Africa needs to heal itself — and not rely on America

There may be better ways to disrespect African leaders than President Joe Biden’s U.s.-africa Leaders Summit earlier this month, but if so, they do not spring to mind.

Summit diplomacy is a term used to describe face-to-face negotiations between heads of state; for example, the 1961 summit talks between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy in Berlin. Addressing 50 heads of state collectively is not summit diplomacy, even if Biden insists otherwise to stroke their egos.

The Africa summit concluded with no joint statement, no modern “Marshall Plan,” no true negotiations between equals. Is there any better evidence that Africa is the stepchild of Biden’s foreign policy?

Africa must heal itself. You know something is profoundly wrong when a Black Washington Post journalist, Keith Richburg, writes in his book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” after witnessing chronic strife, grisly torture and murder on the continent: “I am quietly celebrating the passage of my ancestor who made it out (enslaved)

... Had my ancestor not made it out of there ... maybe I would have been one of those bodies, arms and legs bound together, washing over the waterfall in Tanzania. Or maybe my son would have been set ablaze by soldiers. Or I would be limping now from the torture I received in some rancid police cell.”

African nations should consider four fundamental reforms to end or ameliorate the evils that Richburg chronicled.

They should re-examine boundaries inherited from European white supremacists with no African input or consent. They were informed by the General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, summoned by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, to set the ground rules for the colonial vivisection of the continent. The boundaries characteristically mix combustible, heterogenous tribal, ethnic, religious, cultural and language groups under one sovereign umbrella. Constant conflict is inevitable.

African nations should consider splitting into smaller sovereign units with greater homogeneity and commonalities that facilitate peace, unity and trust. Czechoslovakia peacefully divided between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic in 1992 to diminish internecine conflict.

But setting boundaries, without making more changes, is insufficient. South Sudan separated from Sudan in a 2011 referendum, and Eritrea voted to separate from Ethiopia in 1993. But all four countries continue to suffer internal strife and malgovernance, as do other African nations whose boundaries are not problematic. A common constitutional defect is the concentration of limitless power in the executive branch and the relegation of the legislature and judiciary to being echo chambers of the heads of state. There is no separation of powers — the cornerstone of liberty and the rule of law by checking ambition with ambition.

African nations should consider abolishing their armed forces as Costa Rica did in 1949. Military coups in Africa are chronic. Burkina Faso witnessed two coups in 2022 alone. These must end for African nations to attain the stability and peace necessary for legitimate trade, business and the rule of law.

Finally, African nations must downsize their governments to give the private sector breathing room to innovate and prosper and to diminish the economic incentive for electoral fraud. Governments in most, if not all, African nations dominate the economy with legally protected, bloated, stagnant and corrupt monopolies.

Africa’s deliverance from poverty, conflict, corruption and instability must come from within. The United States is not the continent’s savior.