Much at stake as Obama gives new impetus to Africa policy
Francis Kornegay says the president’s visit was welcome, but also raised many questions
PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s visit to South Africa last weekend was significant for several reasons. In what has to be considered a tribute acknowledging South Africa’s leadership in Africa, Obama chose the country as his platform to relaunch his Africa policy, which, throughout his first term, had been placed in a holding pattern as domestic issues, the Middle East and Asia took precedence.
So Obama’s visit to South Africa was as much about the continent as about South Africa.
Because of this country’s strategic centrality on the continent, Obama rightly saw it as serving as the communications gateway to project his vision regarding the African side of his ancestral heritage.
Thus, he accentuated his special historical niche as the first US president of African descent.
Contributing to the trip’s significance was the seriousness with which South Africa and the ANC approached it.
President Jacob Zuma was at his best in a masterful point-counterpoint dialogue between him and his US counterpart at their joint news conference before Obama’s Soweto “town hall” engagement at the University of Johannesburg.
In many ways, what unfolded at the Union Buildings on Saturday morning was an historic exchange — a dialogue between the head of Africa’s leading power and an African diaspora leader who occupies the executive of the world’s lone superpower, with the globally iconic Nelson Mandela looming in the background.
Zuma captured this unmistakable symbolism in his tribute to Mandela and Obama as the first black presidents of their respective racially burdened lands.
There is no other country in the world which, in engaging the US, can generate such electricity in what normally passes as routine statecraft between two heads of state during an official visit.
Given South Africa’s centrality as Africa’s default leader, the coincidence in timing of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma being chair of the African Union Commission at the time of Obama’s South African visit underlined the benefits for Africa and South Africa of her occupying the AU leadership at this juncture.
The innovative nature of the US town hall format in an African setting, intended to address a continental as well as a South African audience, seemed lost on some in the local media, who described Obama’s University of Johannesburg Soweto youth encounter as “cute”.
Yet contained in this continental outreach through South Africa could be detected a “fly in the ointment” of Obama’s determined bid to place his unique stamp on US policy in Africa.
One of the defining features of his “soft power” in choices of audiences both in the US and overseas — on the campaign trail and on the diplo- matic circuit — has been the way he targets a new generation of leaders among university students and youth generally.
Whether in Cairo or Jerusalem or, more recently, in Northern Ireland, university audiences — containing the world’s emerging middle-class elite — are Obama’s prime targets for inspirational orations.
Africa occupies prime position in this strategy, as reflected in Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative and his announcement of the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders.
Thus, his announcement at the University of Cape Town that the first ever US-African leaders summit would be held next year was coupled with the news that it would be preceded by a young African leaders summit.
Yet, among the satellite hook-ups that carried the University of Johannesburg town hall meeting in Soweto to Lagos, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Dakar, there was a glaring omission: no North African audience. This not only raises serious questions about the lack of a truly pan-African vision in Obama’s imagination, but amplifies broader shortcomings in US and Western policies generally towards the continent.
One would think that a pan- African approach to developing young African leaders could reinforce Obama’s prime objective of reaching out to the Muslim world — that there could be a policy dovetail in joining North and subSaharan Africa.
After all, the Maghreb states fall in the AU. And, if African youth and leader summits are contemplated in 2014, will the youth and leaders of North African members of the AU be excluded?
Looking into the future, when it
Among the satellite hook-ups, there was a glaring omission: no North African audience
will be the turn of North Africa to follow Southern Africa in selecting an AU successor to Dlamini-Zuma, how will US (and EU) policy accommodate such a prospect?
Moreover, this has global implications in the marginalisation of the AU in favour of the Arab League during crises such as those experienced in Libya.
And although Obama played down competing with China in Africa (with sort of a “y’all come” message to external actors scrambling for African market share), Beijing’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation covers the entire continent. Ditto India. But the Western Saharan Achilles heel of the AU is a major concern.
Along with his Power Africa initiative, the upscaled policy emphasis on Trade Africa — which builds on the trade and investment treaty with the East African community — was a most welcome outcome from his stop in Dar es Salaam.
Such a regionalisation of the trade and investment strategy is a corollary of the need to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) as the centrepiece of USAfrican economic relations.
Although the act came into legislative effect under Bill Clinton’s presidency, it should be emphasised that much credit goes to the Congressional Black Caucus in promoting it as a bipartisan initiative.
The act is a major priority for the African-American constituency and the Black Caucus’s backing, in synergy with Obama’s support, will be vital. But a question goes begging: What happens in 2019 when the extension, assuming it passes in Congress, runs out? Between 2015 and 2019, the US and Africa will have to hammer out a “beyond Agoa” trade and investment relationship factoring in support for intra-African trade in building regionally integrated African markets of scale.
Obama was upfront about the benefits for US economic growth and job creation that exporting to Africa’s growing market would bring. This is where a regionalisation emphasis in the Trade Africa initiative bears watching. However, South Africa and the rest of the continent need to approach Obama’s opening on this front with an eye on how US-European Union transatlantic trade and investment negotiations will affect the USAfrica agenda.
This should be a major talking point in next year’s historic summit. It underlines the significance of Obama’s trip.
He kicked off what promises to unfold as a whole new chapter in the US-Africa saga, with South Africa as the launch pad. Better late than never.
Kornegay is a senior fellow of the Institute for Global Dialogue