and competing with China. In all
cases, Africa is merely a pawn, something to be used to pursue
America's interests, not Africa's. African development and everything
related to it are secondary matters. Substantively, nothing Obama has
committed himself to alters these priorities, especially his strong
endorsement of the suspiciously vague new US military command
structure for Africa, called AFRICOM. But the Americans have been
unable to persuade a single African country except ever-cooperative
Liberia to host the base for this structure, all fearing the
increasing militarization of US-African relations. Given that they're
a gang of corrupt leaders who govern poorly, this should surely send
Obama a pretty clear message.

I documented the case against the Obama analysis of Africa in a book
published last year, The Betrayal of Africa. It demonstrates the twin
burdens that actually account for Africa's condition--their own
wretched leaders combined with destructive western policies and
practices. I know the President is a pretty busy guy, but it's a short
book and he clearly enjoys reading and learning. Unless he learns
what's really going on in Africa, his administration will become yet
another in an endless line that has caused Africa more grief than
good. Hard to credit, but yes it can.

About Gerald Caplan
Gerald Caplan, a Toronto-based researcher-writer and activist with a
Ph.D. in African history, is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable
Genocide and The Betrayal of Africa.