The much anticipated US-Africa Leaders Summit has been held in Washington, DC from December 13 to 15. As expected it drew considerable media attention.
Coming eight years after the first summit was held in 2014, it did not have much to look back to in terms of antecedents and continuity. There was virtually nothing about the 2014 inaugural Summit. Between then and now, Power Africa, the signature initiative of former President Barack Obama to double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa where more than two third of the population are without electricity and more than 85 per cent of those living in rural areas lack access to electricity, has mostly floundered.
Mr John Rice, then vice chairman of the US-based General Electric, gave a scathing verdict several years after the initiative that there had been some good initiatives contemplated, Power Africa, being one of them. But if you look today at the number of megawatts that are actually on the grid directly from the Power Africa Initiative, it is very little.
Even the initial phase of the project aimed to add “more than 10,000MW of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation capacity targeted to increase electricity access to at least 20 million new households, to its ultimate destination of “adding 30,000MW of cleaning electricity and increasing access to 60 million new connections designed to be invested with about $7bn got nowhere. Six countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania- were lined up for the phase ending in 2018. By the end of that year, the former chairman of the Nigeria Electricity Regulation Commission told an American newspaper, “I am not aware of any concrete plans for power plants that have emerged as a result of Power Africa.”
Prosper Africa, another initiative launched in 2018 was designed to substantially increase two-way trade and investment between the United States and Africa. By the end of 2021, prior to the second Washington Summit, it delivered a paltry two-way trade of just $64bn, less than one per cent of US total global trade.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act passed at the turn of the century, renewed in 2015 and due to expire in 2025, has added little or no momentum at all to US-Africa economic exchanges. The US-Africa Leaders Summit just concluded in Washington was not short of lofty rhetoric. President Joe Biden told his guests, “We are all in on Africa’s future,” and followed with the announcement of $55bn in commitments. However, Biden underscored that only $15bn is the new commitment, which translates that the bulk of the headlined $55bn comes from initiatives that have already been announced in the past fora. Some observers noted that “while there were a few interesting investment announcements and commitments, the overall feeling while observing the US-Africa Business Forum was watching an assemblage of disparate deals scraped from any, presentable enough commitment to make an impression that in Biden’s words “the US is all in on Africa’s future.”
Beyond the glitters of the Washington Summit, there are no roadmaps, benchmarks, timelines, specific deliverables to give concrete momentum to the existing modest commercial and economic intercourse between the two sides. The summit, which has the opportunity to invigorate the existing cooperation, was over the board in haranguing the private sector of both sides to hug themselves( as if that is not happening already), but rather fell far short of the institutional and other structural processes to drive it on a sustainable basis. Definitely, Washington is more enamoured with geopolitics than the critical inputs that would support Africa in building self-propelling capacity.
The summit itself was ostensibly inspired by geopolitics, an extension of Washington’s obsession to contain China and to a lesser degree, Russia on a global scale, especially in a region where Beijing’s footprints are boldly on the horizon. The US strategy towards sub-Saharan Africa released in August made no pretence about the reason for Washington’s renewed interest in Africa. It has accused China of seeing Africa “as an important arena to challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interest… weaken US relations with the African peoples and governments…., and work with African government, civil societies and counter harmful activities by the People’s Republic of China, Russia and other foreign actors.”
And this is in spite of the warnings earlier made by the chairman of the African Union and President of the Republic of Senegal, Mr Macky Sall, at the UN General Assembly that Africa had suffered enough of the burden of history, and would not want it to be a breeding ground of a new cold war but rather a pole of stability and opportunity open to all its partners on a mutually beneficial basis.
At the Washington Summit, Biden promised support for the Africa Union to be admitted as a permanent member of the G20 exclusive club of top global economic performers. Already, the group has significantly outreached to major international organisations and significant regional groups. Being more of a mechanism or process rather than an organisation, its agenda and outreach are constantly evolving and engaging critical global players is more in its best interest to stay relevant. African countries need more capacities to notch up their respective national aggregates and come to global top tables on their own than to be patronised by it, even worse as a group. Another eye-catching sweetener of the Washington Summit was Biden’s appointment of a special envoy to coordinate US new interest in Africa and drive the summit’s outcomes. The mantle fell on Ambassador Johnnie Carson who comes with a baggage of condescending arrogance towards Africa. Prior to the Kenyan presidential election in 2013, Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, warned Kenyan voters that whatever choice they made would have consequences. The comment was viewed with alarm across Africa. Now there are concerns as to whether Carson will be knocking heads or mending fences in his new assignment.
At the summit, Biden stated, “African voices, African leadership, African innovation all are critical to addressing the most pressing global challenges… Africa belongs at the table in every room where global challenges are being discussed and in every institution where discussions are taking place.”
This is truth expressed in its objective form and there is no doubt that Africa’s moderating influence will douse some of the world’s tension. However, the United States has a responsibility as a major country to contribute to international instability. When instigating separatist irredentism on China’s Taiwan, or piling pressures on Moscow through surrogate wars, or seeking confrontation in the Indo-Pacific, such actions dissipate energy and attention from ” a world that is free, a world that is open, prosperous, and secure,” according to Biden.
The US-Africa Leaders Summit’s expected outcomes will enable a framework for what Washington calls “equal partnership” between the two sides. And now all talk is done and known, the essential part is to walk the talk. The US, as convener of the summit, should take the initiative. The world is watching.
Onunaiju, a research director, writes from Abuja
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