US-Africa ties 11 years after terror attacks

Mobhare Matinyi, Washington DC     The Citizen, Tanzania    Friday, 14 September 2012

On Tuesday, thousands of Americans gathered in designated locations to mourn the nearly 3,000 victims of the September 11th terror attacks that occurred 11 years ago. Truly, 9/11 remains one of the most important days in the modern history of this security-paranoid nation.

One continent that has become more significant to the US now than at any other time before is Africa, which American author David Lamb described in the 1980s as “in need of more education than guns”.

What made Africa essential to the world’s most powerful nation that was just recovering from an embarrassing attack on its soil, in fact, worse than the Pearl Harbor ambush that dragged the US into the Second World War?
Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in November 2010, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, noted that after President George W. Bush took office in 2000, he had a dream of redefining US-Africa relations, but 9/11 attacks changed everything making war on terror the first priority.

Dr Rices said a major implication of that foreign and security policy prerogative was the realisation of the dangers that failed states posed and the importance of having stable and responsible nations. Africa had the largest number of either failed or failing states, thus, Washington could not afford to ignore it.

So the trick was how to turn fragile African states into stable and responsible ones, in effect making them useful agents of American security. This thinking was made stronger by the theory that posits that poverty breeds terrorism. Allowing African states to collapse was not an option to Washington.

What followed thereafter was a strategic plan to make African states effective security agents for the superpower. That idea brought the likes of the Millennium Challenge Account which offers financial rewards to the best performing developing countries based on various globally-monitored indicators. That was in addition to the traditional foreign policy machine, the US Agency for International Development.
The Bush administration didn’t throw away Bill Clinton’s scheme, the African Growth Opportunity Act, which made it easier for African entrepreneurs to export goods to the US domestic market. Clinton’s other initiative, the Open Skies Agreement with some African countries like Tanzania, didn’t work well after 9/11 as terrorists had made flying a riskier business.

The Bush White House also introduced several programs such as the malaria initiative and other HIV/Aids projects, which made Bush the most benevolent American leader to Africans in history. Then Pentagon came up with military and humanitarian aid strategies while a network of American non-governmental organisations kept crisscrossing the continent day and night. Honestly, African leaders became really happy.
Thereafter Washington asked African governments to instruct their parliaments to pass anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering bills. Before the dust settled down, the Pentagon launched the US Africa Command , but this time African leaders smelled a rat forcing Washington generals to station its headquarters in Germany.

But there was one problem that remained in the whole security game - that, the US was still heavily dependent on Middle East oil, that is, from the so-called “countries that don’t like Americans so much”. Where could the US turn to? With Nigeria, Angola, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Chad pumping millions of barrels per day, Africa was the answer. Africa is among major exporters of crude oil to the US.
In that calculus, some African dictators benefited too as Washington typically doesn’t offend despots who “listen” and surely a few of them were more than willing to send their militaries to wherever Washington wanted. To some extent some Africans benefited along the way although oppositions in countries like Ethiopia and Uganda kept crying foul in elections.

Things haven’t yet worked for Americans as Somalia is still not safe from Al Shabaab, in fact, their newly-elected president, Hassan Mohamud, escaped assassination on Wednesday. In West Africa Boko Haram is a thorn in Nigeria’s flesh, while Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb rules the northern Sahara desert, and Ansar Dine is becoming stronger in Mali.

The worry now is that there is an arc of instability being formed from West Africa all the way through the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, and that perhaps one day Al Qaeda will re-organise, re-energise and re-launch from this “fertile” ground. So, what went wrong?

Although President Barack Obama’s approach to Africa has been to maintain achievements while building confidence with Africans as partners, avoiding the client-donor relation, this new fear of an arc of instability could turn things around, perhaps redrawing the US-Africa relations anew in the post-9/11 era. In any case, Africans ought to know the rules of the game.