The recently concluded US-Africa Leaders Summit which held in Washington, DC on December 13-15 has presented another opportunity for our foreign policy experts in the African continent and decision makers in governments to, once again, interrogate and have a deeper introspection of the US relationships on Africa’s health and wellbeing.
Since this particular intervention is not meant as a detailed, empirical research work about what should necessarily be Africa’s foreign policy trajectory in the context of the United States summit, a cursory glance will therefore suffice.
Although the Nigerian president was at the summit, expectantly to make a case for Africa, at least for the West African subregion, it’s not known if the country’s foreign policy and economic objectives were well articulated at this summit.
After all, it’s been said, and widely believed, that once Nigeria gets it right, including its relationships with the advanced economies like the United States, the rest of the pieces of the economic puzzle will fall into place for other African countries, barring Northern Africa.
But one can wager that this isn’t necessarily so because other smaller African countries are already chatting their own growth paths and dealing with the advanced economies fairly on their own terms. Rwanda readily comes to mind here.
One wondered if African leaders called their foreign affairs and international relations experts in their governments when they received their letters of invitation from the Biden’s White House to ask them why the US government was suddenly interested in a summit with them, or what would have been the real reason(s) behind the summit and what might be in it, if any, for them at the end of it all. These are the questions that a deep thinking, reflective leader should ask his people when a more powerful and influential leader say they should talk.
These questions are particularly germane in light of what has since been seen in some diplomatic circles and foreign missions as the US policy of “benign neglect” of Africa for decades.
But before one attempts to hazard a guess as to what might be the real objective of the Washington, DC summit, it’s important to mention that the African Diaspora communities in the US was advertised by President Joe Biden as one of the important reasons for the summit. This further underscores, once again, that any country’s Diaspora is acutely important to the economy of their host country, not to talk of the economy of their home country.
Considering the sudden interest in Africa that had warranted this summit, there are, it seems to me, two fundamental reasons for this seeming courtship.
One is the fact that Africa has resurfaced, once again, as the repository of the highest and most valuable mineral resources that are necessary to build a high technology-driven new economy in the West.
The second is China’s incursion and its astounding penetration into Africa that is getting increasingly discomfiting for the US. Here’s a continent that the US believes its leaders has nowhere to go even if it rides roughshod on them, as it’s wont to do, through the global financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank now getting increasingly entangled in China’s apron string.
The first exemplifies a new scramble (without the partition because that has since been taken care of) for Africa for new resources while the second may well be the beginning of a new cold war between the United States and China in which Africa will be the only theater of operations.
Perhaps the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is a cold calculation by the West to first cripple Moscow militarily and economically after which China would be next. That would be the day.
US dilemma now seems to be how to wean Africa from the stranglehold of China with the huge financial resources (in low interest loans and grants) that the Asian country has already committed into the continent, which is also counterproductive for the continent in the long run. But that’s a different kettle of fish.
While the Washington, DC summit is in itself not a bad idea because it gives African leaders another opportunity to recalibrate their foreign policy objectives and renegotiate their (economic) relationships with the United States, this time on terms that are more favorable to their countries, whether they have the courage and the boldness to do this is another thing entirely.
Since it’s true that Africa has the mineral resources that the West need to build a modern economy of nanotechnology and robotics but doesn’t have the technological know-how and human capital to extract these resources for its own use and for export, what African leaders must do, this time around, is to demand that the US set up shops in their countries for value additions to these minerals before export, thereby creating jobs and wealth for their countries with stringent regulations and oversight functions.
To achieve their objectives, African leaders should table their demands in more kinder and gentler ways and with superb moral suasion if they don’t want the West to feel sufficiently aggrieved in order to prevent some consequences when they’re asked to do the needful on something that they ordinarily should be gracious in doing.
Perhaps one of the most devastating psychological trauma that has consistently dogged post-colonial Africa is the fact that the people and their leaders have been made to believe that they are poor and powerless. Because of this collective negative mindset, they almost always do not want to have a good understanding of the world around them and how it works, vis-a-vis what’s best for them. And when they do, they negotiate from the position of weakness.
This has therefore created some kind of hopeless sense of dependency that the leaders jump at every ‘carrots’ on offer even when some of them are laced with some poison that ‘kills’ very softly.
And this is where one’s proposed policy of benign resistance comes in. In its basic summation, this simply means a “thanks, but no thanks” refusal of some of these ‘carrots’ on offer.
This proposed policy is predicated on what one sees as the serious and inherent lopsidedness and asymmetrical (read economic) relationships between (read eastern, western and southern) Africa and the West.
Yes, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) that was signed into law by former US president William Jefferson Clinton in 2000 is good. But there’s a distraction inherent in AGOA. African countries will be far better off economically if they can summon enough courage to engage themselves in intra-continental trade. There also may be consequences, most especially for the francophone and lusophone African countries if they should veer off the beaten path.
Because the trajectories of the advanced economies with that of the African continent are poles apart, and the services and equipment that are needed by African countries for their development agenda from the West are often prohibitive, it is futile for African leaders to continue to look in the direction of the West for their developmental aspirations.
Therefore, since some funds from the global financial institutions are actually counterproductive, if not poisonous, to Africa’s growth and development, they should be nicely turned down. This is the crux of benign resistance.
From the foregoing, therefore, Africa should look more in the direction of the middle income countries such as India, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico for its rapid economic development and bilateral relations not only because of some similarities in some aspects of cultures and worldviews among them, but also from the point of view that services and equipment from these middle income countries are not as sophisticated, thereby making them less prohibitive and easy to replicate in the long run.
African leaders must take firm decisions, based on their enlightened self interests, on those things that would advance their economic interests even if they are seriously at variance with other economic powers on the principle of mutual respect and benefits. This is what has been chronically missing over several decades that the US now hopes to redress.
After all, the world is about competition. Some competitions are friendly while others are hostile. It is therefore the responsibility of African leaders to know how to navigate their ways between these polarities for their economic independence and survival.
*Femi Odere was a former Senior Special Assistant (Diaspora Affairs) to the former Governor of Ekiti State Dr. John Kayode Fayemi. He can be reached at [email protected].*
