Africa needs a “new America”

The war against terror
Three years before the September 2001 attacks, Al Qaeda had kicked off its war against America on African soil. Osama Bin Laden, who spent much of the nineties living in Sudan, is believed to have given the green light to the twin bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By the time Barack Obama came to office in 2009, it was clear that some form of rapprochement with the Muslim world was needed.

The olive branch was offered on African soil, in Cairo, Egypt, in June 2009. It was President Obama’s first visit to the continent as sitting president, only six months after he was sworn in. In a speech he delivered at Cairo University, he called for a resetting of US-Muslim relations. (Egypt is home to more Muslims than any other country in Africa, with the exception of Nigeria).

It was not the easiest of speeches, seeking to confront head on the spectre of violent terrorism that had shaped the previous decade. Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East formed the cornerstones of the speech; at that time few would have guessed just how prominently Africa would itself become a theatre of lingering war in the coming years, as the map of radicals’ infiltration extended southwards, to encompass swathes of West Africa (from Mali to Nigeria), East Africa (Kenya and Somalia), and North Africa (Egypt, Libya).

What does the future look like?
“The foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration in Africa are rooted in security, political, economic and humanitarian interests,” Hillary Clinton said in 2009, at her confirmation hearings as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Almost six years on, that all-encompassing strategy seems set to continue. The US will approach Africa chastened by the failings and limited successes of omissions and commissions in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Somalia, and Libya.

The vastly changed dynamics of the US-Africa oil trade – for long the most important economic relationship between the two regions – calls for an updating of policy.

In 2009 American General Carlton Fulford, a retired US Marine Corps general, wrote that American foreign policy “must incorporate America’s strategic interest in ensuring commercial and physical access to hydrocarbons.” Less than five years later America is firmly on the road to hydrocarbon self-sufficiency; by some estimates it will be producing enough oil to meet domestic consumption by 2020.

China on the other hand is as hungry as ever, in September 2013 displacing America as the world’s largest importer of crude oil and other liquid fuels on a monthly basis, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The US will no doubt continue to be deeply wary of the growing economic interdependence between China and Africa.

The competition for influence on the continent between both countries – and other emerging players as well, like Brazil, which doubled its diplomatic presence in Africa in the 2000s, and India which recently replaced America as the leading importer of Nigerian oil – will heighten the tempo of complaints by those, within and outside the continent, who regard the 21st century as merely a more sophisticated replaying of the 19th century “Scramble for Africa” among European superpowers of that era.

Indeed there are already those who see the August summit as a validation of the perception that Africa remains hopelessly beholden to all-powerful foreign interests, and who would rather not see African leaders summoned off to foreign capitals for “talks” and summits, whether in Beijing (as now happens triennially under the auspices of the “Forum on China-Africa Cooperation”) or Washington.

In May, following the abduction of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by terrorist group Boko Haram, French President François Hollande convened a security summit in Paris. In an editorial titled “Boko Haram: Jonathan’s Paris flop”, Nigeria’s Punch newspaper noted that the fact that “it took such a conclave in faraway France for Nigeria to forge a strong coalition with these Francophone countries against Boko Haram’s terrorism underscores the bankruptcy of our diplomacy.”

Similar sentiments should be expected as African leaders flock to Washington for the US-Africa Leaders Summit. Jonathan Moyo, Zimbabwe’s Information Minister, has already been quoted as saying, regarding the non-invitation of President Mugabe to Washington, that “we do not mind, because what matters most to us is our sovereignty over our resources and not a trip to Washington.”

In the face of renewed vigour on a continental level, as seen in initiatives like the reinvigorated African Union and its New Partnership for Africa’s Development, African countries need to demonstrate greater confidence in their abilities to work together to solve their own problems. There is evidence that greater cooperation among Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger would go a longer way than any externally-inspired intervention, in checking the threat of Boko Haram.

On his whistle-stop trip to Accra, Ghana, a month after the Cairo visit, Barack Obama said: “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.”

It should be clear to all that there is very little a Washington trip will do for Africa and Africans that cannot be accomplished in Cairo, Abuja, Johannesburg, or Addis Ababa.