The personal sure is political — even in that self-proclaimed beacon of democracy, the United States of America. Indeed, making sense of the Obama administration’s foreign policy on Africa may require you to dig up your first-year politics notes on Hans Morgenthau as well as your copy of Dreams from My Father. Such is the complexity of the first African-American being the US’s commander-in-chief.
US foreign policy towards Africa is, on the face of it, a battle between national self-interest (what political theorists call realism) and the resurrection of a morally grounded foreign policy across the globe — shorn of the misguided neoconservative idealism of the Bush years. When it comes to Africa these debates often fall along ideological lines with conservatives promoting private-sector development and old-fashioned lefties lobbying for more foreign aid.
But Africa is not Iraq and it is too easily forgotten that many of Bush’s policies — especially in the field of public health — were tremendously popular throughout Africa. Beyond the historical symbolism and soaring rhetoric of the Obama revolution not much has changed in Washington’s Africa policy, apart from the fact that an intelligent, eloquent black man has replaced the bumbling Bush in the driver’s seat.
The Obama administration realises that ruthless realism in relation to Africa would leave the continent underdeveloped and rob the US of a more useful, mature partner. On the other hand, a strictly moral foreign policy based on preaching various ethical gospels and lavishing aid on poor countries would be equally unhelpful. It would simply perpetuate the assumption that African nations lack the capability to construct their own goals, let alone achieve them.
Obama’s America, in no small part owing to the president’s own lineage, is therefore promoting African agency as a third way out of the “aid vs trade” debates often bandied about in Washington. A third way is worth striving for, both because the old debates are unhelpful and because African-led development is a more appropriate route to African prosperity.
Obama’s Africa policy is essentially premised on the promotion of — insistence on, even — good governance. This policy is touted not just as an intrinsic good for Africa but also, as Hillary Clinton said at the Eighth African Growth and Opportunity Act conference in Kenya recently, “good [for] business”.
It is also deeply personal. In Accra Obama gave a pointed reminder of how his father’s career was blunted by cronyism and the muffling of dissent in Kenya. His desire for Africans to take their rightful, prominent place in the world is genuine, but by telling Africans to get their own house in order he risks sounding like yet another paternalistic Uncle Sam. Convincing black heads of state to get a handle on corruption, it turns out, is much harder than telling absent black fathers that “responsibility does not end at conception”.
Of course, foreign policy trips are as much about word choice as they are about symbolism and tone and there is a sense that both Obama in Ghana, and now Clinton on her own seven-nation diplomatic safari, are striking an excessively tough tone in the delivery of the good governance message. Not everyone is amused.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made his annoyance at this sort of prescriptivism clear when he bluntly retorted: “We don’t need another lecture.” This was a response to Clinton’s teacherly admonishment, “We are waiting, we are disappointed,” in reference to a tribunal that had not yet been established to look into post-election violence in Kenya. Clinton’s tone dovetails with Obama’s, but unfortunately for Hillary she can’t get away with talking tough love to African leaders and still be met with adoring applause.
But it was the sweeping historical analysis that slipped into Obama’s Accra speech that has caused the most consternation. Chastising African leaders for blaming the West rather than themselves for the continent’s troubles, he stated by way of example that “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants”.
Yet some on the left bristle at such talk of “mutual responsibility”. Gerald Caplan (who writes on African history) recently slammed Obama in the lefty US weekly The Nation for his ahistoricism. Caplan points out, for example, that Obama’s assertion that business won’t invest where “government officials are asking for 10%, 15%, 25% off the top” ignores the two-way nature of kleptocratic relationships.
Even if a great deal of corruption stems from greasy palms awarding domestic contracts and diverting aid, American and European business people also bear some responsibility and they must be dissuaded through harsher and more effective punishment for aiding corruption — or at the very least with the same kind of moral finger-wagging.
As for the emphasis on African agency, Caplan says that “to ignore the incalculable decades-long damage done to Africa as a pawn in the Cold War [shows] willful blindness to peddle a particular agenda”. Whereas Obama’s comment on “cutting costs that go to Western consultants” may have been welcome, it was overshadowed by his omission of any discussion of agricultural subsidies in the US and the European Union, which price out African products exported to the US and Europe. Caplan drives this point home by suggesting that the Obamas go shopping in Accra, where frozen EU imports are cheaper than locally raised chickens.
Caplan’s critique underscores the hasty disappointment of some on the left. Yes, Robert Mugabe’s land reform policies and severe mismanagement precipitated Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown. But it is misleading to ignore Britain’s role in prolonging white minority rule, as well as the structural impact of neocolonial policies on African economies after 1945, or Western businesses’ corrupt relationships with willing African “leaders”.
Here Obama’s strategy of leveraging his blackness to be tough with his admiring African brothers and sisters overreaches. And the fact that he unveiled no major policy initiative in Accra left many feeling that hope was in the air but that nothing concrete was in their hands.
But Caplan’s hysteria does Africans no favours either. Obama’s insistence that Africans develop some control over their lives is spot-on. In doing so he is granting them agency that unreconstructed leftists refuse to give them — reverting instead to worn-out mantras about colonial evils.
Obama may be vague when he says: “Opportunity won’t come from any other place … it must come from the decisions that you make, the things that you do and the hope that you hold in your hearts.” Lofty “yes we can” rhetoric indeed, but is it not preferable to the recycled formulas saying that Africa is helpless in the face of Western domination and oppression?
Certainly, colonialism and post-colonial mercantilism have left far too many individual African citizens, as well as their governments, with deeply ingrained inferiority complexes. We tend — for better or worse — to measure successful self-actualisation partly in material terms. Given how much Africa is lagging behind the West in terms of most socioeconomic indices, it is little wonder that most Africans look West, rather than inward, when setting goals. A US foreign policy that is therefore centred on unearthing, promoting and respecting African agency is critical. It is an important step towards the political self-actualisation of Africa, albeit long after the end of colonialism and apartheid.
Yet the fact that Obama’s intentions may be well-meaning does not guarantee that realpolitik will play out as intended. The truth is that moral foreign policies are the exception rather than the rule and the selfish pursuit of national interests remains alive and well. China already imports one-third of its oil from Africa and, by 2015, 25% of American oil will come from the Gulf of Guinea along the West African coast. Meanwhile, a 21st-century scramble for Africa is under way as countries from China to South Korea, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are leasing fertile land across Africa to grow everything from rice to crops for biofuels.
Even though Johnnie Carson, assistant secretary of state for Africa, is quick to dodge such realist critique by suggesting we now live in a multipolar world and so the US is not, in fact, trying to compete with China in a two-horse race for Africa’s resources, the simple fact is that a multipolar world is not necessarily a post-realist one.
It is no coincidence, for example, that conflict-ridden regions, such as Sudan (where China’s presence is strong) or northern Uganda, have been overlooked in favour of visits to economically and politically strong countries. Even the military support touted for the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is based on securing safe passage for ships in the seas off the Somali coast and consistent with the security aims of realist ideology, keeping terrorism at bay.
Obama has a unique opportunity to help eliminate Africa’s continued geopolitical marginalisation in the world. This is a tough but achievable goal. The route to success is to facilitate African-led development while making sincere attempts at dismantling structural inequalities in the international system — and domestic US policies — that hinder it. Obama will have to take this post-realist approach to heart, taking personal pride in helping to build the kind of Africa in which his father’s great potential could have been realised.
Eusebius McKaiser is a political and social analyst at the Centre for the Study of Democracy in Johannesburg. Sasha Polakow-Suransky is an associate editor at Foreign Affairs in New York