White House blueprint on how to deal with continent is short on detail

When the White House recently published its report US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa, it was not a surprise to observers of US-Africa relations. Over the past weeks and months, the US has been grappling with how to engage Africa in the wake of the consistent upward mobility of China's influence.

As with all broad policies, a reading of this latest policy paper is short on detail, settling for a broad-brush treatment of the issues that will define US-Africa relations. If US congressional and senate hearings and testimonies are an important source of US policy making, then the legislative deliberations in recent days have been largely left out of the policy with the understanding that the devil is in the detail.

In ticking off recent achievements on the continent, the new US policy points out the pacification of the Cote d'Ivoire impasse last year, support for the African Union mission in war-torn Somalia and others. Glossed over is the Obama administration's role in dispatching Muammar Gadhafi and instituting a new government in Libya - a conspicuous omission.

While the US may indeed point to gains made on the democratic front and indeed in health, it is clear that the world's No 1 economy has been struggling to maintain its long economic connection with Africa. The US lost the No 1 berth as Africa's most significant trading partner in 2009, a position now occupied by China. If this new policy is the product of leaders and strategists looking to ensure a US bounce back in Africa, it appears that they have learned little.

For a start, it is increasingly clear that China's governance-neutral approach is what has won it many friends in Africa. Yet the new US policy foregrounds matters that have in many instances been framed controversially, such as engaging young leadership to challenge the old order in Africa and calling for the respect of liberal, "sexual orientation" rights. The crafters of the policy seem deaf to the fact that a growing number of Africans have not only grown weary of years of US proselytizing but have also found an alternative in a China that does not seek to impose any moral values.

Of course whether values at the heart of the "American way" and more so democracy and human rights are universal or local remains debatable. Most US elites take a fundamentalist approach not unlike certain religious extremists. Other viewpoints suggest that you cannot preach the gospel of same-sex relations in poor but conservative countries such as Malawi or Uganda with dire child mortality rates, to mention but one challenge. A scan of comments on the push by the US and its allies on the single human rights issue of same-sex relations indicates the US will only end up making enemies rather than friends in Africa.

Fortunately for the US, it does not mind making enemies as witnessed in the differentiation between friend and foe in the new policy. Indeed, by putting together a strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa cutting out the Arab Maghreb, Egypt, Sudan and others, the new policy follows a script that sees Sub-Saharan Africa as largely pliant black Africa and northern Africa as an intricate web linked to the even more complicated Middle East.

China on the other hand has been successful largely by considering most, if not all, nations as friends, and eschewing distinction between black Africa and Arab Africa. This is spelled out in China's Africa Policy of 2006 which, compared with the US policy, seeks to limit confrontation in a spirit of non-interference and mutual benefit. It would appear that as the US has remained tethered to exporting its democratic ideals, China has proceeded to engage in matters pragmatic with Africa, accounting for the dragon's spreading footprint on the continent as the eagle's claws become blunt.

In the final analysis, all the brilliant plans for increased engagement between the US and Africa will be affected by governance issues. In these respects, the US has a lot to learn from China.

The author is a Kenyan communications researcher based at the Communication University of China. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily 07/06/2012 page11)