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A new American future?
Barack Obama’s election has granted the US a reprieve from the harsh judgements levelled at his predecessor by many Africans, but faced with trouble at home, can the new administration meet Africa’s expectations for change?
The atmosphere in Nairobi on November 5 was that of the morning after a particularly exuberant wedding. Many residents had been glued to the television all night, but still every set across the city was on and repeating the moment the nation’s new favourite son had stepped up onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago; radio stations blasted out Samba Mapangala’s “Barack Ubarikiwe” and replaced their own jingles with “Yes we can.” Even the declarations of loyalty to Manchester United, Arsenal and Barcelona that usually grace the back windows of the city’s fleet of matatas were temporarily obscured by pictures of the man himself, torn from the front pages of the local dailies.
The level of immersion in US politics had been such that previously obscure terminology – the ‘Bradley Effect’, ‘electoral colleges’ – had become part of the daily vocabulary, not only in Kenya, but in its neighbours, whose claims on the president elect were more tenuous. Uganda and Tanzania joined Kenya in declaring national holidays – “presidentially approved hangovers”, as one local put it – to celebrate the event.
For some Kenyans, the irony of celebrating Mr Obama’s victory by reaching across doctrinal and racial lines, given the sectarianism that marred the presidential elections in December 2007, was not lost. The running joke, that the US would get a Luo president before Kenya, was a reminder that Kenya’s political scene has in the past been prone to the manipulation of ethnic sensibilities for electoral expediency. One Kenyan expat living in Uganda who on the 4th had been playing down the chances of victory, expressed his hope that an Obama victory would at the least reaffirm the US as a gold standard of democracy for Kenya to aspire to, but then quietly confided, “he is not an African. He is an American”.
Expectations are high. As Professor J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a former senior adviser on Africa to Senator McCain’s presidential campaign, says, managing those expectations is the first imperative of the incoming administration, “because the only thing worse than having poisonous relations is having unreasonable expectations which are then disappointed, leading to perhaps even greater resentment.”
While the McCain and Obama campaigns differed on certain points of their respective Africa policy, the themes, Mr Pham says, mostly enjoyed bipartisan support. This may bode well for the success of reforms being proposed to a divided House of Congress, but also serves to reinforce the growing acceptance among the diplomatic and academic community that the president-elect is an American, and as such, Africans’ expectations will only be met where they align with the priorities of the United States.
Furthermore, as the economic crisis in the US deepens, those priorities are likely to be a lot closer to home.
One of the key proposals of the Obama campaign was to double the overall US foreign assistance budget to $50bn, a goal which, in light of the debate over the potential $25bn bailout for the country’s ailing automobile industry, seems ever more ambitious.
“I think one of the lessons that we’ll have to learn out of this is what is said on the campaign trail and what can actually get through Congress can be vastly different. Or what the administration would actually pose for Congress to pass,” says Thomas Wheeler, a research associate at the South African Institute for International Affairs. “It’s a gross oversimplification to think that the money is there just for the administration to dish out. There’s a pretty stringent legislative process that has to be gone through for the administration to get any money.” With US Congressmen focused on re-election every two years, the issues that resonate with their constituents are likely to be foremost on their minds, he adds.
“US voters will expect their administration to look after them first, not to look after people at the other end of the world in a place which Sarah Palin couldn’t quite identify as a continent,” Mr Wheeler says.
Ill feeling towards the outgoing Republican administration L tends to obfuscate the fact that it was particularly generous towards Africa, tripling development assistance from $2bn in 2000 to $6bn in 2008; extending the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides export opportunities for African companies; creating the Millennium Challenge Account, a global development fund; and launching a $15bn programme for tackling Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. As both Mr Wheeler and Mr Pham note, merely sustaining the Bush government’s level of support will itself be a challenge.
Mr Obama’s administration will enter unburdened by that instinctive distaste. “The bad will towards the United States is very much wrapped up around the persona of George Bush and the neoconservatives and what they have done in the Middle East. They haven’t done any harm to Africa, though they certainly have done a lot of harm to their image,” says Mr Wheeler.
