Chicago — When President Jimmy Carter made the first state visit of an American president to Africa in 1978, the only countries on his tour were Nigeria and Liberia. Two decades later, President Bill Clinton's state visit was marked by many emotional events: a million Ghanaians attending his public address, his warm embrace by South African leaders including Nelson Mandela, and his public apology for failing to stop the Rwanda genocide of 1994.
Last week it was George W. Bush's turn, and the stakes have moved significantly higher. Before his departure, Bush identified a broad agenda of American concerns on the continent: democracy, warfare, corruption, education, health care, terrorism, hunger, trade and investments. The fundamental question to be answered is whether his administration will fulfill the wonderful promises made in his speeches.
Instead of a basket of policy initiatives, a comprehensive, multinational campaign to end Africa's regression is needed. The most critical issues in sub-Saharan Africa today are the decay of institutions and infrastructures, and the loss of human capital.
It is not only the tide of HIV/AIDS that must be reversed but what I call the African Predicament. With millions of preventable deaths from armed conflict, malnutrition and disease, there must be a profound transformation in how sub-Saharan Africa is governed and its resources utilized. The United Nations Development Program has just issued a chilling warning that, unless current trends are reversed, many African countries will not reach basic targets in poverty reduction, education, and health--in this century.
In association with rich and middle-ranked countries, and in partnership with African government, civic and business leaders, the United States should lead an international effort to end war, improve governance, strengthen states, and rebuild traumatized societies and economies in Africa.
In short, the many initiatives cited by President Bush and his associates should be pulled together into a global Marshall Plan for Africa. Most African countries were sites of proxy Cold War conflicts, and the deep fissures today in such countries as Congo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan can be traced back to the years when Eastern and Western nations cynically pursued their interests at Africa's expense. There has been no international commitment to overcome the devastation caused by those policies.
African security needs are still trumped by policy priorities in other regions. At the outset of the second Iraq war, while the president of Cameroon was being ushered into the White House, the State Department was reporting on the profound denial of political freedoms and human rights in his country.
Africa's abundant mineral wealth has brought more grief than joy to its people. Petroleum to overseas consumers has flowed freely from Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and Sudan leaving warfare, corruption, political repression and environmental pollution, while the proceeds often disappear into a maze of untraceable accounts.
African leaders have proposed a New Partnership for Africa's Development. Bush has adopted this language in referring to our partnership with Africa. Yet African leaders have persistently failed to act collectively to promote democracy, good governance, mutual accountability and economic reform.
Empty promises
The African Charter of Human and Peoples' Rights, adopted with great fanfare in 1981, has remained a virtual dead letter. Governing justly, investing in people, and promoting economic freedom and growth--the current guiding principles of the administration's aid policies--have been promised the African people by their leaders since colonial rule ended four decades ago in most of the continent.
After Bush's Africa tour, Secretary of State Colin Powell should be given responsibility to initiate a global partnership with Africa, in association with other countries. Some specific goals should be met by the end of this decade: reduced incidence rates for HIV/AIDS and other major diseases; fewer deaths from warfare; transparent resource flows to Africa; indexes of corruption, social development and electoral democracy; access to education, health facilities, clean water and reliable electricity; and national and economic growth.
The time has come for a truly global compact with Africa that requires an international pooling of resources from government agencies, non-governmental groups, universities, religious associations and business corporations to rescue the birthplace of humanity from the plagues that beset it. At the center of such a global partnership should be the rebuilding of institutional capacity in Africa. Reversing the devastation of public institutions and the erosion of basic infrastructures must be at the heart of any genuine recovery program.
Manipulation in Liberia
After 25 years, Liberia was again on the agenda of a visiting American president albeit not on his itinerary, thanks to President Charles Taylor. Taylor, a consummate opportunist, has sought to extract every ounce of leverage for his negotiated exit from the discomfiture of the Bush administration over sending peacekeeping forces to the region.
In mid-1991, I was pulled from an international democracy conference in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to make the first of several trips to meet with Taylor in Gbarnga, Liberia, where he had set up the headquarters of his rebellion. Having observed him at close quarters in the context of a peace effort led by Carter, I am not surprised at his current manipulative performances for the international media. Every effort should be made to close the curtain on this perverse drama.
Taylor promises to write his presidential memoirs once in exile, and then return to Liberia after "a cooling-off period" to engage in politics. This period should be a very long one, spent behind bars. His indictment for war crimes by the Special Court in Sierra Leone should be the start of a thorough investigation and exposure of how this intelligent but wicked man was able to inflict so much destruction on his country and much of the West African region. The crimes for which he is held responsible in Sierra Leone, monstrous as they are, pale in comparison to what he has committed in Liberia.
Peace, democracy and development in the West African region can accelerate once the cancerous node of Taylor's criminal enterprise has been excised. Bush's recent meeting with leaders of the most democratic governments in the region was an important counterpoint to the havoc in Liberia's capital, Monrovia.
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Once Taylor has departed for Nigerian exile, the desire to quickly turn the page on this tragic period should be resisted. Alongside the careful establishment of a constitutional government, and the rebuilding of civil society and a legitimate economy in Liberia, a full examination should be conducted of how one individual was able to hoodwink domestic and external actors and impose an utterly predatory system on his country.
Bush has spoken eloquently of helping the African peoples and nations realize their great potential, a profound change from his denial of the continent's relevance to American national interests during his election campaign.
If this trip is truly successful, it will have awakened in him and the American people the potentiality of a genuine partnership with Africa. Time, however, is fast running out for the continent as the rest of the world expands productive capacity while Africa's contracts.
The challenges to be confronted transcend political parties and ideologies. They concern the deep historical debt the president evoked when he spoke in Dakar, Senegal, about the heinous crimes of slavery and the slave trade. History, he said, "moves in the direction of justice." If so, it often follows a circuitous path. In the case of America's relations with Africa, the time has come to make that path straight and true.
Richard Joseph is a professor of political science and director of African studies at Northwestern University. This article first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.
