The State of U.S. Africa Policy

By Ann-Louise Colgan
Africa Action

Presentation at Africa Action’s first Annual Baraza
October 3, 2003

Africa has always been marginalized in U.S. foreign policy. Despite historical ties and important interests, the continent has generally been considered to fall outside the scope of U.S. concerns. U.S. policy-makers and the broader American public remain largely ignorant about African realities and about Africa’s importance to the U.S. That ignorance, combined with the racism that it feeds, serves to circumscribe Americans’ understanding of true U.S. interests in Africa.

Yet, today’s most urgent global threats, from the HIV/AIDS pandemic to extreme poverty, from civil conflicts to environmental degradation, all have their most devastating consequences in Africa. If the U.S. is to sharpen its focus on the most destabilizing international threats and the most urgent global priorities, it must move African concerns from the margins of U.S. foreign policy to the center.

But under the Bush Administration, U.S. policy fails to recognize this more than ever. U.S. interests in Africa have been recast in the Cold War model, with a focus on controlling Africa’s natural resources, specifically oil, and on strategic military relations. Africa’s interests have largely been ignored. On the rare occasion when U.S. policies focus on Africa’s real priorities, such as the fight against AIDS and poverty, the U.S. prefers to view Africa as an object of “compassion”. This allows the U.S. to avoid any serious discussion about its culpability for these conditions in Africa.

U.S. unilateralism is now directly at odds with African efforts to build multilateral approaches to the continent’s greatest challenges. The U.S. defines the most urgent international priorities as weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism, and the G-7 agrees. But these are the interests of a global minority. African countries, and the majority of people in the rest of the world, are concerned less with these potential threats than with the more immediate threats to human security – AIDS, poverty, and civil conflicts. This difference between a global minority and the global majority reveals the system of global apartheid, which Salih talked about earlier. This is the context that frames U.S. relations with Africa.

Bush Administration Africa policy has made much of symbolism. The White House touts new initiatives on AIDS and on foreign assistance, and the President traveled to the continent in July of this year. Bush has repeatedly noted that he met with 25 African Heads of State in his first 2 years in office.

But the real measure of the Bush Administration’s commitment to Africa must be the reality of its policies.

Looking at the broad landscape of U.S. Africa policy, it is clear that AIDS should be the top priority. This is the greatest challenge facing Africa today, and it poses a real threat to the survival of the continent.

The Bush White House has declared that combating AIDS is a top policy priority.

Since his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush has reaped great public relations benefits by parading himself as a compassionate conservative, committed to helping the people of Africa defeat AIDS. When he traveled to the continent in July, Bush repeatedly emphasized how much his Administration was doing on the AIDS crisis. But the reality is very different.

The $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief announced by the President in January was described as “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” But this was not an emergency plan to fight AIDS. No new money was requested for this initiative for 2003, and not even a half-billion for next year. In July, the White House specifically asked Congress to limit AIDS funding for next year.

Indeed, most of the money for the AIDS plan will not even be requested until 2005 and beyond. What’s more, the focus of the new AIDS initiative is not really on Africa and the Caribbean, as originally stated. The White House has since clarified that the $15 billion will include all U.S. funding for AIDS globally.

An analysis of President Bush's track record on AIDS policy reveals a litany of broken promises and betrayals.

In 2001, President Bush supported the creation of the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. But the U.S. has contributed only an average of $200 million a year to the Global Fund since then. This is only a fraction of the $3.5 billion per year that would be an equitable U.S. contribution, based on the U.S. share of the global economy. The Global Fund, which is widely acknowledged as the key to defeating AIDS in Africa, is almost bankrupt as a result.

Instead, to coordinate his new AIDS initiative, President Bush is creating a new U.S. bureaucracy that will compete directly with the Global Fund. Bush named a pharmaceutical executive, Randall Tobias, as the Coordinator of this new AIDS initiative. This choice emphasized the Bush Administration's close ties to the pharmaceutical industry, which has led the U.S. to consistently block efforts to relax patent rules and facilitate African countries' access to anti-AIDS drugs and other essential medicines.

The Bush White House also supports conservative measures that undermine a comprehensive response to the AIDS crisis in Africa. These include emphasizing abstinence-only measures, prioritizing prevention over treatment, and opposing the use of condoms. This emphasis on fundamentalist ideology over science and public health represents a dangerous step backward in the fight against AIDS.

A war on AIDS can be won. But the Bush Administration is failing to show the leadership required to beat this pandemic.

Beyond AIDS funding, development assistance is critical to supporting African efforts to overcome the health crisis and other major poverty-related challenges. The Bush Administration states that one of its top Africa policy priorities is promoting health and education. But, although the U.S. is the richest country in human history, spending on foreign aid has steadily been in decline, relative both to the size of the U.S. economy and to the federal budget. At present, the U.S. ranks at the bottom of all donor countries. Only 1/100th of 1% of the U.S. budget, or around $1 billion, is currently spent on aid to sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, President Bush announced the Millennium Challenge Account, which promised to reverse the decline in foreign aid, starting in 2004. This initiative would increase U.S. development assistance by 50% over the next 3 years, so that by 2006 an annual increase of $5 billion would be achieved. This new money would go to a list of countries that meet certain economic and political criteria, defined by Washington. Only a handful of these countries are in Africa.

But the Millennium Challenge Account proposes a far smaller increase in foreign aid than what the U.S. can and should give to the world's poorest countries. Moreover, the eligibility criteria dictated by the U.S. reinforce an imperialist-style relationship between the U.S. and poor countries, rewarding countries with which the U.S. has most favorable relations. The U.S. and other wealthy countries still fail to take seriously their commitment to supporting African efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

Most importantly, African efforts to reduce poverty and promote human development are fundamentally hindered by the continent’s debt crisis. The $15 billion that African countries are required to pay each year to rich country creditors and to the World Bank and IMF diverts money directly from spending on the needs of their own people. At present, most African countries are spending more money repaying old, illegitimate debts, than they can spend on health and education for their own people, or on the fight against AIDS.

Current U.S. policies toward Africa fail to address Africa’s debt crisis. The existing debt relief framework, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, or HIPC, has failed to offer a solution to the debt crisis. The U.S. is the single largest shareholder at the World Bank and IMF, to whom most of Africa’s debt is owed, but it is unwilling to move beyond the HIPC framework to resolve Africa’s debt crisis. Instead, President Bush has declared his support for the provision of grants rather than loans to support development in poor countries, saying this will “stop the debt.” But this can do little, when African countries are still left struggling under the burden of the existing debt crisis.

Trade remains high on the agenda in U.S. Africa policy. The Bush Administration is increasingly interested in Africa’s oil resources as an alternative to the Middle East, and this has increased the strategic importance of certain African countries, like Nigeria, Angola and Gabon. At present, sub-Saharan Africa supplies almost one-fifth of U.S. oil imports. The National Intelligence Council projects that U.S. oil supplies from West Africa will increase to 25% by 2015. This would surpass U.S. oil imports from the entire Persian Gulf.

The Bush Administration continues to promote trade as the engine of growth and progress for the African continent. However, current U.S. trade policies have benefited few African countries, and have failed to promote sustained economic growth. Africa’s share of world trade now stands at just over 1%. This is less than half what it was in 1980.

Restrictions on African access to U.S. markets undermine Africa’s trade potential. U.S. agricultural subsidies hurt Africa’s competitiveness, costing the continent tens of billions of dollars each year in lost revenues. U.S. trade policies, exemplified by the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), have succeeded in perpetuating the continent’s role as a source of raw materials and cheap labor. The U.S. continues to insist on free market solutions to Africa’s development challenges, and to promote the interests of American corporations. But it refuses to dismantle trade barriers and level the playing field in the global economy.

In the area of peace and security, the Bush Administration is very much focused on its own security interests in the context of the “war on terrorism.” The White House has declared it a priority to help establish peace and security across Africa.

The U.S. military presence in Africa is growing, particularly in East Africa, where military bases and access to ports and airfields are considered of increasing strategic importance for projecting military force into the Persian Gulf. In June, Bush announced a new $100 million initiative to help East African countries increase their counter-terrorism efforts.

Beyond this, however, U.S. policies on peace and security continue to keep the U.S. one step removed from engagement with efforts to resolve African conflicts. The Bush White House remains unwilling to make a real commitment to African priorities in this area. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan, home to two of Africa’s most intractable conflicts, the role of the U.S. has been very limited, though African-led peace-making initiatives have achieved progress, nonetheless.

The crisis in Liberia imposed itself on the President’s trip to Africa in July, but, in the end, the U.S. was unwilling to make a real commitment to ensuring a peaceful transition in that country, and stability in the larger West Africa region. This despite the fact that in Liberia, as in many African countries, the U.S. has a particular historic responsibility for fueling civil conflict during the Cold War years. The refusal of the U.S. to participate in multilateral peacekeeping efforts undermines African initiatives in this area. U.S. policy will, at most, commit logistical support to African peacekeeping efforts – as in Burundi and Cote d’Ivoire.

Similarly in the area of democracy and human rights, U.S. policy is extremely selective, and is guided by its own strategic interests. The Bush Administration has been openly critical of the human rights violations perpetrated under the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, but has been less quick to criticize other countries, like Nigeria, Morocco or Ethiopia, which are considered strategically important to the U.S. This dynamic is reminiscent of relations during the Cold War, when geopolitical considerations were placed far above human rights.

In conclusion – The current state of U.S. Africa policy reveals the distorted international priorities of the Bush Administration. The global AIDS pandemic, centered in Africa, is the greatest threat to human security in the world today. This year alone, AIDS will kill more than 3 million people globally – most of these in Africa. And the pandemic is still in its infancy.
Defeating AIDS should be the top priority of the Bush Administration. This will require not just greater funding. It will require a re-orientation of U.S. foreign policy to address the real global challenges of today.

Thank you.

Ann-Louise Colgan is Assistant Director for Policy Analysis & Communications at Africa Action.

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