Washington, DC — Gulf of Guinea of increasing importance to U.S., expert says
There is an urgent need for a coherent U.S. strategic energy policy -- and the countries in West Africa that are washed by the Gulf of Guinea should be an element in such planning, according to J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In testimony July 15 before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion, Morrison said, as oil-producing nations in the Gulf of Guinea become more important, the United States needs to develop an effective energy policy that takes these countries into account.
Such a policy, he said, should contain certain key elements: "It must be long-term, it must be built upon sustained partnerships with African counterparts, and [it] must feature a two-pronged, regionally coordinated approach."
It also needs to address "serious deficiencies in the internal governance of key African oil-producing states at the same time that it systematically addresses the shared, external security threats these states face," he told the lawmakers.
Transparency, accountability, improved human rights, and greater democracy within the African oil-producing nations are also essential to ensure that oil revenues are tied to sustained and equitable economic growth in those countries, he said.
Morrison also summarized major elements laid out in a recently published CSIS report, "Promoting Transparency in the African Oil Sector: A Report of the CSIS Task Force on Rising U.S. Energy Stakes in Africa," issued in March 2004, which he co-authored.
First, he said, the United States should pursue sustained, high-level engagement, bilaterally and multilaterally, to promote transparency and reform in the Gulf of Guinea's oil-producing nations. The United States, he added, "should explicitly enshrine this goal as a top priority of U.S. Africa policy."
U.S. engagement, he explained, should include establishing clear and transparent benchmarks for regional behavior, complementary to the standards of the Millennium Challenge Account.
"The touchstone," he stressed, "should be a public commitment to transparency in public finance, with benefits contingent on verifiable, sustained, and public disclosure of government revenues and expenditures and adoption of open public finance practices."
Second, to pursue this goal, Morrison said, the report recommends that a special adviser to the president and secretary of state for African energy diplomacy (S/AED), with ambassadorial rank, be designated to lead interagency policy.
A special adviser with ambassadorial rank would be housed at the State Department, he explained, but endowed with authority by the president and the National Security Council to lead interagency policy. "The appointment, an unprecedented act of commitment in this area," he noted, "would powerfully signal U.S. leadership on this issue.
"The special adviser would be mandated to develop relationships with senior African leaders, coordinate political, economic, military, and governance policy for the U.S. government, interact with the G8 process and other multilateral fora, liaise with like-minded nations, and brief the Congress on U.S. policy."
Third, the United States, the report says, should introduce a set of reinforcing bilateral policies with special application to the Gulf of Guinea.
"The United States," Morrison said, "should declare publicly its benchmarks for regional behavior, in close parallel with those benchmarks set out for the Millennium Challenge Account." Any leader who makes such a commitment would meet with the secretary of state and be eligible for regional support programs, he added.
The level of support for a nation could be calibrated as needed, he said. The United States, he added, should continue to utilize African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) eligibility as a means of leverage for good governance.
Regional programs that committed nations would be eligible for would include an African Energy Producer Summit, which, he said, could be appended to the G8 meeting or the annual AGOA summit.
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Morrison said the report also mentioned other areas for improvement, such as the need to "dramatically increase" peacekeeping training and International Military Education and Training (IMET), the establishment of Maritime Security Programs to train an African regionally coordinated maritime force to protect offshore oil rigs, and continued strong support for civil society programs.
A fourth recommendation of the report, Morrison told the lawmakers, calls on the United States to integrate the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into its Gulf of Guinea strategy and devise new, innovative collaborations.
[The Center for Strategic and International Studies is a private, nonpartisan Washington research institution that provides world leaders with insights on, and policy solutions to, current and emerging global issues.]
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
