Introduction

The argument of this monograph is that President Obama is maintaining the substance of post-Cold War Africa-U.S. relations but has changed the style of U.S. engagement. Obama’s U.S.-Africa partnership, which I call cosmopolitan realism, is reminiscent of both Clinton’s and Bush’s; his rhetoric on Africa mixes Clinton’s liberal cosmopolitan views with Bush’s compassionate realist narrative of Africa. Unlike previous U.S. presidents, however, Obama is refreshingly blunt about the U.S.’s position on key African issues, and equally significantly, he is placing African youth at the heart of the relationship. The change of style is welcome, though the Obama administration has yet to address some of the major African concerns and has repeated some of the fundamental mistakes made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, including failing to engage with indigenous local African institutions.

As President Obama crosses the midpoint of his historic presidency, it is timely to examine his approach to Africa.1 He seems to have adopted a consultative approach to managing Africa-U.S. relations in the past three years. His first major engagement with Africa as president was to hold a series of consultations with African embassies and African Union (AU) missions in New York and Washington, D.C., in September 2009. These consultations led to the establishment of new ad hoc channels of communication to complement traditional bilateral and multilateral channels.

The traditional consultations have included about seventeen bilateral talks—meetings between President Obama and the presidents of South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, and Liberia, as well as with the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe; consultations between vice President Joe Biden and the governments of Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa and meetings between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and the governments of Kenya, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Liberia, and Cape Verde. Within the multilateral framework, the Obama administration continues to hold meetings of the U.S.-sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, which was introduced by President Clinton.

The newly established ad hoc channels include:

• • a high level working luncheon with 25 African leaders and the Chairperson of the AU Commission (AUC) on the margins of the 64th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, held in New York in September 2009;
• • the first U.S.-AU annual high-level consultation, held in April 2010;
• • a new Strategic Partnership Dialogue between the U.S. and South Africa, Nigeria, and Angola; and
• • the first U.S.-Young African Forum, held in the first week of August 2010, which brought together about 115 young leaders from about 40 African countries.

These consultations, I would argue, signal a shift in style but not in substance of U.S.-Africa relations. The substance of Obama’s policy, which I call cosmopolitan realism, is reminiscent of both Clinton’s and Bush’s Africa policies. The Obama White House has remained faithful to post-Cold War U.S. goals of promoting America’s economic interests and spreading liberal and capitalist values in Africa, promoting America’s image as a benign hegemon, fighting transnational terrorism, and preventing Africa from becoming a major security burden on the international community. President Obama’s rhetoric on Africa combines the perspective of Clinton’s liberal cosmopolitan African speeches with Bush’s compassionate realist narrative. Unlike his predecessors, however, President Obama is refreshingly blunt about the position of the U.S. government on key African issues, and equally significantly, his administration has included the AU in major consultations on Africa.2 The change of style is welcome, though the Obama administration is ignoring traditional African concerns and reinforcing some of the deep-seated problems in U.S.-Africa relations.

For most observers of U.S.-Africa relations, the most surprising thing is perhaps that the Obama administration has not strengthened the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs or reorganized the eclectic U.S. institutions developed by his predecessors to ensure policy and institutional coherence in African matters. It is widely acknowledged that the Bureau of African Affairs is the weakest link in the State Department. As Princeton N. Lyman emphasized during a congressional testimony in April 2009, “the Africa Bureau is not well equipped, bureaucratically or with sufficient personnel, to engage the Near East Bureau and other elements of the State Department in a high priority regional diplomatic effort” (Lyman, 2009). Nic van de Walle (2009) has insightfully documented the Bureau’s problems as well as the plethora of uncoordinated institutions established, especially during the Bush administration, to manage U.S.-Africa relations.

The U.S. government needs to restructure the State Department to reflect Africans’ and the AU’s views of Africa. The splitting of Africa into sub-Saharan and Arab Africa is not only inconsistent with the way Africans think of themselves; the division has been at the heart of some of the missteps by U.S. officials, including Bush’s failure to consult with the appropriate constituencies before creating major security programs such as the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). These avoidable mistakes have often re-animated anti-American sentiment, even in places where it is fashionable for taxi drivers to display the American flag on their cars, where ordinary people are happy to enjoy everything American, where it is cool for a high school student to call himself or herself the American boy or girl, and, of course, where many people will do everything possible to get an American visa.

The Obama administration’s faithful pursuit of the Clinton-Bush Africa policies has surprised many rural Africans, who expected the first African-American president to take a broader approach to governance by engaging indigenous local African institutions that often possess the best local knowledge and solutions to local African problems. The marginal position that indigenous local African institutions occupy in U.S.-Africa relations is ironic, given that the majority of African population and lands are under the care of indigenous authorities and that African governments themselves depend heavily on these institutional outlets to manage contemporary African challenges. Indeed, indigenous local governments are more experienced in governance matters than Westphalian sovereign governments in Africa, and although they have in the past been successfully used by external agents to negative ends, they enjoy widespread support in rural Africa. The horrific slave trade, its heinous cousin the infamous colonial rule, and even the Apartheid system in South Africa gained firm foot-holds in the African continent in part because of the active collaboration of these local institutions. Yet these indigenous institutions have some of the strongest governance, conflict management, and problem-solving tools on the African continent. The Obama administration is missing a historic opportunity to establish durable and mutually beneficial relations with these institutions to complement the traditional U.S. focus on Westphalian governance structures.

The Obama administration’s strong support for President Bush’s security programs in Africa may confound observers of African military politics, who expected a Democratic White House to at least review these policies with a view to finding out whether they serve African security priorities. As I will show, there is strong evidence that such security programs led to the re-emergence of the civil-military imbalance that characterized African politics in the 1970s and 1980s. The wave of political reforms in Africa in the 1990s had managed to unwind some of the grip the military had on African politics. The security programs introduced during the Bush administrations have reversed the trend by strengthening once again the executive arms of government in Africa against the institutions where democracy resides—such as parliament and the judiciary—thus contributing to the erosion of civil liberties and political rights. Apart from the obvious fact that it may not be a good move to strengthen security institutions in a continent with a notorious history of military dictatorships and adventurism, as I will argue, President Bush’s security program, which was based on preferential treatment of selected states in the Sahel and the Horn, is grounded in mistaken assumptions and even appears to compromise U.S. long-term security interests in Africa. It has at the very least limited the ability of the U.S. military to obtain good and relatively cheap human intelligence from local people, who may be more reliable than state agents.

It may also surprise African farmers and agro-businesses that President Obama has not realized the urgent need to overhaul U.S. economic policies toward Africa, including policies that allow U.S. farmers to receive subsidies and other non-tariff barriers that continue to keep African goods and services—mostly the goods of poor farmers—out of the U.S. market. Despite the Secretary of State’s open admission that Clinton’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) “has not lived up to the highest hopes of a decade ago,” Obama has strongly promoted the Act—a position that some will question. Many critics blame AGOA for African governments’ cuts to domestic spending and corporate taxes; the result of these cuts has been a reduction in government revenues and hence a hampered ability to invest in social programs (Clinton, 2010a). Moreover, by pushing the so-called sub-Saharan countries to establish a free trade area with the U.S., AGOA has been undermining the African regional economic integration process as well as implementation of the African Economic Community treaty. Some will also be unhappy that President Obama has not deemed it necessary to reform U.S. aid to Africa, which continues to be elite-focused and urban-biased. The bulk of U.S. aid to Africa has gone to African elites, including those in the non-governmental sector, many of whom do not need financial assistance from the U.S. Again, while observers applauded the Bush administration for increasing assistance to Africa from $1.3 billion in 2001 to about $7.3 billion in 2009, many have bemoaned the fact that resources for development initiatives channelled through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to benefit the African poor have drastically declined.

Democracy promoters in Africa will complain that President Obama has not used his considerable rhetorical skills and the power of his office to encourage U.S. investors to invest in African states that have good governance records. The story of U.S. investment, like all other foreign direct investment in Africa over the past 50 years, is that it goes to natural resources-rich but poorly governed African states, such as Angola and DR Congo. South Africa is the only African country with a reasonably good governance record to have received major foreign direct investment. The sad reality is that good governance seems to play little role in decisions to invest in African states. President Obama appears unconcerned about this development, as he has yet to publicly or forcefully address the problem. At the very least he could have used one of his engagments with American business leaders to openly encourage U.S. investors, as an example for others, to invest in natural resource-deficient but well governed African countries such as Cape Verde.

Though pan-Africanists will applaud the Obama administration for recognizing the importance of consulting with the AU, it will not be lost on them that Obama is not building relations with pan-African organizations that go beyond consultation and diplomatic niceties. They will, for instance, note that unlike China—which is working with the AU in a number of areas including an agreement to build a new multipurpose complex for the pan-African institution—the Obama administration has yet to develop a substantive working partnership with the AU. It remains a mystery why the Obama administration has not been a strong supporter of Africa’s regional economic integration agenda and of the AU, an institution built on pan-African ideas originally developed by African-American intellectuals and their Caribbean colleagues in the early twentieth century. Perhaps President Obama is worried that working closely with the AU might undermine his attempts to transcend race in domestic U.S. politics, though the AU itself makes a conscious effort to work across racial lines. This in part explains why African leaders chose an African of Chinese descent to be the chairperson of the AU Commission. Like the so-called sub-Saharan Africa, where race is not a major driving force, the AU is a place where different races—Arab-Africans, Indian-Africans, European-Africans, Chinese-Africans, Nilo-Saharans, Khoikhois and of course, Bantus—mix together in a seamless way. Indeed, the diverse nature of Africa, which some Africanists try to downplay in their work, manifests itself vividly at AU. In other words, there is no better institution than the AU to showcase President Obama’s stated wish to work across races. In addition, it remains a mystery to many people why the Obama administration has so far shown little genuine interest in working with the AU to implement some of its forward-looking initiatives, such as the African Charter on Democracy, Governance, and Elections; the charter on corruption; the African Economic Community; the African standby force; and counter-terrorism measures, among other things. Most of the ideas in these documents are exactly what the Obama administration and its predecessors have publicly claimed to be promoting in Africa.

I discuss the above issues in six sections. Following this introduction is a brief history of U.S.-Africa relations between 1950 and 1990. The analysis is brief in large part because the literature in this area is already extensive. The third section explores U.S.-Africa relations during President Clinton’s administration; the fourth documents relations during the Bush era. Following this I offer a textual analysis of President Obama’s African agenda and the similarities between his African policies and those of his predecessors. Finally, part 6 identifies weaknesses of the policies and areas where improvement might be mutually beneficial. I conclude by reiterating the central messages of the monograph, drawing attention to key outstanding issues in U.S.-Africa relations.