The Promises and Expectations of the First Obama Administration

During the 2008 campaign, the Obama team identified three objectives in its Africa policy: first, to accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy; second, to enhance the peace and security of African states; and third, to strengthen relationships with those governments, institutions, and civil society organizations committed to deepening democracy and accountability and reducing poverty in Africa (see Schneidman Reference Schneidman2008). It took three years before the Obama administration finally outlined a comprehensive policy toward sub-Saharan Africa in June 2012 (The White House 2012).

The report, titled “U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa,” identified what it called four interdependent and mutually reinforcing objectives. First, to strengthen democratic institutions by promoting accountable, transparent, and responsive governance, bolstering positive models, and promoting and protecting human rights, civil society, and independent media. Second, to spur economic growth, trade, and investment by promoting an enabling environment and encouraging U.S. companies to invest, promoting regional integration, and expanding African capacity to effectively access and benefit from global markets. Third, to advance peace and security by countering Al Queda and other terrorist groups, advancing regional security cooperation and security sector reform, preventing conflict, and supporting initiatives to promote peace and security. Fourth, to promote opportunity and development by addressing constraints to growth and poverty reduction, promoting food security, transforming Africa’s public health, increasing opportunities for women and youth, and promoting resilience to climate change, low-emissions growth, and sustainable development. “Across all objectives,” the report promised, “we will: deepen our engagement with Africa’s young leaders; seek to empower marginalized populations and women; address the unique needs of fragile and postconflict states; and work closely with the U.N. and other multilateral actors to achieve our objectives on the continent.”

For their part, African leaders, scholars, and opinion makers called for changes in the style and substance of U.S.–Africa relations, to fundamentally transform these relations by making them more mutually beneficial in the areas of security, democracy, development, and the restructuring of global institutions (see Kornegay 2008; Akukwe 2009; Prendergast & Norris 2009; LeMelle & Stulman Reference LeMelle and Stulman2009). While the tone of the Bush administration had been particularly troubling, they deplored the long-standing paternalistic attitudes of U.S. policymakers and hoped for change. On the security question, the United States was called upon to abandon or temper the growing militarization of an Africa policy spawned by the misguided “war on terror” and concretized by the formation of the Africa Command (AFRICOM), which was widely opposed by African states and civil society groups. The U.S. was urged to promote and effectively coordinate with regional African peacemaking initiatives, rather than pursuing misguided unilateral or bilateral interventions, as had often been the case.

As for democratization, which African countries had been undergoing in fits and starts since the end of the 1980s—and which indeed goes back to the struggles for independence—there were expectations that the United States would increasingly adopt the policy of backing rather than blocking progressive democratic regimes, experiments, and struggles on the continent by pursuing and maintaining sustained engagement with Africa’s democratic states and social movements. The United States has a despicable record of coddling autocracies and electoral malpractices when it suits its short-term and shortsighted interests—of rhetorical commitment to democracy and human rights that is often not pursued in practice.

With reference to development, it was pointed out that the United States had undermined the continent’s efforts for sustainable development through the imposition, from the early 1980s, of the Washington Consensus, a ruthless ideological regime of neoliberalism that undid much of Africa’s postindependence development momentum. There was hope that the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession and ushered in Keynesian interventions in the U.S. and other Western countries, long advocated by African states to avert their prolonged recessions of the “lost decades” of the 1980s and 1990s, would finally bury neoliberal orthodoxy. Also problematic, indeed culpable, in the eyes of progressive African leaders and scholars were U.S. trade policies, including the tariffs imposed against manufactured exports of African and other developing countries and the agricultural subsidies that distort global trade and weaken the competitiveness of African producers. For example, massive state subsidies for U.S. cotton farmers severely damaged the prospects and livelihoods of West African cotton growers.^{Footnote 1}

Finally, it was anticipated that a Democratic administration led by a cosmopolitan African American would abandon the aggressive unilateralist policies of the insufferably cocky Bush administration. And more crucially, that demands from Africa and the global South for the restructuring of institutions of global political and economic governance—from the U.N. Security Council to that unholy trinity, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—would receive a more sympathetic hearing. In this regard, the U.S. was prevailed upon to take leadership in environmental matters befitting its role as the world’s biggest polluter and consumer of global resources by, among other things, supporting international protocols and funding existing agreements for climate adaptation and mitigation among the developing countries and negotiating new and more robust arrangements to combat global warming and other environmental threats.

Clearly, some of the rhetoric in the Obama administration’s policy toward Africa echoed Africa’s age-old pursuits of sustainable development, democratization, human security, and incorporation into the world system as a vital player, not a perpetual pawn. But beyond the rhetoric, there was little substantive change in U.S. Africa policy. The Obama administration’s Africa, like the Africa of its predecessors, referred primarily to sub-Saharan Africa. North Africa was subsumed into the Middle East. Indeed, the Obama administration’s Africa policies hardly differed from those of previous administrations in any significant way.

Limits of Hope and Structural Contexts of Change and Continuity

Despite the euphoria that greeted Obama’s ascension to the presidency, few informed African and American observers expected that the Obama administration would embark on a fundamentally transformative path in which the engagements between Africa and the United States would significantly change. They were proved right. The Obama administration largely continued to pursue the Africa policies of its immediate precursors.

The reasons for this are not difficult to decipher. Beyond the rhetoric of different administrations, it is important to understand that U.S. foreign policy is determined by the structural imperatives of a hegemonic imperial power. Any administration’s policies are set in a context in which there are multiple, competing, and intersecting players from the military-industrial complex, the financial complex, the media-knowledge complex, and the civic complex with its web of cultural, social, humanitarian, and religious organizations and networks. U.S. foreign policies, as those of any country, are also determined by the shifting configurations of the global political economy. The fact that the inauguration of the first Obama administration coincided with the Great Recession and the continued rise of the emerging economies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) set the broad contours of and constraints on its Africa policies.

There is little doubt that President Obama’s rhetoric represented a shift from that of the Bush administration and that his race reflected a different face of American power, which generated unrealistically high expectations around the world. Many yearned for the United States to become less unilateralist and more multilateralist: in short, less imperialist and less militaristic. Interestingly, for the pan-African world the deracialization of the face of American power opened new directions for progressive pan-Africanism, insofar as it showed that the assumption of power by a diasporan African did not guarantee a progressive pan-African agenda. This paralleled Africa’s own independence movement, in which the new leaders who assumed power were not always committed to postcolonial Africa’s progress. President Obama’s Africa rhetoric was on full display in his speeches in Cairo and Accra during his only two presidential visits to the continent during his first term, in which he sought to reset U.S. policies toward the Muslim world and African countries. The Cairo speech was notable both for what the president said and for his silences. Many remarked on the eloquence of its delivery and its respectful tone, judicious invocation of his Muslim heritage on his father’s side, and praise for Islamic contributions to world civilization. Others noted its troubling framing of the struggle between a country (the United States) and a religion (Islam), the false equivalences between the struggles for civil rights by an oppressed racial minority in the United States and for independence by an occupied nation in Palestine, and its silences on the subject of the abysmal human rights record of his host, President Mubarak, the octogenarian dictator, who was to be ousted in the so-called Arab Spring less than two years later. Not surprisingly, the United States neither foresaw the uprising nor supported it, notwithstanding retrospective claims to the contrary after the collapse of the Mubarak regime (see Zeleza Reference Zeleza2012).

In contrast, President Obama’s speech in Accra was at once a sermon, a lecture, and a call to arms for Africa to take charge of its destiny, for Africans to assume full responsibility for their future. It was delivered with his trademark flourishes and earnestness, combined with the rhetorical intimacy and tough love, the almost hectoring style he reserves for African American audiences. He offered a trenchant appraisal of postcolonial Africa, which progressive Africans make all the time. But the latter’s critiques are accompanied by equally sharp assessments of Africa’s colonial history and the persistently unequal global system that has made the task of realizing the dreams of independence harder. This is not simply blaming colonialism, as Obama claimed dismissively. Colonialism in Africa is no more an irrelevant relic of history than slavery and racial segregation are in the U.S. for African Americans. Nowhere in his speech did he refer to the unsavory records of the U.S. government and corporations in undermining democracy and development across Africa by supporting dictatorships and corruption.

Thus in Accra, unlike in Cairo, the first African American president of the United States did not have the honesty and humility to accept the culpability of his country and the West more generally for some of Africa’s misfortunes, which undoubtedly Africa’s inept and venal leaders have exacerbated. More important than the rhetoric of U.S. leaders are the realities of U.S. policies toward Africa. It can safely be argued that the Obama administration has largely continued with the Africa policies and signature programs of previous administrations, especially the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the areas of humanitarian interventions, promotion of democracy, development, and security.

Over the past fifty years, U.S. Africa policy has largely been framed through the prism of the humanitarian paradigm, which has two key facets (see Cohen Reference Cohen2010; Forsythe Reference Forsythe2011; van de Walle 2009). One is the perspective of Africa as a zone of humanitarian disasters in need of constant social welfare assistance and interventions. The other centers on Africa’s apparent need for human rights modeled on idealized Western principles that never prevented Euro-America from perpetrating the barbarities of slavery, colonialism, the two World Wars, other imperial wars, and genocides, including the Holocaust. The Africa rhetoric and policies of the Obama administration demonstrate no significant shift from the U.S.’s age-old humanitarian ideology.

This ideology is characterized by inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies because it is always trumped by national security and political interests, rather than by African interests, and it represents the jostling of different traditions in American political thought and culture. These include the traditions of cosmopolitanism and universalism, the providential nationalism and exceptionalism that led to President George W. Bush’s radical unilateralism, and the realism and pragmatism embodied by the Clinton administration. Thanks to the country’s weakened economy, imperial overreach with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of China as a serious economic and strategic competitor, the Obama administration, perhaps even more than its predecessors, muddled through a rapidly changing world as pragmatically as it could.

This was amply evident in its efforts to promote democracy, one of the linchpins of its Africa policy. The Obama administration revived the Clinton administration’s instrumentalist promotion of democracy—what Kiki Edozie (forthcoming) calls a “representational” tool of a hegemonic U.S. foreign policy and international politics in which foreign aid is made conditional on American-determined measures of good governance, accountability, democratic elections, and politics. “Democracy promotion,” she writes, is deployed as “part of a discursive ritual of asymmetrical power relations embedded in a complex network of symbolic and historical interactions between the U.S. and Africa.” As such, Edozie continues, it “has negatively and instrumentally constructed the African democratic experience devoid of the continent’s self-determined evolution of democracy. The effects of these negative constructions have led to the misrepresentation of actually-existing democratization processes and performances on the continent.”

Similarly, in its discourses and policies on African development, the Obama administration continued to rely on the key programs introduced during the Clinton and Bush administrations and on neoliberal policies promoted by the international financial institutions. The most well-known Clinton initiative was the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which was established to give African countries greater access to the U.S. market and eventually establish free trade areas (FTAs) with specific African regional economic organizations. Available evidence shows that African economies and workers have not benefited significantly from AGOA. The first attempt to create an FTA with the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) failed. AGOA hardly put a dent in unequal trade between the U.S. and Africa, and according to Margaret Lee (2011), workers in AGOA factories suffered from harsh working conditions, including violations of international labor rights. “Seemingly the United States,” she notes, “as do most developed countries, gives gifts to Africa with one hand, and takes them away with the other.”

From the Bush administration, the Obama administration inherited the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR/Emergency Plan), which was created in 2003. PEPFAR is often regarded even among President Bush’s harshest critics as one of the few bright spots for a president with an exceptionally dismal record characterized by imperial hubris, managerial incompetence, and unregulated greed. PEPFAR represented the coalescence of the interests of two key constituencies of the Bush coalition—the business community and evangelical Christians; unfortunately, the narrative of “Africa as savior” for unsavory Westerners, from faded pop stars to failed presidents, is quite familiar in the Western media and imaginary. It also says more about the enduring power of the humanitarian paradigm in U.S.–Africa relations—what can be referred to as the “mercy–industrial complex”—than it does about African perceptions and realities. Pharmaceutical companies had much to gain in pushing for PEPFAR. For the evangelicals, Africa had become a major focus of their proselytizing—in 2001 nearly 350,000 Americans undertook missions to the continent, eight times as many as in 1996. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 merely reinforced the messianic politicization of the evangelical movement and raised its political stock for a born-again Christian president (Huliaras Reference Huliaras2008). Not surprisingly, PEPFAR served to promote the export of both drugs for the pharmaceutical companies and the right-wing family planning ideology of the evangelicals. Some critics have charged that PEPFAR often suffered from lack of coordination with local health systems.^{Footnote 2} The Obama administration incorporated the program into the Global Health Initiative (GHI) and expanded coverage to fight malaria and improve maternal and child health. In mid-2012, the GHI was closed and incorporated into the State Department’s Office of Global Diplomacy.

The most controversial inheritance of the Obama administration from the Bush years was the increased militarization of U.S. policy toward Africa. After the Cold War, Africa’s marginality to U.S. strategic interests seemed destined to grow. The foreign policy infrastructure that supported the U.S. humanitarian paradigm in Africa declined as development aid fell, embassies were downgraded, and the number of Peace Corp volunteers diminished, and such instruments of soft power as the U.S. Information Agency were closed. Then came the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, followed three years later by 9/11. Suddenly, Africa’s strategic importance rose, and the security paradigm came to compete, complement, and conflict with the humanitarian paradigm as U.S. Africa policy achieved a new strategic coherence.

The cornerstone of the new policy is AFRICOM, which was created out of various regional military programs and initiatives established in the early 2000s, such as the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn Africa, and the Pan-Sahel Initiative, both established in 2002 to combat terrorism. It began its operations in October 2007. Prior to AFRICOM’s establishment, the military had divided up its oversight of African affairs among the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany; the U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida; and the U.S. Pacific Command, based in Hawaii. Undoubtedly, AFRICOM’s establishment was an integral part of the so-called war on terror. But it also represented a growing recognition among U.S. policymakers of Africa’s growing economic and geopolitical importance.

The United States was becoming more dependent on Africa for its oil needs. In 2006 the U.S. imported 22 percent of its oil from Africa, compared to 15 percent only two years earlier. In short, Africa had outstripped the Middle East as a source of oil imports (the latter accounted for 17.4 percent of U.S. oil imports in 2005). It is projected that by 2015 West Africa alone will provide 25 percent of total U.S. oil imports (Mesfin Reference Mesfin2009). Also critical, according to many observers, was shifting global power with the rise of the BRICS, especially China, which overtook the U.S. as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Africa’s trade with China skyrocketed from $1.7 billion in 1990 to $10.6 billion in 2000 and reached $73.5 billion in 2007, $115 billion in 2010, $166 billion in 2011, and $200 billion in 2012 (“China–Africa Trade” 2013). It is projected to rise to as much as $400 billion by 2015.

These realities and shifts, combined with Africa’s rapid economic growth since the late 1990s, have not only given African countries a renewed sense of optimism, but also greater assertiveness in international forums, including the United Nations.^{Footnote 3} AFRICOM, the critics charge, is intended to contain both China’s influence in Africa and Africa’s rising sense of independence and international presence. Thus the U.S. can no longer ignore Africa or treat it with benign neglect as in the past. In short, the U.S. needs to court African states to support its own global interests, including its never-ending hot and cold wars such as the war of nerves with Iran, North Korea, and whatever regime it decides to designate as a “rogue state.”

Predictably, AFRICOM justifies its mission in more lofty language: “U.S. Africa Command protects and defends the national security interests of the United States by strengthening the defense capabilities of African states and regional organizations and, when directed, conducts military operations, in order to deter and defeat transnational threats and to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.”^{Footnote 4} Few in Africa are fooled by this self-serving rhetoric.^{Footnote 5} African governments, civil societies, and commentators do not buy the narrative of terrorism as the major threat to African interests, the demonization of Muslims in the “war on terror,” and the underlying assumption that Africa is incapable of solving its own problems.

Opposition has been most widespread in countries with low levels of dependence on U.S. aid and high rates of growth, as shown by Carl LeVan (2010) in his detailed survey of dozens of newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts in several African countries. Antagonism to AFRICOM across the continent has a variety of sources: the authoritarian way in which AFRICOM was introduced (which some regard as a public relations failure), the proliferation of agencies dealing with Africa, and the lack of a strategic vision in regard to Africa (see Burgess Reference Burgess2009). Africans certainly resent the fact that they were hardly consulted about AFRICOM’s creation. But more important, African hostility has arisen out of historical experiences and continued concerns about external intervention.

In Africa, the memories of colonialism are still vivid, as are those of U.S. neglect, selective engagement, and support for dictatorships. Africans are very protective of their hard-won sovereignty, and they regard the establishment of AFRICOM as divisive and a threat to regional and continental unity. Based on their postcolonial experiences, they don’t trust the military as a partner in development, and fear mission creep for AFRICOM and the militarization and securitization of economic relations with the U.S.^{Footnote 6} The growing uses by the U.S. and other donor countries of private military companies that lack transparency and accountability give further cause for concern (see Aning, Jaye, & Atuobi Reference Aning, Jaye and Atuobi2008). Moreover, African critics point out, authoritarian African regimes are taking advantage of the U.S. antiterrorism crusade, as they did in the past with anticommunism, to crack down on domestic dissent and prodemocracy activists. This crusade also fuels tensions and conflicts among Muslims and Christians in some countries.

While the Obama administration continued to try to shore up AFRICOM, it also sought to restructure and strengthen the State Department by centralizing development policy under the Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID) and paying more attention to multilateral institutions (see Vines & Cargill Reference Vines, Cargill and Niblett2010). The administration established several new or recycled programs, including a $3.5 billion African food security initiative. It also announced support for a Global Climate Change Initiative launched as part of the Copenhagen Accord from the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which called for $30 billion in financing for developing countries (The White House 2013). Later, USAID established its Climate Change and Development Strategy (2012–16) to support investments in clean energy technology, help countries and communities prepare for and respond to changes in climate, and make climate change considerations part of all aspects of its programs and operations (see USAID 2013).

Prospects for the Second Obama Administration

There is little reason to believe that the Africa policy of the second Obama administration will change in any significant way from what it was during the first term. Obama visited Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa for five days in June and July, his longest trip to the continent yet. But it is doubtful if this will result in any meaningful change in U.S. policy and engagement with Africa. Indeed, this time around, few on the continent expect much from this son of Africa in the White House (see Akuke Reference Akukwe2012). More realistic appraisals by African leaders, institutions, and activists, buttressed by the much trumpeted “rise” of Africa as well as the profound shifts taking place in global power, will continue to force changes in U.S.–Africa relations.

The challenge for Africa with the Obama administration, as with any U.S. administration and other major powers for that matter, will be, as always, for its leaders and thinkers to clearly articulate and fight for Africa’s fundamental interests as they cohere around the triple historic and humanistic dreams of development, democracy, and self-determination. This entails a three-pronged strategy in Africa’s dealings with the United States: first, strengthening coordination within Africa itself so that the continent speaks with a more unified voice on critical global issues; second, promoting collaboration between Africa and the global South for more leverage in negotiations with the global North over international challenges, from trade to security to the environment to the systems of global governance; and third, bolstering connections with the African diaspora as Africa’s eyes and ears in the streets and corridors of power in Euro-America.

The African diasporas in the United States and elsewhere in the global North have made critical contributions to Africa, from the development of pan-Africanism by the historic diasporas to remittances by the new diasporas that currently constitute the largest inflows of “foreign aid” to the continent. In 2010 remittances from the diaspora were conservatively estimated at $40 billion, far outstripping the flamboyant charities of the “mercy-industrial complex” fronted by celebrities like Geldof and Madonna and Bono and Clooney and many others seeking to burnish their humanitarian gravitas through African commiseration. The tentacles of the diaspora today are more extensive than ever, encompassing cultural and social institutions as well as political and civil society organizations, and in the United States they extend from classrooms to Congress, the media to the pulpit, and yes, the White House. Africa and the diaspora need to mobilize each other and put pressure on the Obama administration to deliver both on Africa America and Africa.

The first African diasporan leader of this powerful imperial country, and his administration, must be made to do the right thing for Africa through time-tested struggles and the strategies of mobilizing both old and new social movements and lobbying coalitions.^{Footnote 7} The old movements and coalitions include activist organizations from the days of the civil rights and antiapartheid movements, while the new movements and associations are those that have formed around diaspora knowledge networks and social media activism. As T. M. S. Ruge (2013) observes, through social media the African diaspora is increasingly “challenging the underpinnings of international development” and “quickly becoming the undisputed champions of development punditry” formerly dominated by non-Africans, so that Africa is no longer “faced with what the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie called ‘the danger of a single story.’”

The power of social movements, networks, and lobbying coalitions, as well as the African diaspora vote in the United States, must continue to be mobilized to complement mobilization on the continent itself to change the future of Africa–U.S. relations for the better. Like all politicians and U.S. administrations, President Obama will do the right thing for Africa not because he is the son of a Kenyan, but only if the pressures of political calculus force him to.