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| Sat 5 Jul 2003 |
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Bush billions designed to buy stability
Fred Bridgland
Yet it is here, amid the memories of chains and shackles, at the door that was carved and erected in the same year as the United States’s independence, 1776, that George Bush has chosen to make a major speech on Tuesday. The White House hopes it will set the tone for his week-long swing through five key African states, and perhaps begin to soften the cynicism that questions the motives behind his safari through Africa, summed up by a rash of cartoons showing a puzzled White House chief studying a book entitled Africa for Dummies.
He has already won over one convert. Bob Geldof, the rock star behind Live Aid, has written of Mr Bush’s programme: "You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy."
The Gorée Island speech, being previewed as a "Message of Compassion", was crafted long ago to show the US cares about Africa, not least because the ancestors of many millions of Americans passed unwillingly through the Door of No Return - and next year there is a US presidential election, nod the cynics.
However, Mr Bush’s African agenda is much bigger than whether he can swing a few black American votes in 2004.
The events of 11 September, 2001, triggered a realisation in Mr Bush and his more percipient advisers that a chaotic Africa can breed and nurture American enemies. US policy-makers have learned that poverty-stricken states, with weak institutions and brutally corrupt rulers, can pose as great a danger to American national interests as strong ones.
The Twin Towers disaster cast the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam - in which more than 200 Africans and 12 Americans were killed and thousands of people injured - in a sharper retrospective light in Washington. The dangers lurking in Africa were again emphasised just seven weeks ago, when al-Qaeda bombers launched an attack on Casbalanca in which 24 people died.
Mr Bush entered the White House after a campaign in which he seldom spoke about Africa and failed to include it in the "areas of strategic importance" he argued were central to US foreign policy.
The airborne terrorist attacks of 11 September changed all that and convinced Mr Bush that Africa, with its huge potential as a key terrorist base and battleground, had become crucial to national security and that Washington needed to exercise its influence there.
So, as well as fine words, Mr Bush will arrive in Africa with a sack containing the most generous aid package ever for the world’s poorest continent; a separate offer worth $15 billion to fight AIDS that has infected, and will kill, 30 million Africans in addition to the 15 million who have already died; a determination to achieve "regime change" in at least two states; a $100 million plan to fight terrorism in East Africa; an agenda to secure US oil supplies; and a controversial plan to end hunger in Africa with magical genetically modified seeds patented by technological wizards in America.
The aid package, which will total some $5 billion a year by 2006, is tied to a Marshall Plan for Africa devised by the presidents Thabo Mbeki and Abdoulaye Wade of South Africa and Senegal.
The core idea of the plan, ponderously titled the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), is a trade-off with the world’s aid-weary major powers. Africa, in an effort to shake off its persistent begging-bowl disorder, commits itself to democracy, good governance, financial discipline and market-oriented policies in return for more help from the developed countries, especially in the form of better access to their markets for Africa’s exports.
The intricate plan has obvious merit. It was drafted by Africans for Africans and so is free of any imperialist taint. Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria are also co-authors.
NEPAD’s godfathers know the developed countries are sick of pouring their taxpayers’ money into Africa only to see it end up in the pockets and offshore accounts of corrupt leaders while the ordinary people - Franz Fanon’s "wretched of the Earth" - sink into ever deeper poverty.
NEPAD’s ultimate grand ideal is to end Africa’s conflicts, encourage accountable government and achieve growth rates that can at least absorb into employment the millions of African children who leave school each year, let alone the many millions who get no education at all.
Mr Bush intends putting his stamp on NEPAD and the five states he will visit - Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Botswana and Nigeria - have been selected as those nearest to achieving NEPAD standards.
But Mr Bush will also turn up the pressure on Africa’s leaders to deliver on their side of the bargain if they want to obtain $65 billion in Western investment to kick start the African Marshall Plan.
Nowhere will talks be more tough and tense than in Pretoria on Wednesday, when, despite huge public bonhomie and thousands of yards of red carpet, Mr Bush will tell Mr Mbeki that NEPAD will be dead in the water unless he seriously helps to topple Robert Mugabe, in neighbouring Zimbabwe, from power.
Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, this week ratcheted up the pressure on both Mr Mugabe and Mr Mbeki by demanding, on Mr Bush’s behalf, that Mr Mugabe step down from power.
"Robert Mugabe and his cohorts may cry, ‘Blackmail’, but we should ignore them. Their time has come and gone," said Mr Powell.
"If leaders on the continent do not do more to convince President Mugabe to respect the rule of law and enter into a dialogue with the political opposition, he and his cronies will drag Zimbabwe down until there is nothing left to ruin."
Mr Mbeki endorsed Mr Mugabe’s fraudulent election last year and has refused to criticise the Zimbabwean president’s increasingly oppressive and economically destructive rule. Mr Mbeki recently said: "The reason Zimbabwe is such a preoccupation in the UK, in the US and in Sweden is because white people died and white people were deprived of their property. All they say is Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe."
If Mr Mbeki repeats that mantra, Mr Bush and other G8 nations will quote a line in their Africa Action Plan, the developed world’s necessary twin to NEPAD.
That line goes: "We will not work with governments which disregard the interests and dignity of their people."
If Bush has to say that, Africa’s renaissance with Western help will have to wait a while yet.
