Africa is greeting the first trip to the continent by US President George Bush with a dose of scepticism, with analysts wary of American intentions and questioning the benefits of such a visit.
Bush’s week-long tour begins on Monday in the west African nation of Senegal, then proceeds to South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria.
The White House says the visit is designed to highlight Bush’s recent promise of $15-billion toward Aids programmes and to showcase African economic and political success stories.
But African analysts believe Bush is primarily looking to shore up the anti-terrorism effort on the continent, to push the US trade agenda and to pave over strong African criticism of the war in Iraq.
The visit is clearly about US self-interest and less about what matters to Africa, says Guy Mahone, a professor at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
”The important issues for Africans, like development initiatives are not really on the cards,” Mahone said.
”The American establishment has taken significant heat from the international community including Africa around the Iraq war,” he says.
”What Bush is attempting to do is build bridges that might not have been broken, but that were made unstable as a result of the war.”
For many years, sub-Saharan Africa figured little in US foreign policy, beyond being an occasional proxy battlefield in the Cold War. It took until 1998 before a sitting president bothered to visit, when Bill Clinton came to promote democratic reform, peace-building and to apologise for his administration’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide.
Since Clinton’s visit, US interest in the continent has only grown, with al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in east Africa, the growing importance of oil production in west Africa and the boost in exports from the continent to the US under a major free-trade deal known as Agoa (African Growth Opportunity Act).
”The US and Bush are interested in expanding their realm of trade with Agoa,” says Mahone.
He adds that the US also wants to promote the self-help New Partnership for African Development (Nepad), its chief architects are the presidents of three countries on the itinerary: Senegal, South Africa and Nigeria.
But the visit is not expected to see the birth of any new or significant aid gestures that Africans living with hardships so crave.
It comes at a time when the US is being asked to play a bigger role in peacekeeping on the continent, namely by sending troops to lead an intervention mission to Liberia, where civil war reached the heart of the capital last month. Hundreds of civilians died and thousands were wounded.
The US has been reluctant to commit forces to peacekeeping missions — especially in Africa — since its intervention in Somalia turned ugly in 1993.
That reluctance hasn’t extended to the war on terrorism. A 1 800-strong task force of US military personnel is based in Djibouti, monitoring terrorist activity in the Horn and east Africa.
The war on terrorism is no doubt a subtext of the Bush trip, according to analysts.
”Substantively, the thing that has got him here is to advance his anti-terror agenda,” says Adam Habib of South Africa’s Centre for Civil Society.
”The US is worried that international terrorists are using east Africa to launder money, smuggle weapons and establish themselves,” says Henri Boshoff, a military analyst with the South African Institute for Security Studies.
Bush is aware that many African states could disintegrate into the kind of anarchy seen in Somalia, considered by the US to be a likely safe haven for terrorists.
The visit won’t go unnoticed by opponents of Bush’s foreign policy, who criticise the US for a combination of arrogance, meddlesome tendencies and indifference toward Africa. Demonstrations against Bush are planned by anti-war groups, trade unions, anti-poverty activists and other critics in South Africa, Uganda and Nigeria, testing the democratic freedoms of each nation.
Whatever the reasons for a visit by a US president, the event should be seen as an opportunity, according to Ross Herbert, an Africa expert from the South African Institute for International Affairs.
”Any time a major power comes to visit there will benefits,” Herbert says. – Sapa-DPA