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January 22, 2009
How President Obama Can Help Africa – and America as Well
While throngs of supporters and well-wishers braved the cold weather to fill the Washington for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America, arguably the most enthused celebrants were an ocean away. As I observed on the morrow of the election in November, President Obama’s “unique personal history means that he is the first son of Africa in the diaspora to be entrusted with the leadership of any major power, much less the chief magistry of what is still the world’s political, military, economic, and cultural superpower,” and, consequently, millions of Africans have an incredible emotional investment in his personal political fortunes, but also in the hope that they believe it represents for the relationship between America and Africa. And, as I likewise noted, this set of circumstances “presents the new U.S. chief executive with a rare opportunity to translate effusive sentiments of good will into a windfall of diplomatic capital which, if he husbands it prudently, can significantly advance America’s values and interests on the continent while helping to achieve Africans’ aspirations for peace, stability, and development.” But what does the new administration need to do to take advantage of this rare juncture?
First, President Obama needs to acknowledge and build upon the firm foundations which were laid by his predecessors. For the first three decades of Africa’s post-independence period, Washington policymakers, when they did not defer entirely to the former colonial powers, viewed the continent and through the prism of the Cold War competition with their counterparts in the Kremlin for influence over states and movements. In the 1990s, after initial fumbles in Somalia and Rwanda, President Bill Clinton began the shift towards a more balanced Africa policy that emphasized democratic politics, economic growth, and general good governance. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000, for example, substantially lowered barriers to trade between African countries barriers and the United States. To cite just the textile industry, as a direct result of AGOA the export of African garments to America has increased sevenfold.
To his credit, President George W. Bush built on this legacy, scoring in Africa success after success for American policy. Over the course of the last eight years, not only has AGOA been renewed and expanded, but, as I noted here a year ago, a whole host of new development and humanitarian initiatives – including, among other programs, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) – have positively demonstrated American commitment to Africa, strengthening the “soft power” links between America and the nations of the African continent. It is very much in the interests of the United States that the Obama administration to not only maintain these programs – all things being equal, continuity is a virtue in statecraft – but that, even in these troubled economic times, it finds the resources to keep them adequately funded to keep apace of the increasing need for them. In addition, older agencies of the U.S. government, including the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), will need resources to strengthen their work in an Africa whose strategic importance to America has increased significantly in just the decade since Washington policymakers declared in one report that they saw “very little traditional strategic interest in Africa” and, determining that “American economic interests in Africa are limited,” concluded that “America’s security interests in Africa are very limited” as well as her “ability to influence events on the continent.”
Second, there is broad recognition that security is a precondition for sustainable development in Africa, an end state that not only benefits Africans, but is also good for the United States and the international community at large. The establishment of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), with its mission, “in concert with other U.S. government agencies and international partners,” to conduct “sustained security engagement through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment” is a significant step to helping meet the security needs of the continent. As I noted in October when the new command became fully operational as the Pentagon’s sixth geographic unified combatant command, “AFRICOM represents not only a new institutional framework for U.S. engagement with Africa, but also a significant shift in the United States’ strategic paradigm from military reaction to threats to a preventative approach that fosters human security through conflict prevention and, where necessary, post-conflict stabilization operations.”
However, the Obama administration must convince its congressional allies to provide the resources necessary to stand up the new command: in the budget proposal for fiscal year 2009, President Bush requested $390 million for AFRICOM; the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, chaired by Representative John Murtha, only slashed that figure by one-third, offering just $266 million. This amount is barely enough to keep AFRICOM’s current modest operations – heavily focused on helping fight terrorism and extremism by building up the capabilities of African militaries – much less for it to undertake any new efforts to work with America’s African partners on the other security priorities which they have identified, including maritime security (see my September 16, 2008 column on this subject), law enforcement capacity-building, enhancing border security, and combating transnational crime (see my May 29, 2008 column on African criminal networks). Even fully funded, however, AFRICOM will still struggle in the midst of the stretched personnel resources of the U.S. armed forces, to honor all of its commitments. Hence, as I noted here some eighteen months ago, it is time to have a serious dialogue not only between the U.S. governmental and private sectors, but also involving America’s African partners, on the contributions that contractors will make to an “all of America” approach to helping build up Africa’s security capabilities.
Third, if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have taught any lesson, it is that while achieving security is a precondition for development, without noteworthy progress on the latter the former is at best illusory. Hence, as the Pentagon itself formally recognized in Directive 3000.05 on the Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, “stability operations,” are now a “core U.S. military mission” which ought to “be given priority comparable to combat operations” and defined as “military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order in States and regions” with the short-term goal of providing the local populace with security, essential services, and meeting its humanitarian needs and the long-term objective of helping to “develop indigenous capacity for securing essential services, a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society.” Translated into other terms, the security objectives of Americans and Africans cannot ultimately be achieved and sustained unless alongside the investment in building security there is an investment in developing the infrastructure, legal and physical, that will facilitate for the emergence of both effective governance and prosperity-bringing markets. Precisely because the current fiscal crisis in the United States has created a political climate where the sort of massive increase in foreign aid which promised by the Obama campaign is unlikely, the new administration needs to look for creative ways to encourage the private sector to be more engaged with efforts to develop and modernize Africa’s infrastructure, including financing facilities such as the relatively modest amounts currently available through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank of the United States, and tax incentives, which are particularly attractive insofar as they do not require direct public expenditures.
Fourth, while building up infrastructure in Africa is important, it is a means to an end, not an end itself, which is that Africans themselves should become fully integrated into the global marketplace. Over the long term, the path to sustained economic growth and prosperity for Africa lies through opening up additional opportunities for the continent’s abundant natural resources and nascent market economies. The new administration needs facilitate a concerted effort to mobilize the private sector – especially those small-to-medium-sized enterprises that best empower job growth in all economies – to invest in Africa, creating new possibilities not only for American business, but also for Africans to achieve their own dreams. Confronted as it is with a recession that puts fiscal constraints on what the U.S. government might undertake as well as the fact that other countries, including China, India, Japan, and Russia, are busy advancing their own economic interests in Africa, the Obama administration needs to engage in a serious dialogue with the members of the American business community and other stakeholders to determine how best to leverage what available resources to the greatest effect in order to promote the expansion of enterprise, trade, and wealth, while recognizing that in some circumstances other potential contributors may enjoy a comparative advantage.
Fifth, given both the historical caprice of the frontiers of many African states (see my column several years about the destabilizing nature of Africa’s colonial borders) and the current desire of many African governments and people to work through continent-wide and regional frameworks, the Obama administration, especially the State Department under the leadership of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, would do well to place a premium on America’s support for and engagement with the African Union, subregional bodies like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and Africa’s specialized multilateral institutions like the African Development Bank and the Maritime Organization of West and Central Africa (MOWCA), recognizing that Africans must take the lead. The same counsel goes for American security initiatives in Africa, which need to be multilateral as well as bilateral. For example, along the increasingly strategic Gulf of Guinea, it would seem to make very little sense to be building up the maritime domain awareness capabilities of littoral states with very short coastlines like Togo (56 kilometers) and Benin (121 kilometers) when a cooperative, subregional coast guard would probably better serve the national interests of the individual countries. In an address delivered in Washington at the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual legislative week in September, Jean Ping, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, listed five expectations which Africa would have of the new U.S. administration: (1) continued engagement with Africa as illustrated by a separate diplomatic mission accredited to the AU; (2) encouraging more high-level interactions and dialogue; (3) strengthening institutional working relations between the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government and the AU Commission; (4) American leadership in ensuring that global commitments to Africa are implemented; and (5) support for AU initiatives and programs. As a very first step, the new administration should explicitly pledge to accommodate these modest requests.
In the months ahead, Africa faces a number of armed conflicts and other security challenges, some of which I outlined in this space two weeks ago, which will consume the attention of the new administration, its African partners, and the international community. However, even while these crises are being attended to, attention must also be given to the less sensational, but nonetheless important, challenge which the global financial climate poses to Africa by decreasing the amount money available in the budgets of donor countries for foreign aid programs to which African states are still disproportionately dependent, limiting the capital available for investment in the continent’s still-emerging economies, reducing the prices commanded by their commodities, and even cutting back on the remittances which Africans in the diaspora are able to send home. To a certain extent this challenge may even be a more stubborn obstacle to progress than armed strife since it is, fundamentally, a structural question of development; hence it is all more important for President Obama to explicitly renew America’s commitment to tackle it.
Undoubtedly, what many Africans believe Barack Obama will do for America’s relationship with the continent is daunting, perhaps even surrealistically so, although the heightened expectations are understandable given their immense pride in and affinity for him as the son of a man from a small village in western Kenya (on Africans’ expectations and reality, see the excellent article on the subject in the launch edition of This Is Africa, a new publication from the Financial Times Group). At the same time, however, the wave of enthusiasm for the new president and, consequently, for America in general which has swept across the continent gives the 44th president an unprecedented opportunity to not only secure key U.S. interests in Africa – including replacing devastating conflicts in geopolitically sensitive places like those in Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo with stable political settlements (on the latter, see my Nelson Mandela Prize-winning essay in the current issue of the RUSI Journal), combating terrorism and extremism as well as lawlessness like that of the Somali pirates, opening markets to American exports and investments while assuring access to energy and other natural resources, and promoting good governance and respect for human rights (see my column last week on the positive example of Ghana) – but to also to confirm the hope of millions of Africans that they too can dream of living securely, with dignity and in prosperity, assured of a place in the globalized world of the 21st century. Indeed the achievement of Africa’s full integration into the international order would be a change everyone, Americans and Africans alike, should believe in.
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. J. Peter Pham has testified before the U.S.Congress. Feedback:editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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