by Musifiky Mwanasali
Directives on US engagement with Africa
After years of professing Africa’s irrelevance to its global agenda, the United States issued three foreign policy directives on Africa in 2022.
The first, “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act,” was adopted by the US House of Representatives in April 2022 as HR 7311. Its peculiarity resides in punishing African countries for doing business with the Russian Federation, thus breaking with the bipartisan consensus that, according to President Barack Obama, Africa once enjoyed among US lawmakers. African reactions to HR 7311 ranged from indignation to outright condemnation, as the SADC regional block did at its 2022 summits in Kinshasa and Windhoek. HR 7311 languished in the US Senate, but threats and sanctions continue unabated due to Africa’s expanding partnership with China and Russia.
The second, “US Strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa” (hereafter the Strategy), is the product of President Joe Biden’s administration. Issued in August 2022, its uniqueness stems from the administration’s declaration that “the United States must reset its relations with [its] African counterparts. . .” (p.12). Also unique is the administration’s pledge to “graduate from policies that inadvertently treated sub-Saharan Africa as a world apart and have struggled to keep pace with the profound transformations across the continent” (p.5).
Third was the “US- Africa Leaders’ Summit” in December 2022. There, US officials appeared conciliatory, treating their guests respectfully and insisting with President Biden on US’s unwavering commitment to mutually beneficial cooperation based on African priorities and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.
I agree that US engagement with Africa needs a reset. The overhaul is even more urgent now, considering the downward trajectory in US- Africa relations and the uncertainties it has generated on the prospects for Africa’s transformation agenda. But to be helpful, the reset must integrate African perspectives. These perspectives reflect the positions African states collectively agree to implement domestically and defend globally, even though they are not precluded from having their stance. (This essay uses Africa and Africans in this collective sense).
US officials concede that it is “impossible to meet this era’s defining challenges without African contributions and leadership” (p.4). Yet the Strategy is replete with assertions about what the US will do in (not with) Africa. It barely mentions the AU and repeatedly uses the term “sub-Saharan Africa” despite its colonial and racially divisive overtones and against the administration’s own undertaking to “address the [US] artificial bureaucratic division between North and sub-Saharan Africa” (p.12).
Transformation and its discontented
Momentous changes are taking place in Africa. Regionalism is thriving as African states rely increasingly on regional and continental cooperation as the surest insurance for their security and prosperity. Meanwhile, continental and regional institutions steadily advance with the common unity and integration agenda.
The most striking examples are in the ever-expanding scope of the AU Development Agency (known by its former NEPAD acronym), the centrality of the Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), designed to improve access to regional and continental infrastructure networks and services, or the African Peer Review Mechanism, the peer-reviewing and monitoring instrument that AU member states adhere to voluntarily to improve their domestic governance practices. And African leaders are noticeably more vocal in global affairs, advocating for multilateralism under the aegis of the United Nations (UN) charter while pushing for Africa’s greater involvement in managing global issues.
But many obstacles remain, notably due to flaws and weaknesses in the execution by African governments of their sovereign functions. Challenges are of three orders: the unpredictability of foreign investments, state fragility vis-à-vis foreign capital, and challenges dealing with an increasingly restive civil society (especially the youth).
Take foreign investments. Historically, Africa is the world’s lowest recipient of foreign direct investments (FDIs). According to the statistics portal Statista, global FDI flows increased between 2020 and 2021 worldwide except in Africa. In 2020, Africa received $39 billion out of $929 billion globally, and in 2021, only $38 billion out of $1,647 billion. In both years, FDI amounts to Africa represented less than one-tenth of one percent of global flows (0.042% and 0.023%, respectively).
Capital is, by its nature, domineering. It imposes unfavorable conditions (leonine contracts, profit repatriation, or tax exemption terms) that leave the recipient bloodless. Attempts to rein in (by tracking illicit financial flows or sales tax evasion from global online transactions) usually fail, leaving the recipient state vulnerable domestically and compliant internationally to avoid sanctions. Hence the rise of antiimperialist protests flooding the streets of many African capitals, where it is no longer uncommon to watch young people bringing the French Tricolore down and raising the Russian flag (the colors are similar).
What Africa wants
The AU Agenda 2063 is essential for understanding what Africans want. Adopted at the AU summit of Sandton, South Africa, in 2015, it is the blueprint of the “Africa We Want” and the core of Africa’s transformation agenda.
Burdened by enormous socioeconomic challenges due to unsustainable levels of external debt and fluctuations in the prices of their primary raw materials in the global markets, not to mention donor-enforced sanctions, African states have collectively adopted a dynamic approach to multilateral cooperation and built a network of strategic and win-win partnerships with countries like China, Russia, Turkey or India, and intergovernmental institutions such as the League of Arab States and the European Union.
They also began exploring alternative ways to strengthen the resilience of their economies by increasing intra-African cooperation and reliance on their own resources. The AU initiative to capture the flow of remittances from the African diaspora is one example. According to the World Bank, remittances from the Nigerian diaspora are estimated at $11 billion annually. Equally significant are the amounts remitted home by the vast Ethiopian diaspora. Estimated at $40 billion in 2018, Africans are hopeful that remittances could serve as a long-term strategy to compensate for dwindling FDIs and public assistance.
These changes have not gone unnoticed by the Biden administration. The Strategy recognizes that “the world is keenly aware of Africa’s importance, spurring countries to expand their political, economic and security arrangement with African states” (p.5). Paradoxically, these otherwise positive trends are also a source of uneasiness. US officials recognize the opportunities that arise from the growing international interest in Africa. But they are also growing extremely nervous about the expanding footprint of their adversaries on the continent. For them, none of the African partners exerts such a “malign influence and activities” as China and Russia (p.5).
In particular, the Strategy is alarmed that “the People’s Republic of China sees the region as an important arena to challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken US relations with African peoples and governments” (p.5).
The Russian Federation is just as malevolent because it “views the region as a permissive environment for parastatals and private military companies, often fomenting instability for strategic and financial benefit” (p.5). Worse still, Russia “uses its security and economic ties, as well as disinformation, to undercut Africans’ principled opposition to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine and related human rights abuses.”
Don’t sanction. Compete!
Africans are confused about the trajectory of the US foreign policy and worried about other physical threats, such as sanctions, for their shared position on unfolding global issues. Likewise, there is mounting irritation, among the youth especially, about US double standards in dealing with Africa. US officials ought to be mindful of this growing resentment if they wish to maintain the reservoir of goodwill they still enjoy on the continent.
No US official has so far bothered to explain why Africans – and only them – are subjected to threats and sanctions for doing business with China and Russia. Former AU chairperson and Senegalese President Macky Sall raised it with President Biden at the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit. And last year, the African Group at the UN slammed their US counterpart regarding double standards.
Africans know that their foreign partners are self-interested in the continent, but, as President Sall observed, “Africa has suffered enough from the burden of history… It does not want to be the home of a new Cold War but a pole of stability and opportunity open to all its partners on a mutually beneficial basis.” And further, he reminded foreign partners his reminder that “Africa…wishes to engage with all its partners in reinvented relationships, which transcend the prejudice that who is not with me, is against me.”
No longer bound by their colonial legacy, Africans (especially the youth) are keen to engage with the rest of the world fairly, on an equal footing, and in a spirit of mutual respect. Acknowledging this reality is an excellent first step for successfully resetting US engagement with Africa.
Alumnus Musifiky Mwanasali (political science, 1991), is a former academic in Africa and the United States. He spent over two decades working for the AU and the UN. He is presently a Pius Okigbo Fellow at Northwestern’s Program of African Studies, focusing on the challenges and opportunities of Africa’s transformation amidst current global uncertainties. Dr. Mwanasali spent this past summer as a UN consultant to operationalize the conflict early warning system at the Secretariat of the East African Community based in Arusha, Tanzania.