Prez Biden slowly losing Africa; Harris or Trump unlikely to fare better

By Andreas Kluth

Africans may comfort themselves that greeting a lame duck from Washington is better than hosting no duck at all. Having postponed his first and only trip to Africa as president, Joe Biden now has new plans to visit Angola — in December, a month before he exits the White House. 

That just about sums up America’s enthusiasm for wooing the continent with the world’s fastest-growing population, a region, no less, that is increasingly turning away from Washington and bowing to new imperial overlords in Moscow and Beijing. If the United States keeps putting Africa last — and it probably will, whether the next president is Donald Trump or Kamala Harris — let nobody be surprised if the continent, if not the whole Global South, eventually sides with America’s enemies.

 

Biden did pay a modicum of attention to Africa. In Angola he’ll be talking up a big railroad project that the US is helping to fund, the so-called Lobito Corridor which will eventually link the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. At the United Nations, he has pushed for giving Africa two permanent seats on the security council (in addition to the three rotating seats the continent’s countries already share). But little has come of it. Nonetheless, the Biden presidency still counts almost as courtship after Trump during his first term dismissed African nations, among others, as “shithole countries.” He never visited. 

In general, this policy of neglect interrupted by occasional press conferences has been a bipartisan constant in American foreign policy. “Overpromising and under-delivering” has convinced Africans that the US is “an inherently unreliable, even hypocritical, partner,” argues Cameron Hudson at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The result is that Africans — unlike Europeans, say — don’t see huge differences between Trump and Harris;they expect to be snubbed either way. 

That pique is one reason why they’re open to overtures from Moscow and Beijing. Wherever the French (often hated as the former colonizers) and the Americans withdraw — as in Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad or Niger, say — Russian mercenaries and paramilitaries move in, callously selling their kinetic services to juntas in return for diamonds, gold, lithium or other wealth. Chinese “colonization” is more mercantile, with infrastructure projects that often lead to debt peonage. But it’s successful. Since 2009, China has been Africa’s largest trade partner; it’s also the largest investor. 

This geopolitical contest evokes the struggle between American and Soviet influence in Africa during the Cold War. Like the Kremlin back then, Moscow and Beijing unscrupulously use every tool at their disposal, including disinformation. In just the past two years, Russia has sponsored at least 80 campaigns in 22 African countries. In Burkina Faso, for example, scientists funded by America’s Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are trying to stop malaria by genetically modifying mosquitoes. Russia’s local trolls, bots and useful idiots are instead spreading a narrative that the Americans and the lab want to infect Africans. 

The US also does plenty to sabotage itself. Russia and China have a clear objective in Africa: to project their own power in the style of amoral realpolitik. America, by contrast, isn’t sure whether to be idealist or realist: whether to promote democracy and prosperity, to fight terrorism and extremism, or to compete head-on against Russia and China. Trying to do it all, Washington instead does everything badly.

The slide from democracy to tyranny or anarchy has certainly been steep. About half of Africans now live under autocratic rule, and only 7 per cent live in relative freedom. Military coups are a particular bane; there have been nine since 2020, mainly in the Sahel region, and another five attempts. 

Such coups pose no problems for the Russians or Chinese, who don’t care what regime they’re dealing with. But the US has laws and policies that forbid partnering with coup juntas. That leads to all sorts of contortions. When a general putsched out the legitimate leader of Niger in July 2023, the Biden administration held off for four months on calling the takeover a “coup,” hoping for some arrangement to keep its troops there (they’re out, now). The US has done that labeling trick with about half the coups since 2009. It looks hypocritical.

Whenever the US gets kicked out of a country, moreover, it not only leaves an opening for Russia but also becomes less effective at fighting terrorists in the region. And there are a lot of them: Sub-Saharan Africa, and especially the Sahel, has replaced the Middle East as the world’s largest and hottest cauldron of terror. The region accounted for almost half of the world’s deaths from terrorism last year. The less the US fights terrorists over there, the more it’ll have to fear them over here.

Resources — diplomatic, military, fiscal — are finite, of course, and the US is already busy with the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Still, the next administration can do better.

That means not only asking for favors but building deeper relationships with more countries. The US should staff the vacancies in its African embassies. It should also renew the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade pact that expires next year, and give more African countries duty-free access to the American market (currently, only 32 out of 54 nations have that privilege). 

The US might also refrain from being too preachy. When Uganda passed a draconian anti-homosexuality law last year, the Biden administration was right to protest. But did it also need to revoke Uganda’s eligibility for the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act? Too much moralizing only pushes more Africans to embrace Russia and China.

The biggest problem is the lack of interest in Washington. This is hard to take for those in the know. For example, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, says that “the worst situation that we have seen in the world” — in terms of killing, rape and starvation — is not Ukraine, Gaza or the Levant, but Sudan. Yet whenever she brings up the subject, “it’s like crickets.” In a sense, she could say that about the continent as a whole.

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Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper