Airforce One hits the tarmac at Waterkloof airbase next Tuesday, the first pulpit on United States President George Bush’s evangelical five-stop African junket — his second trip to the continent, his first to South Africa.
Bush will also visit Senegal, Nigeria, Botswana and Uganda. Officially, the countries were chosen for their solid democratic practice (Senegal; South Africa), good HIV/Aids management (Uganda) and economic sheen (Botswana).
Strategically, Nigeria and Senegal are vital for future US oil supplies; South Africa’s support is crucial because she’s a regional power and an influential developing world country, while both Uganda and Bot swana are paeons to the US free market agenda.
Early briefings about the trip have about them a sense of cometh the hour, cometh the saviour.
“For a century, America has acted to defend the peace, to liberate the oppressed … America is committed to the success of Africa because we recognise a moral duty to bring hope where there is despair…,” said Bush in Washington last week.
Where the tone is not godlike, it is that of empire. “America also understands that unprecedented influence brings tremendous responsibilities. We have duties in the world.”
Accompanied by his Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush will be hard-pressed to show his good works in South Africa.
Powell has been shouted down by protestors here twice since 2001, once during an address at Wits University and then while he was delivering his speech at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. He comes to a country where one of the world’s greatest statesmen, Nelson Mandela, called him “a man who cannot think properly” and where the country took a firm and vociferous stand against him on the war on Iraq.
And once he gets his voice heard above the roar and the din, his spin-doctors will have their work cut out overcoming the distrust and scepticism that Africans — and South Africans in particular — have developed towards his administration.
To many on the continent and in the pro-Africa lobby in the West, Bush is the Great Deceiver: adept at repackaging old promises and dazzling his critics with new pledges to be delivered on future dates.
Besides South Africa, protests are also planned in Dakar, and the union movement in Nigeria will link its crippling strike against the oil sector to Bush’s visit. Bush’s strategic agenda is two-fold: political and economic interest. Politically, this is a visit to shore up support for his “war on terror”.
His economic goody bag for Africa includes more aid, more trade and a large chunk of the additional $15-billion funds for HIV/Aids.
In return, Bush will seek cooperation from the five African countries to fall behind the US both by arresting the alleged foot soldiers of terror networks (as Malawi did in conjunction with the CIA last week) and by passing anti-terrorism legislation in line with a US-inspired Security Council resolution to ensure all United Nations members put the laws in place.
Against massive public opposition, both South Africa and Kenya are putting the finishing touches to domestic anti-terror laws.
“The mood among East African governments, after the 1998 US embassy bombings [in Kenya and Tanzania], has been unequivocally supportive of anti-terrorism action,” reports the Washington-based journal Southscan.
Despite this, Bush will not have an easy political ride. South Africa has led a campaign on the continent to push for support for a unilateral, UN-led approach to anti-terrorism.
It’s been hard work because sub-Saharan Africa is susceptible to America’s chequebook diplomacy, but most countries held the line on Iraq, refusing to give the US the votes it needed to bully through a UN resolution sanctioning pre-emptive strikes on Iraq.
The decision by the US this week to tie military aid to 19 African countries, including South Africa, to support for its plans to dilute the influence of the International Criminal Court is likely to harden attitudes.
This short-sighted decision could have implications for the US’s ramped-up military activities in Africa. Southscan also reports a “qualitative shift in US military policy towards Africa” for a more permanent military presence including its base in Djibouti. “Small rapid reaction contingents of US soldiers will be placed in bases in Algeria, Morocco and perhaps Tunisia with facilities in Senegal, Mali and Ghana.”
Troop deployment is often congruent with oil exploration — the US sees West Africa as a vital future supplier of oil.
Bush’s increasingly unilateralist foreign policy agenda is alienating the “world’s only superpower” across the globe, and here. His is an unwilling empire and, as next week’s protests and meetings are likely to show, as they do in Iraq’s nascent guerrilla war, national sovereignty and multilateralism are vital in a globalised era.
The US decision to downgrade its representation to the World Conference against Racism in 2001; its walkout from negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court; its hardline and uncooperative stance at the World Summit; and, finally, the war on Iraq have cooled relations, at points to near icy, between it and South Africa.
President Thabo Mbeki’s office has confirmed that “multilateralism” will be on the agenda of talks next week. “It’s an excellent opportunity to discuss the world post-Saddam’s Iraq,” said Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad at the weekend.
He added: “Without multilateralism, you can’t tackle the problems of terrorism, HIV/Aids and the financing of development.
“We have differences in tactical approaches, but there are no big problems and we’d like to put an African agenda high on their [the US] agenda.”
Professor John Stremlau of the University of the Witwatersrand concurs. “I do not think that South Africa’s stand [on Iraq] caused any real damage in relations because the US government understood South Africa’s stance. Bush and Mbeki get along and Mbeki is the one president in Africa who has the credibility to stand with Bush and make his points frankly.”
One area of frank discussion is likely to include Zimbabwe. The US has upped the ante, pushing for a more robust stance by South Africa and coming close to labelling Zimbabwe a terrorist state. “Notorious human rights abusers, including, among others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world,” said Bush. This is likely to come up in talks on multilateralism.
If the evangelical tone is loud on Bush’s political agenda, it gets even louder on economic strategy.
In the same speech last week, he said, “Our strong and prosperous nation must also be a compassionate nation. I will continue to advance our agenda of compassionate conservatism, applying the best and most innovative ideas to the task of helping our fellow citizens in need.”
While Bush will stress the absolutes of US compassion, research shows that in each area he will highlight, economic support is in fact very limited and always places US business and national interests first.
Such “compassionate conservatism” includes its biggest carrot — $15-billion in aid in the next five years to fight Aids in Africa. The money will be targeted at African and Caribbean countries, where the crisis is most severe, and is expected to prevent seven million new infections and provide care for 10-million infected people and orphans. The money cannot be released until it is approved by the US Congress.
But the US has also hamstrung efforts at the World Trade Organisation to make it easier for developing countries to import or manufacture cheap generic drugs; and this week it appointed a big pharmaceutical industry businessman, Randy Tobias, former CEO of Eli-lilly to head the Bush Aids programme. Aids activists fear this will sound the death knell for efforts to manufacture and distribute cheaper non-patent Aids drugs — essential in the global battle.
The US remains the world’s largest aid donor, giving $11-billion in 2001, with about one-third targeted at Africa. In addition, its charitable foundations are also major donors, giving $4-billion in 2000.
Through its Millennium Challenge Account, it will boost funding by 50% over the next three years to countries which meet its pro-forma standards of good political and economic governance. Economic standards include full market liberalisation, which has hurt many African economies.
US aid is criticised by NGOs for attaching over-onerous conditions. Recent studies have also shown that a large portion of every US aid dollar is spent in the US and the country is far from reaching the 0,7% of gross domestic product in aid that it has pledged to the UN.
The third leg of its “compassionate conservatism” is the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which allows preferential market access to 38 African countries.
Reports say 22 countries have been able to use the legislation to get products into the world’s largest market. Six — Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Swaziland and South Africa — are the biggest Agoa beneficiaries, primarily for clothing exports. Overall, Africa has only managed to capture 2% of all exports to the US.
But South Africa’s rag trade has been pulled back from the brink because of Agoa, with South African exports jumping from R7-billion in 1994 to R30-billion by 2002. The rand’s decline helped by making exports more competitive, says the South African government. Agoa’s benefits, however, are limited.
Continentally, African exports to the US declined in 2001, while imports from the US increased. Agoa benefits are renewable annually, allowing the US to shut off access to products that threaten its producers and it is finite, ending in 2008 (though Bush supports efforts to increase its lifespan).
Because benefits are only granted to countries that completely open their markets, local producers can lose out. In Lesotho, where clothing exports grew to $130-million from a zero-base, almost seven in 10 new enterprises are Taiwanese owned with suspect labour practices and poor working conditions, a troubling norm, according to trade unions who conducted a two-year study into Agoa.
In addition, the US has refused to budge at World Trade Organisation negotiations aimed at dismantling trade-distorting subsidies. West African cotton producers are going to the wall because they cannot compete with subsidised US cotton farmers.
South Africa is readying to roll out the red carpet for Bush — diplomacy and realpolitik determine it must because, as Pahad said last week, it is the world’s only hegemonic power, South Africa’s largest foreign investor and a major trading partner. Mbeki is also looking to shore up concrete US support for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and for the institutions of the African Union.
But as Airforce One takes off next Friday, Bush is likely to go home with another message: the age of empire is over and Africa has her own priests.