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Sudan: The U.S. Has Lost to China By Playing the Reluctant Suitor
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The Nation (Nairobi)
ANALYSIS
21 March 2008
Posted to the web 20 March 2008
Badru Mulumba
Southern Sudan
Last month, United States President George W Bush visited Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania but skipped southern Sudan --- the archetypal Africa of the pre-colonial era where insurgency has even smothered the infrastructure initially left behind by the British.
Southern Sudan is that Africa where children still go to school in torn uniforms; where families eat from a single plate and where tribal fights still follow the pattern of a century ago.
Yet, it's hard to think of a region that is so deceptive because southern Sudan's forests, wildlife and oil (the world's most desired commodity at the moment) hold the key to the gateway for a dream economy.
A Bush visit to Southern Sudan, or even to the entire Sudan, would have changed the mindset of the people in ways few other foreign policy trump cards can. This is because this is a region where the US still excites, unlike Ghana, which has seen a US President before.
South Sudan reveled in the limelight of President Salva Kiir's visit to the White House last November. And, north Sudan grumbled over the US failure to reciprocate its advances (although it's hard to see how Bush would have simply ignored north Sudan's stench in Darfur without a backlash back home.)
When Bush met Kiir in November in Washington, north Sudan officials were embittered to the extent that Presidential Advisor Gazi Salah Eldeen Al Atabani told a public forum that the United States must stop giving scholarships to Sudanese. Of course, he came out looking like a spouse who tells a third party not to give his partner a holiday ticket rather than telling the partner to reject the ticket.
According to media reports then, the presidential advisor said he was not angry, but the US had ignored President Omar Bashir so "many times," and had favoured south Sudan government officials by inviting them to Washington "as if there is no one called Omar Al-Bashir, the President of Sudan."
A south Sudan official rubbed the salt into the wound. Clement Janda, then the chairman of Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement task force to unite the warring Darfur factions, said President Bush had never shown interest in inviting Bashir to the White House ever since the National Congress Party leader assumed power.
Well, Bashir came into power in 1989 and Bush in 2001.
Some analysts had, earlier on, figured out that the two men's paths would cross during Bush's presidency, thanks to Sudan's oil.
Bush started off his administration with an eye on Sudan for its oil, analysts at US intelligence group Strategic Forecasting said at the time. They were probably right because Bush pressed both sides in the Sudan civil war, without which pressure the regional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) would probably never have procured Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
From those first months in office emerged the picture of a Bush whose central engagement with Africa was business but the somewhere on the way things changed.
Instead, the US President is concluding his term in office with an engagement with Africa that has largely hinged on the liberal agenda, "philanthropy" (fighting HIV and Aids) and security as is clear in America's effort to establish the Africa Command for the US military.
True, the countries Bush chose to visit have been on the right political and economic path, riding largely on US aid although they are not more economically strategic to it the way Angola is.
In the Millennium Challenge Account -- the initiative under which dollars go to countries whose leaders the US deems honest and was announced in March 2002-- Bush has tried to change the aid dynamics.
"One of the reasons I've come here," Bush said in Benin last month, "is because leaders around the world have got to understand that the United States wants to partner with leaders and the people, but we're not going to do so with people who steal money -- pure and simple."
It was the same message in Tanzania-- Bush's longest stop and where the country received $698million (Sh49 billion) from the Millennium Challenge Account.
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"We like dealing with honest people and compassionate people. We want our money to go to help the human condition?," he said in Dar es Salaam.
The problem is that the aid that is disbursed under the Millennium Challenge Account is such a little percentage of US total aid to Africa as to make the whole concept lose impact.
Some $3.8 billion (Sh266 billion) of aid is disbursed to Africa under the Millennium Challenge Account. This breaks down to about $800 million (Sh56 billion) a year if one considers that the Millennium Challenge Account aid is disbursed over, say five years. In essence Bush's novel idea fades in significance if one also considers that US aid to Africa will stand at about $8 billion (Sh560 billion) next year.
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