What Obama didn’t say about Africa in his inaug

Elections

The US has promoted ‘free and fair’ elections around the world for more than 50 years. The Obama administration will continue this policy. The key question is whether Obama will show greater appreciation for the costs holding elections and the consequences of sometimes bad outcomes.

In Africa, elections, however essential to the functioning of strong democracies, remain profoundly problematic, the source of both violent conflict and political dysfunction.

The latter can be seen dramatically in Zimbabwe, where the tyrannical Robert Mugabe has held fast to power through the skillful abuse of electoral politics. Since Mugabe may either leave office voluntarily or be removed forcibly from power for Zimbabwe to move forward, President Obama faces the unappetizing option of asking for non-electoral political change.

Zimbabwe is of course a special case. The once prosperous country has been ruined. Zimbabwe may benefit for a government of national unity, and a ‘temporary’ halt to elections, at least until the country is moving again.

Elsewhere, elections are essential, yet remain fraught. Ghana, to its credit, just engineered a peaceful change of power through a complicated two-stage election. Yet in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Togo, elections have either proven to a theater of fraud or an engine of ethnic enmity.

President Obama is unlikely to try to “reform” the broken electoral processes in many African countries. He is most likely to encourage and exhort African politicians to put the national interest ahead of their own. In his comments on the Kenyan crisis a year ago, Obama stopped short of providing solutions and preaching interventions. Only in flagrantly abusive cases such as Zimbabwe’s phoney elections can Obama be expected to take action.

Foreign Assistance

In the area of ‘aid,’ President Obama could provide his most radical departures from the past. He is, after all, a former community organizer schooled in the ’empowerment’ philosophy of the legendary Saul Alinsky. As president, he surely will recoil when he learns how much aid money to Africa reinforces dependency, goes towards large salaries for foreign experts and sustains ineffective practices of African governments.

Under Obama, assistance from the US could focus on how Africans can do more to help themselves and each other. In an African context, where more than half of the population still farms for a living and lives in rural areas, this means paying attention to the crucial role in transforming African agriculture. One way is for Obama to imaginatively reconstruct the relationship between aid and trade.

Today, US taxpayers generously provide training and incentives to African farmers to improve their output of key crops and raise their incomes. Yet despite the strength of these technical programs, US taxpayers spend far greater amounts on subsidy payments to their own American farmers, who then ‘dump’ subsidies crops, such as cotton, maize and rice, on world markets. African farmers are pounded by competition from wealthy government-supported farmers in the American heartland. By removing the subsidies, Obama would be aiding African farmers in a truly American fashion” unleashing market forces to â’liberate’ rural Africans from poverty.

While actions by official US programmes harm ordinary Africans, American assistance need not stop at the technical. President Obama embodies powerful lessons about the importance of education, social mobility and tolerance in creating equal opportunity for all members of society. Obama’s father was a Kenyan sojourner in America. His mother, a white Midwesterner, lived most of her life outside of her nation of birth. Obama benefited from university programs aimed at promoting ‘minorities,’ especially black Americans. His campaign for the president was a ‘rainbow coalition’ worthy of anything envisioned by Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr.

In Africa, race is presumed not to be a contentious issue because ‘everyone’ is black. Ethnic diversity is a source of pride in nearly all African countries, yet also a source of dispute, bias and economic imbalance. The existence of rigid class and ethnic barriers in African life can come as a shock to crusading Americans raised on a diet of stories about the importance of eradicating ‘racial prejudice.” In Africa, foreign aid reinforces inequalities of opportunities. Because of his own biography, Barack Obama may yet crack a revolutionary aid programme for Africa that recognizes the importance of levelling the playing field and allow real talent to compete for the richest rewards, whether they be social, cultural or financial.

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1. Pascal Zachary is author of four books, including “Married to Africa.” published in January by Scribner, and “The Diversity

Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy.” He is a visiting scholar at the University of California’s School of Information and a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.