Obama is a blessing and a curse for Africa

By MUKOMA WA NGUGI

President-elect Barack Obama is both a blessing and a curse for Africa.

He is a blessing because he has African roots and a personal knowledge of — and affection for — the continent.

But he is a curse because he may pursue some of President Bush’s policies that aren’t helping Africans, and he may be shielded from criticism for this because of his background.

For instance, Obama supports the Bush initiative of a U.S. unified African military command center, Africom. Yet Africom has been so unpopular that even dollar-hungry African leaders have rejected it.

Obama also supports Bush’s African Growth Opportunity, which promises to allow African countries greater access to U.S. markets sounds good in theory. But in practice it has created sweatshop enclaves within African countries where foreign companies can operate without governmental oversight, without paying taxes and without labor unions.

In addition, Obama has said he will continue with Bush’s African AIDS program. True, he might not endorse Bush’s faith-based approach that emphasizes abstinence over condoms to the detriment of AIDS prevention in Africa. But is he willing to go far enough and allow African countries to break the patents on AIDS drugs — patents that put profit before millions of African lives? And then there is the war on terror. Bush used it as an excuse to support Ethiopia, whose troops are occupying Somalia and killing civilians with impunity. And Obama has given no indication that he will withdraw this support.

Africans and their supporters need to be clear about Obama.

In his 2006 visit to his father’s home in Kogelo, Kenya, Obama was asked what he would do for his father’s countrymen. “I am the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo,” he answered.

No surprise

And so he will be a U.S. president, looking after U.S. interests, and not a Kenyan president. That should not come as a surprise.

But rather than placing blind faith in him, and rather than dismissing him as the same old thing, those who are concerned about Africa ought to try to engage him.

Let’s remember that Obama was a community organizer. Unlike Bush, who once tried to marginalize millions of protesters by saying he does not rule through focus groups, Obama knows how to listen.

But unlike his predecessor, we can at least talk to Obama. And that’s what we should do.

X Mukoma Wa Ngugi is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services