- For the United States, the balance sheet of what comes
out of Africa far outweighs what goes back in. Oil, raw materials and the
expansion of the free market are the principal reasons the US engages in
Africa, anything else is pretty much incidental.
-
- Chancellor Gordon Brown may have wrung significant support
from the US for the debt relief deal he announced after yesterday's meeting
of G8 ministers, but in the balance book of persuading the richest nation
on Earth to help the poorest continent, the bottom line is not all that
encouraging.
-
- America will have nothing to do with the commitment to
providing 0.7% of GDP (gross domestic product) for aid which the European
powers have signed up to. The US will have nothing to do with Gordon Brown's
International Finance Facility (IFF) which would use the sale of gold reserves
to speed up the rate of aid delivery. According to aid agencies, the Bush
administration's agreement on debt cancellation simply makes more economic
sense than the European proposals for debt relief which would see the impoverished
African nations picking up the repayment baton again halfway through the
next decade.
-
- In the same way as it blindly ignores the Kyoto targets
on climate change, the US government is pursuing its own unilateral agenda
on Africa and poverty reduction.
-
- This, however, does not necessarily support the conclusions
about American intentions most of Europe has already come to before George
Bush steps foot on Scottish soil for the G8 summit at Gleneagles next month.
-
- "Bush has a reputation in Europe, for grudgingly
accepting that Africa has to be dealt with, but in practice he has a fairly
benevolent policy in terms of aid," says Martin Meredith, whose book,
The State Of Africa, a study on the 50 years of post-colonial independence,
was published this month.
-
- It's not as if Bush, who arrived in office as one of
the least-travelled presidents, doesn't know where Africa is. He toured
part of the continent in 2003, emphasising the tough-love approach to poverty
reduction, insisting on the entrenchment of democracy and on cleaning up
state corruption.
-
- Bill Clinton was the first US president to tour Africa
while in office, and although he made large gestures about working with
the continent, they amounted to very little in reality. Bush has actually
delivered on promises over the last three years the US aid to Africa has
trebled.
-
- Within the US itself, there is a perception that the
world's superpower does deliver a lot for Africa. Survey after survey shows
that Americans do care, do think that something should be done for Africa,
do think that the US government is putting its shoulder to the wheel.
-
- In sheer volume terms the world's largest economy is
sending the largest amount of foreign aid to Africa, but as a proportion
of national wealth only 0.16% of the US budget goes on aid, far short of
the 0.7% of GDP that is the UN target.
-
- A ridiculously small amount of US aid, far less than
1% of its total aid budget, is spent in sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest
place on Earth. A lot of the funds go to Pakistan, to Israel, to countries
that assist in the US's strategic interests. In that respect, foreign aid
is, as it always was, a tool of foreign policy.
-
- In stark contrast to Britain, which brought a wealth
of diplomatic and technical know-how to post-colonial Africa, and France,
which bought influence throughout the continent with generous financial
support, for most of the 20th century the United States brought only guns.
-
- The US bears a historical responsibility for numerous
regional and tribal conflicts that have destabilised countries such as
Angola, Liberia, Congo and Somalia.
-
- Africa does not loom as large in the collective American
conscience as it does for Europeans. For most of the last two centuries
Africa was ruled by Britain and France, with Portugal and Belgium picking
up the remnants of the map. Slavery and Liberia excepted, the US had little
geo-political interest in Africa until the continent became a playground
for cold war politics as the colonial control waned and the Soviet Union
sought strategic advantage.
-
- When the US was involved in a proxy war against communism
any leader who served as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence
was deemed good enough for money and guns. When twinned with multinational
demands to continue to exploit Africa's mineral wealth, the US cold war
policy for the continent often led to bizarre contradictions such as having
Cuban troops guarding Angolan oil installations operated by American companies
against rebel insurgents armed by the US government.
-
- Dictators have received billions of dollars of military
aid and there are enough small arms in the continent for one in 20 people
to have their own personal weapon. In the two years following September
2001, the amount spent on military training for African officers has increased
by over $2 million to $11.1m.
-
- Manganese for steel, cobalt for chrome and alloys, gold,
fluorspar and germanium for industrial diamonds Africa remains a treasure
trove for the world's sophisticated economies. The US continues to rely
on Africa for raw materials, and for American companies there are tremendous
profits in the current trade agreements that continue the age-old exploitation
of the continent by the rich world.
-
- Sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest place, is also
its most profitable investment destination. According to the World Bank's
2003 global development finance report, the huge continent offers "the
highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world".
-
- The trade and aid agreements reflect the continuing imbalance
between Africa and the West.
-
- "There is obviously poverty reduction rhetoric but
when you look closely at the way aid is tied to contracts for US companies
you can see that it is a different way of benefiting the domestic economy.
It is being done for the benefit of US business and not for the poor of
the countries receiving the aid," says Peter Hardstaff, head of policy
at the UK-based World Development Movement.
-
- The exploitation of Africa has a long and sordid history,
dripping in blood and corruption and with enough blame and guilt to share
between all the participants Western governments, multinational companies
and national leaders. On trade the US still does extremely well from the
plunder of Africa's raw materials.
-
- The African Growth and Opportunity Act, which sounds
like a benevolent multilateral trade agreement between the US and Africa,
forces participants to remove subsides from their industries (while allowing
the US to subsidise its own) and insists on privatisation of social services
such as water even in countries that face drought.
-
- The non-government organisations working in the continent
have described the agreement as a colonial imposition that provides the
US with cheap labour and goods and tax-free energy. Of course, over 90%
of the sales under the agreement in its first nine months were oil exports
from Nigeria and Gabon.
-
- Not all the deals are cynical. The Bush administration's
$15 billion commitment to Aids in Africa and the Caribbean, the biggest
single pledge by any US administration, undoubtedly benefits America's
pharmaceutical companies, but few seriously doubt that its main aim is
to improve the wellbeing of the people of Africa and the planet as a whole.
-
- But there are other riders to US aid. Some of the aid
money $86m of the $865m apportioned to fighting Aids in 2004 goes to Christian
faith-based organisations who promote abstinence as a means of preventing
sexually transmitted disease. Most Aids prevention programmes more realistically
focus on education and protection.
-
- The over-riding American concern in Africa, as it is
across the entire globe, is oil security. Oil, its extraction and supply,
will always be the top priority for the US. The biggest returns, and the
most important product out of Africa for the coming decades, will be petroleum.
The returns are not for Africans though. While 70% of Nigerians exist on
a dollar a day, Shell continues to make megaprofits from oil drilling in
the country, taking an estimated $30bn out of the ground since the 1950s.
-
- At present 12% of US oil comes from Africa and by 2015,
when the UN's Millennium Goals to halve world poverty will be laughably
incomplete, that proportion will have reached 25%. To control the security
of oil supply will, in all likelihood, require a large US military presence
near the oilfields.
-
- Fortunately for the US most of West Africa's oilfields
are offshore, and so less vulnerable to sabotage, insurrection or local
instability. The oil has the added benefit of having shorter transportation
routes to US refineries and not having to travel through vulnerable areas
of the world.
-
- As the world passes peak oil production, and some analysts
believe the top of the graph is already disappearing in our rear-view mirror,
the race for oil will become paramount. Rapidly industrialising China,
the US's chief competitor in the future, has already recognised the need
to have Africa as a key source of mineral wealth. Agreements are already
in place with the government of Sudan to provide oil that will fuel Chinese
economic growth.
-
- With oil becoming an economic weapon, there will be no
shortage of regime changes, human rights abuses and privately sponsored
coup attempts to control the flow of the most precious commodity.
-
- Poverty and the needs of the African population will
take second place to US geo-political strategy. In the lexicon of aid and
trade, the NEPAD agreements and the AGOA, there are only three letters
that really matter to the US in Africa, they are O-I-L.
-
- ©2005 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights
reserved
-
- http://www.sundayherald.com/50283
|
