"... there are only three letters that really matter to the US in
Africa, they are O-I-L."
http://www.sundayherald.com/50283
[Sunday Herald]
When it comes to Africa, Bush has more on his mind than aid
By Torcuil Crichton
For the United States, the balance sheet of what comes out of Africa
far outweighs what goes back in. Oil, raw materials and the expansion
of the free market are the principal reasons the US engages in
Africa, anything else is pretty much incidental.
Chancellor Gordon Brown may have wrung significant support from the
US for the debt relief deal he announced after yesterday's meeting of
G8 ministers, but in the balance book of persuading the richest
nation on Earth to help the poorest continent, the bottom line is not
all that encouraging.
America will have nothing to do with the commitment to providing 0.7%
of GDP (gross domestic product) for aid which the European powers
have signed up to. The US will have nothing to do with Gordon Brown's
International Finance Facility (IFF) which would use the sale of gold
reserves to speed up the rate of aid delivery. According to aid
agencies, the Bush administration's agreement on debt cancellation
simply makes more economic sense than the European proposals for debt
relief which would see the impoverished African nations picking up
the repayment baton again halfway through the next decade.
In the same way as it blindly ignores the Kyoto targets on climate
change, the US government is pursuing its own unilateral agenda on
Africa and poverty reduction.
This, however, does not necessarily support the conclusions about
American intentions most of Europe has already come to before George
Bush steps foot on Scottish soil for the G8 summit at Gleneagles next
month.
"Bush has a reputation in Europe, for grudgingly accepting that
Africa has to be dealt with, but in practice he has a fairly
benevolent policy in terms of aid," says Martin Meredith, whose book,
The State Of Africa, a study on the 50 years of post-colonial
independence, was published this month.
It's not as if Bush, who arrived in office as one of the
least-travelled presidents, doesn't know where Africa is. He toured
part of the continent in 2003, emphasising the tough-love approach to
poverty reduction, insisting on the entrenchment of democracy and on
cleaning up state corruption.
Bill Clinton was the first US president to tour Africa while in
office, and although he made large gestures about working with the
continent, they amounted to very little in reality. Bush has actually
delivered on promises - over the last three years the US aid to
Africa has trebled.
Within the US itself, there is a perception that the world's
superpower does deliver a lot for Africa. Survey after survey shows
that Americans do care, do think that something should be done for
Africa, do think that the US government is putting its shoulder to
the wheel.
In sheer volume terms the world's largest economy is sending the
largest amount of foreign aid to Africa, but as a proportion of
national wealth only 0.16% of the US budget goes on aid, far short of
the 0.7% of GDP that is the UN target.
A ridiculously small amount of US aid, far less than 1% of its total
aid budget, is spent in sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on
Earth. A lot of the funds go to Pakistan, to Israel, to countries
that assist in the US's strategic interests. In that respect, foreign
aid is, as it always was, a tool of foreign policy.
In stark contrast to Britain, which brought a wealth of diplomatic
and technical know-how to post-colonial Africa, and France, which
bought influence throughout the continent with generous financial
support, for most of the 20th century the United States brought only
guns.
The US bears a historical responsibility for numerous regional and
tribal conflicts that have destabilised countries such as Angola,
Liberia, Congo and Somalia.
Africa does not loom as large in the collective American conscience
as it does for Europeans. For most of the last two centuries Africa
was ruled by Britain and France, with Portugal and Belgium picking up
the remnants of the map. Slavery and Liberia excepted, the US had
little geo-political interest in Africa until the continent became a
playground for cold war politics as the colonial control waned and
the Soviet Union sought strategic advantage.
When the US was involved in a proxy war against communism any leader
who served as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence was
deemed good enough for money and guns. When twinned with
multinational demands to continue to exploit Africa's mineral wealth,
the US cold war policy for the continent often led to bizarre
contradictions such as having Cuban troops guarding Angolan oil
installations operated by American companies against rebel insurgents
armed by the US government.
Dictators have received billions of dollars of military aid and there
are enough small arms in the continent for one in 20 people to have
their own personal weapon. In the two years following September 2001,
the amount spent on military training for African officers has
increased by over $2 million to $11.1m.
Manganese for steel, cobalt for chrome and alloys, gold, fluorspar
and germanium for industrial diamonds - Africa remains a treasure
trove for the world's sophisticated economies. The US continues to
rely on Africa for raw materials, and for American companies there
are tremendous profits in the current trade agreements that continue
the age-old exploitation of the continent by the rich world.
Sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest place, is also its most
profitable investment destination. According to the World Bank's 2003
global development finance report, the huge continent offers "the
highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the
world".
The trade and aid agreements reflect the continuing imbalance between
Africa and the West.
"There is obviously poverty reduction rhetoric but when you look
closely at the way aid is tied to contracts for US companies you can
see that it is a different way of benefiting the domestic economy. It
is being done for the benefit of US business and not for the poor of
the countries receiving the aid," says Peter Hardstaff, head of
policy at the UK-based World Development Movement.
The exploitation of Africa has a long and sordid history, dripping in
blood and corruption and with enough blame and guilt to share between
all the participants - Western governments, multinational companies
and national leaders. On trade the US still does extremely well from
the plunder of Africa's raw materials.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act, which sounds like a
benevolent multilateral trade agreement between the US and Africa,
forces participants to remove subsides from their industries (while
allowing the US to subsidise its own) and insists on privatisation of
social services such as water even in countries that face drought.
The non-government organisations working in the continent have
described the agreement as a colonial imposition that provides the US
with cheap labour and goods and tax-free energy. Of course, over 90%
of the sales under the agreement in its first nine months were oil
exports from Nigeria and Gabon.
Not all the deals are cynical. The Bush administration's $15 billion
commitment to Aids in Africa and the Caribbean, the biggest single
pledge by any US administration, undoubtedly benefits America's
pharmaceutical companies, but few seriously doubt that its main aim
is to improve the wellbeing of the people of Africa and the planet as
a whole.
But there are other riders to US aid. Some of the aid money - $86m of
the $865m apportioned to fighting Aids in 2004 - goes to Christian
faith-based organisations who promote abstinence as a means of
preventing sexually transmitted disease. Most Aids prevention
programmes more realistically focus on education and protection.
The over-riding American concern in Africa, as it is across the
entire globe, is oil security. Oil, its extraction and supply, will
always be the top priority for the US. The biggest returns, and the
most important product out of Africa for the coming decades, will be
petroleum. The returns are not for Africans though. While 70% of
Nigerians exist on a dollar a day, Shell continues to make
megaprofits from oil drilling in the country, taking an estimated
$30bn out of the ground since the 1950s.
At present 12% of US oil comes from Africa and by 2015, when the UN's
Millennium Goals to halve world poverty will be laughably incomplete,
that proportion will have reached 25%. To control the security of oil
supply will, in all likelihood, require a large US military presence
near the oilfields.
Fortunately for the US most of West Africa's oilfields are offshore,
and so less vulnerable to sabotage, insurrection or local
instability. The oil has the added benefit of having shorter
transportation routes to US refineries and not having to travel
through vulnerable areas of the world.
As the world passes peak oil production, and some analysts believe
the top of the graph is already disappearing in our rear-view mirror,
the race for oil will become paramount. Rapidly industrialising
China, the US's chief competitor in the future, has already
recognised the need to have Africa as a key source of mineral wealth.
Agreements are already in place with the government of Sudan to
provide oil that will fuel Chinese economic growth.
With oil becoming an economic weapon, there will be no shortage of
regime changes, human rights abuses and privately sponsored coup
attempts to control the flow of the most precious commodity.
Poverty and the needs of the African population will take second
place to US geo-political strategy. In the lexicon of aid and trade,
the NEPAD agreements and the AGOA, there are only three letters that
really matter to the US in Africa, they are O-I-L.
12 June 2005
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