Hillary’s African safari

NAIROBI, Kenya — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed here Aug. 4 for a tour of seven African countries that will roll out the Obama administration’s policies toward the continent.

President Barack Obama’s July stopover in Ghana was the symbolic homecoming of an African-American president, and a pat on the back for Ghana, which held a good election last year, whose economy has grown steadily of late and who has proved a good neighbor in a tough region. In contrast, Clinton’s 11-day, seven-nation tour is the nuts and bolts visit.

Clinton arrived in Kenya, Obama’s ancestral home and a longtime regional ally of the U.S. From there she will head to South Africa (sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy), Angola (its fastest emerging oil producer), the Democratic Republic of Congo (its treasure trove of mineral wealth), Nigeria (its biggest supplier of oil to the U.S. and most populous country), Liberia (historically America’s closest ally) and Cape Verde (a small success story).

Clinton will meet presidents and foreign ministers in all these countries. In Kenya she will encourage the coalition government’s fractious partners to work together to prevent a rerun of the violence that followed the 2007 elections. She will also meet with Somalia’s beleaguered President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

In South Africa, she will talk about the situation in neighboring Zimbabwe and try to mend diplomatic bridges that all but collapsed during the George Bush/Thabo Mbeki era. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Clinton will meet victims of the rape and sexual violence that is epidemic in the war-torn east of the country.

State Department officials point out that this is the earliest in any administration that both a president and a secretary of state have visited Africa.

“[This visit] will highlight and underscore the Obama administration’s commitment to making Africa a priority in U.S. foreign policy,” said Johnnie Carson, assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

Despite the attention on Africa, Asia and Latin America, ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, North Korea and Iran’s development of nuclear capabilities and the intractable Middle East quagmire will take foreign policy priority in the U.S. for the time being.

Clinton made the trip now so that she can open the eighth annual forum of the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), a mechanism by which some producers in 39 African countries get preferential trade terms when exporting to the U.S.

Although products such as T-shirts and socks made with African cotton benefit from AGOA, the bulk of the beneficiaries are oil producers: hydrocarbons accounted for 92 percent of AGOA-eligible imports to the U.S. in 2008, valued at $66 billion.

Clinton “will emphasize Africa as a place of opportunity, built on an ethic of responsibility,” but her focus on oil and gas producers is clear, said a State Department spokesman.

The other impetus for the visit is China, whose influence in Africa has grown massively in recent years. China-Africa trade was worth $107 billion in 2008, up from $18.5 billion in 2003. Only the U.S. and Europe have more trade with Africa and China is fast catching up, offering infrastructure investments in exchange for raw materials.

What makes China a particularly attractive trading partner — especially to the less savory African leaderships — is its policy of non-interference, meaning its loans come with no strings attached and no lectures on good governance or democracy.

"War on terror" may be a less popular term nowadays but its reverberations are still felt, for example in the attention that Clinton will be paying to Somalia. According to the most recent U.S. National Defense Strategy published in 2008, “Ungoverned, under-governed, misgoverned, and contested areas offer fertile ground for [extremist] groups to exploit the gaps in governance capacity of local regimes to undermine local stability and regional security.” That may as well be a description of Somalia.

For years now intelligence officials have warned that an Islamist terrorist attack in Kenya is likely, even expected. And there is precedent: In 1998 Al Qaeda cells blew up U.S. embassies in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing hundreds. With a barely policed 500-mile long border with Somalia across which thousands of refugees trek every month, Kenya really has no way of controlling the passage of extremists into the country.

None of these concerns signal a major departure in U.S. policy toward Africa but there are signs of change.

The Obama administration understands both the reality of climate change and that Africa will be worst hit. Clinton intends to address food security and agricultural development, speaking about technologies for increasing crop yields to help Africa become more self-sufficient and less reliant on food aid.

There is also likely to be less talk of financial aid (although bilateral U.S. aid to sub-Saharan Africa was worth a significant $6.5 billion in 2008) and more of trade of the kind represented by AGOA.

Obama’s Africa policy is still developing, but perhaps the strongest signal of intent is in the appointment of a strong team of experienced people within the African Affairs bureau at the State Department (see box below). This is a shift from the last Bush administration where State officials were frequently ignored in favor of Defense. The hush surrounding the new U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, since Obama’s inauguration suggests an end to what critics saw as a creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy towards Africa.

Who’s who in Obama’s Africa team:

• Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa: career ambassador with broad and long Africa experience

• Donald Yamamoto, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa: former ambassador to Ethiopia with good East Africa experience

• Scott Gration, Special Envoy for Sudan: ex-Air Force General who favors engagement with President Omar al-Bashir’s regime over Darfur and the continuing tensions between the north and south of the country

• Michelle Gavin, Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council: penned an influential policy paper on Zimbabwe and has a proven track record on Africa and human rights

• Susan Rice, U.N. Ambassador: former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under Presient Bill Clinton