A depressing sense of deja vu must have washed over Africans last week as President Bush toured their continent.
By STEPHEN BUCKLEY
Published July 13, 2003
The president passed through Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria. But those are virtually the same nations President Clinton visited back in 1998. (Instead of Nigeria, he went to Ghana and Rwanda.)
The scarcity of new success stories was a reminder of how far Africa must go in its quest for the kind of democracies that feature the widespread economic success and societal security that President Bush says he's eager to promote.
It was also a reminder that this moment marks a real opportunity for the United States. It's a chance to shed the reductive policies of the past - "elections will fix everything!" or "economic growth will fix everything!" - in favor of a long-term approach that simultaneously stresses both.
When I arrived in Africa in early 1995, the continent was abuzz with talk of multiparty democracy. In the early 1990s, a host of nations - under duress from frustrated citizens - had finally decided to allow ostensibly free elections. Some two dozen countries converted to democracy, including Kenya, where I was based as a reporter in the mid-1990s.
Hope was the buzzword back then. There was a sense that Africa was on the verge of shucking leaders who had smothered political opposition, stunted economic growth, and neglected education and health care.
It didn't happen.
Instead, aided in many cases by a splintered opposition, oppressive leaders held sham elections, allowing them to stay in power.
In Kenya, for example, President Daniel arap Moi finally fell from office only last year - 11 years after his nation adopted multiparty democracy. In Nigeria in the 1990s, military rulers simply annulled unfavorable election results, then plunged that nation into a period of instability unlike any other since its independence from Britain in 1960. Democracy got a kick start only after the last military ruler, Sani Abacha, died suddenly in June 1998.
Meanwhile, urgent issues such as AIDS went ignored, as some African leaders refused even to publicly talk about it. Lousy leadership also fed a lawlessness that allowed radical Islamic fundamentalism to go largely unchecked in regions such as the Horn of Africa, opening the door to groups such as al-Qaida.
Which brings us to today.
After making it clear as a presidential candidate that Africa didn't fit into America's national strategic interests, Bush changed his mind, reportedly with some nudging from Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The attacks of Sept. 11, the continuing AIDS crisis, and America's need for oil outside the Middle East have together made Africa relevant again to U.S. foreign policy. What's unclear is whether America's new interest in Africa is permanent or passing.
There are some - including some prominent AIDS activists long critical of America's lack of action - who argue that we're witnessing an important shift in U.S.-Africa relations.
They note that it's rare for a sitting American president to visit the continent; it's unprecedented for two consecutive leaders to go there. (The first sitting president to make the trip was Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Theodore Roosevelt went in 1909, but he was already out of office.)
It's also rare for a president to go with specific proposals in hand. Clinton talked a lot about African trade, but his trip focused on an "African renaissance" that was more public relations than reality.
Congress may have slashed the first installment of Bush's AIDS package from $3-billion to $2-billion, but it's at least something tangible. The millions of AIDS widows, orphans and victims themselves are surely not going to turn their backs on the help.
Likewise, Congress funded Bush's Millennium Challenge Accounts bill for $800-million instead of $1.3-billion, but that money could make a huge difference for African corporations and entrepreneurs.
The president didn't talk much about oil, but that was clearly also on the agenda. Administration officials said before Bush's trip that the United States will get an estimated 20 percent of its imported oil from Africa by 2005, with that figure rising swiftly thereafter.
Surprisingly, Bush said little about democracy. He didn't say much about about fair elections or the rule of law. There was even less about education and primary health care and other issues that directly impact the strength of young democracies.
That was striking, given that those subjects (elections especially) were the primary rhetorical focus of U.S. officials throughout much of the 1990s. Which raises the question: Will the United States now go too far in the opposite direction? Will all the talk now focus on exports and imports and oil and challenge accounts?
If Bush's trip marks a new era in U.S.-Africa relations, then that should go with a new strategy.
Our relentless emphasis on elections during the 1990s ended up giving despots permission to ignore a host of problems, the same problems we're now scurrying to help solve. Prior to that, during the Cold War years, our brutal pragmatism helped prop up leaders in places like Zaire and Somalia long enough for those countries to dissolve into chaos.
Without an approach that stresses a blend of democratic fundamentals, good basic governmental services, and reasonable economic help, the next U.S. president to visit Africa may end up visiting the same five countries Bush went through last week, and Clinton toured five years earlier.
Without a new, more sophisticated long-term approach to Africa, the continent's states will remain fragile, and the relatively strong ones will see little growth. The continent will stand still - which is to say, go backward.
Even some of the nations that Bush visited are struggling to move forward. Uganda has found stability, and a progressive AIDS program, in the form of President Yoweri Museveni, but his 22 years in office already have sown the kind of creeping corruption that heralded the eventual downfall of other African leaders.
Nigeria, the continent's most populous country with 140-million people, is rife with religious and ethnic strife, and president Olusegun Obasanjo recently won an election that many monitors said was shot through with irregularities.
So it could be that the next president to visit Africa may have even fewer stable, democratic examples to choose from than Bush had this year.
That's not good for Africa. And, as Sept. 11 has made clear, it's not good for America.
