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Having former US president Bill Clinton hanging around won't help.
From Harlem to Abuja, our former President just can't seem to get enough
of the company of black folks - and our admiration and gratitude! Such
sentiments are not only wildly misplaced, they are dangerous.
The triumph of symbolism over substance is the true Clinton legacy in the
African world. If African and African American leaders alike don't
distinguish between the two, and insist upon the latter, the next
generation will suffer.
Consider the price already paid:
During his first term in office, President Clinton withdrew US troops
from Somalia and established the unspoken rule that no African concerns
were worth risking American lives. The rule holds even in places where
Washington has deep historic responsibilities for the problem, as it does
in Mogadishu, and despite the fact that US armed forces are
disproportionately of African descent. Clinton's administration not only
failed to act against the genocide in Rwanda, it prevented the UN from
doing so as well.
Clinton also showed no love for African civil society when its
practioners led pro-democracy struggles in Mobutu's Zaire, Moi's Kenya or
Abacha's Nigeria. And for most of the Clinton years, US development
assistance to Africa never great continued to decline.
In his second four years as President, Bill Clinton embraced a
conservative Congressional initiative on trade with Africa in order to
have a showpiece for a G-7 Summit he was hosting in 1997. The economic
legacy he leaves in Africa legitimizes the false dichotomy of "trade vs.
aid" and ducks the more urgent issue of Debt cancellation.
Clinton's symbolically important 6-country Africa visit in 1998,
including an airport apology in Kigali, Rwanda failed to produce
sustained US support for peace, development and democracy in Africa.
Nor did the decision to bomb an aspirin factory in Khartoum, following
attacks against US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, address the
real security needs of Africans in Sudan or east Africa more broadly. It
proved merely an exercise in ineffectual bullying and a diversion from
the sex scandal at the White House.
On a different pharmaceutical front, the Administration gave significant
support to western drug companies in South Africa who were initiating a
law suit to prevent Nelson Mandela's government from implementing a law
designed to make essential medicines more affordable - the court case the
drug companies finally abandoned this month, three years and 400,000
lives later. Vice President Al Gore played the role of enforcer until it
became an embarrassment in his campaign to succeed Clinton.
In his last year in office and second trip to Africa, Bill Clinton
pressed the Obasanjo government in Nigeria to increase oil production,
while ignoring ongoing human rights violations in the Niger delta. The
visit also coincided with the introduction of US special forces training
for Nigeria's military, which has shouldered the bulk of West African
peacekeeping burdens. That US interest in Nigeria was confined to the
cheap supply of oil and regional policing, while Africa's largest country
is struggling to build a democracy under the weight of debts, was
telling. That Nigerians seemed desperate for US attention any attention
is perhaps profoundly revealing of the secret to Clinton's success
through symbolism.
If Africans and African Americans continue to settle for symbolism over
substance from US public policy officials, we will continue to be the
victims of our own low expectations. |
