President Barack Obama takes the stage to deliver remarks at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel during the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Julia Hotz
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 2014 (IPS)

As the three-day U.S- Africa Leaders Summit here drew to a close Wednesday, experts across the private, public and non-profit sectors continued to debate the opportunities and obstacles posed by the U.S’ expanding business partnership with Africa.

Speaking Tuesday regarding the 17 billion dollars pledged toward African business development, U.S President Obama declared his determination to be a “good,” “equal” and “long term” partner for Africa’s success.“African leaders are asking for US investment, while Africans are asking for jobs…this disconnect hasn’t completely been dealt with.” -- Gregory Adams

“We cannot lose sight of the new Africa that’s emerging,” Obama said Tuesday, announcing new private partnerships, as well as a reaffirmed commitment to improving infrastructure, expanding trade, and providing educational opportunities for young entrepreneurs.

While such business advances most directly benefit actors in the U.S. private sector, non-profits expressed similarly qualified enthusiasm about the summit’s promise of increased economic engagement with Africa.

“What the summit has offered is an opportunity for the United States is to see Africa as a land of opportunity,” Gregory Adams, director of aid effectiveness at Oxfam America, a development organisation here, told IPS.

Adams also said the proceedings have helped move U.S.-African relations more “from patronage to partnership,” and have facilitated “good” and “direct” exchanges between civil society actors and leaders from both the United States and Africa.

But he warned that not all African voices were heard during the three-day proceedings, and that an “important distinction” between the diverse economic interests of Africans has yet to be established.

“African leaders are asking for U.S. investment, while Africans are asking for jobs…this disconnect hasn’t completely been dealt with,” Adams told IPS, noting how “tremendous” economic growth does not necessarily translate to job creation.

More intensive effort to listen

Adding that representatives from Africa’s local and small business have historically been absent from large-scale conversations about U.S-African engagement, Adams explained that “if we’re truly moving from patronage to partnership,… we’re going to need a more intensive effort to listen to variety of African voices…and do more to engage with civil society and local African businesses.”

In a plea to examine just how “demand-driven” the announced investments to Africa are, Adams also called for there to be “follow-through” on such pledges, saying that “all of these commitments are coming fast and furious, so it’s hard to keep track of them and determine what’s real and what’s not.”

Such commitments were premiered within the three-day U.S-Africa Leaders Summit, in which delegations from more than 50 African countries – including more than 40 heads of state – came to Washington to discuss security, trade, infrastructure, and governance with U.S. President Obama and other top U.S. government officials.

Announced last year during U.S President Obama’s visit to Africa, the joint African leaders summit is the first in U.S. history, and has marked a major effort to play catch-up with the EU and China, where governments have previously used summits with Africa as a platform to expand economic partnerships and strengthen diplomatic ties.

While civil society groups participated in the proceedings, the summit’s centrepiece came Tuesday with the U.S-Africa Business Forum, which featured pledges by U.S. government officials, World Bank leaders and CEOs of major U.S. companies – including General Electric, Coca Cola, Walmart, Marriot, and  Mastercard – to provide aid to a variety of sectors in Africa

Special emphasis was given to Obama’s Power Africa programme, which has mobilised 12 billion dollars from both the public and private sector to an initiative that will provide 600 million Africans with a reliable electricity supply.

Ben Leo, director of Rethinking U.S. Development Policy at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, claimed that the Power Africa initiative is a key pre-cursor for business development in the region, explaining how the promise to provide electricity across Africa may even save the otherwise-neglected small businesses.

“If some of these commitments under the Power Africa initiative are effective in addressing both access to power and reliability to power, there will be significant benefits for [Africa’s] small and medium enterprises,” Leo told IPS.

Yet the Atlantic Council, a think tank here, believes that despite the promising nature of Power Africa, the region still lacks adequate infrastructure, and suffers from profound geographic disadvantages.

“Most data-driven investors in the world”

In a report released Wednesday, the Atlantic Council cited these two factors, along with the need for more market data and stronger policy implementation, as obstacles plaguing business development in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Although these are obstacles that affect everyone, the U.S. is the most frustrated with the lack of data… [because] they are the most data-driven investors in the world,” Diana Layfield, CEO of Africa Operations at Standard Chartered Bank, said at the report’s premiere.

But through harnessing innovation, a virtue that CGD’s Leo dubs as one of “America’s core strengths,” the Atlantic Council is optimistic about the opportunity for increased investment in sub-Saharan Africa.

From using satellite imagery to identify local traffic patterns, to issuing SMS surveys to learn about consumer preferences, private companies have been using technology as means to obtain basic information about consumer behaviour, which, the report says, is otherwise unavailable from public sector sources.

Yet for Oxfam’s Adams, such tech innovations miss a crucial point.

“I think we’re really skipping a step as a country if we’re not looking ahead to 30 years from now and asking if all this investment is a flash in the pan, or if  it’s going to lead to the emergence of  local businesses that will lead to job creation,” Adams told IPS.

Stressing that the U.S. is “incredibly non-transparent” and rarely “tell[s] countries the details of their own aid,” Adams concluded that “there is a lot more that the U.S. government needs to do if it actually wants to support Africa.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at hotzj@union.edu

Artisanal diamond miners at work in the alluvial diamond mines around the eastern town of Koidu, Sierra Leone. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 2014 (IPS)

As the three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit got underway here Monday, anti-corruption activists urged President Barack Obama to prod a key U.S. agency to issue long-awaited regulations requiring oil, gas, and mining companies to publish all payments they make in countries where they operate.

“The companies need to be held accountable, and we would ask President Obama to also support us in this message,” said Ali Idrissa, the national co-ordinator of Publiez Ce Que Vous Payez (Publish What You Pay, or PWYP), in Niger, a country rich in uranium and iron deposits.Anti-corruption activists are losing patience with what they see as pressure by the extractive industries to prevent the emergence of tough new disclosure requirements.

“We need to look at the entire production chain of these extractive industries; we need to continue putting pressure on this industry …so we can fight poverty and corruption and ensure we have a better development,” he added.

Idrissa, one of scores of African activists who have descended on Washington for this week’s unprecedented gathering, was speaking at a forum sponsored by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Global Witness, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam America, among other groups, on civil society efforts to promote government and corporate transparency and accountability on the continent.

The activists, whose numbers are dwarfed by the size of official government delegations, most of which are led by heads of state, as well as U.S. and African corporate chiefs eager to explore business prospects, nonetheless claimed at least part of the spotlight Monday.

At what was billed as a “Civil Society Forum Global Town Hall” meeting at the National Academy of Sciences, both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry echoed Idrissa’s concerns in general remarks.

“Widespread corruption is an affront to the dignity of your people and direct threat to each of your nations,” Biden declared. “It stifles economic growth and scares away investment and siphons off resources that should be used to lift people out of poverty.”

Kerry also stressed the importance of “transparency and accountability” not only in attracting more investment but also in “creat(ing) a more competitive marketplace, one where ideas and products are judged by the market and their merits, and not by a backroom deal or a bribe.”

While their words gained applause, it was clear from the OSF forum that anti-corruption activists are losing patience with what they see as pressure by the extractive industries to prevent the emergence of tough new disclosure requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency that regulates U.S. stock and related markets.

At issue is section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, an anti-corruption provision that requires all extractive companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to publish each year all payments they make to the U.S. and foreign governments in the countries where they operate.

According to the legislation, which is designed to counter the so-called “resource curse” that afflict many developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, taxes, royalties, fees, production entitlements and bonuses should all be reported down to the project level.

Eight of the world’s 10 largest mining companies and 29 of the 32 largest active international oil companies would be covered by the Act, which requires the SEC to develop specific regulations to implement its intent.

After nearly two years of consultations with businesses, activists, and other interested parties, the SEC issued draft regulations, but they were immediately challenged in a lawsuit filed by the American Petroleum Institute (API), a lobby group that represents the powerful oil and gas industry here.

The SEC has since reported that it does not plan to resume the rule-making process until March, 2015, a source of considerable frustration for the anti-corruption activists.

In the meantime, the European Union (EU), whose member countries have historically shown much less willingness than Washington to enact legislation to deter bribery and corruption by its companies operating abroad, has adopted and begun to enforce its own tough disclosure measures that go beyond the energy and mining industries to include timber companies as well.

“Until 2000, corruption and bribery by European [companies] was not only legal; it was tax-deductible,” Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British telecommunications entrepreneur and prominent philanthropist for good governance in Africa, told the OSF Forum. “The United States, which has been a leading light on corruption, is now dragging its feet. Do you have a backbone, or what?”

He echoed the concerns of an open letter sent to Obama and signed by the heads of the national chapters of PWYP, an OSF-backed international anti-corruption group, in Guinea, Niger, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Chad, Ghana, and Nigeria, on the eve of this week’s Summit.

“It has been more than four years since you signed the Dodd-Frank Act, section 1504 of which obliges all U.S. listed extractive companies to publish the payments they make,” the letter, which was also signed by the African representatives on the PWYP global steering committee. “The law will yield crucial data that can help us hold our governments to account, but it has yet to come into effect.

“We ask you to urge the SEC for a swift publication of the rules governing section 1504 to ensure that they are in line with recent EU legislation and the emerging global standard for extractive transparency,” it said, adding that more also needs to be done to strengthen multilateral rules on taxation and creating a public registry of corporate beneficial ownership information as other critical parts of the anti-corruption struggle in Africa.

Harmonising the SEC regulations with those of the EU is particularly critical, according to Simon Taylor, co-founder and director of London-based Global Witness. “If the SEC gets it wrong, we will then have a double standard,” he noted, suggesting that some European companies could move to the U.S. if the latter’s requirements are less stringent.

API and other critics of the section 1504 have argued that strict rules will put U.S. companies at a disadvantage in bidding for mining or drilling rights, especially vis-à-vis China whose trade investment in Africa, particularly in the continent’s extractive resources, have exploded over the past decade and now far exceeds the U.S.

Beijing has failed so far to join the 12-year-old Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an Oslo-based international organisation that promotes transparency and currently includes 44 governments, as well as extractive companies, civil-society groups, international development banks, and institutional investors.

But Ibrahim said it was “not acceptable for Europeans or Americans to say, ‘We want to be moral and ethical, but we can’t until this guy’” joins. “China is learning; it can understand and can change. They’re trying to find their feet [in Africa].”

George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who created OSF, as well as a number of other foundations, said it was important to get China on board because “otherwise they are the spoilers. It is so important that I think we have to be willing to reconsider the whole structure of the [EITI which] they consider [to be] a post-colonial invention.

“They have to be involved in the creation of the system that they will abide by. That’s where civil society in Africa can be influential,” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The explosion in Chinese involvement with Africa is of particular concern to policy-makers here for strategic reasons. Credit: Kit Gillet/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 3 2014 (IPS)

Despite worsening crises in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Middle East, the administration of President Barack Obama hopes next week to focus at least some more positive attention on Africa.

The U.S.-Africa Leadership Summit, which will bring presidents, prime ministers, and other top officials of some 50 African nations here, is designed to demonstrate Washington’s continued interest in the continent, particularly in matters affecting its pocketbook.“This is really a very high-profile photo-op to better position U.S. stakeholders to compete for the continent’s natural resources." -- Emira Woods

In speeches and briefings leading up to the three-day meeting, whose centrepiece will be Tuesday’s U.S.-Africa Business Forum, U.S. officials have highlighted the economic opportunities offered by increased trade and investment in Africa.

“(W)e hope to see increased U.S. investment as one of the Summit’s key outcomes,” said Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the Atlantic Council Thursday in previewing the Summit whose theme is “Investing in the Next Generation”.

“When we talk about the fact that most of the world’s fastest-growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa, we’re also seeing a burgeoning middle class of African consumers and an expanding market for U.S. direct investment. This means enormous growth opportunities for American business and new jobs for Africans and Americans,” she told the group.

Washington is being playing economic catch-up in Africa, a region where its military engagement has grown far more quickly, largely due to its efforts to counter the proliferation of radical Islamist groups in North Africa, Somalia, and the Sahel.

As noted by the Council on Foreign Relations recently, the U.S. has gone from a leading trading partner with Africa “to being far surpassed by the European Union and China.”

The EU’s trade over the last decade has more than doubled to more than 200 billion dollars last year, while China’s trade with the continent has mushroomed from some 10 billion dollars in 2000 to more than 170 billion dollars in 2013.

By contrast, U.S.-African bilateral trade has actually declined – from about 100 billion dollars in 2011 to only 60 billion dollars last year.

Most of that trade consisted of imports from Africa – mainly oil and other natural resources — while exports to the continent have largely stagnated at around 20 billion dollars annually over the past five years, despite the rapid growth of the continent’s consumer market extolled by Thomas-Greenfield and featured in a front-page analysis in the New York Times earlier this month entitled “Africans Open Fuller Wallets to the Future.”

The explosion in Chinese involvement with Africa is of particular concern to policy-makers here for strategic reasons, although they routinely go to great lengths to insist that they welcome Beijing’s commitment to promoting development in the region.

“President Obama has made clear that we welcome other nations being invested in Africa infrastructure, and, frankly, China can play a constructive role in areas like developing African infrastructure,” Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters earlier this week.

At the same time, Obama himself offered words of warning appeared designed to resonate in some African nations that have witnessed recent protests over Chinese labour practices.

“(M)y advice to African leaders is to make sure that if, in fact, China is putting in roads and bridges, number one, that they’re hiring African workers; number two, that the roads don’t just lead from the mine, to the port, to Shanghai,” he told The Economist magazine.

All but a handful of the region’s heads of state have been invited, and most, including the presidents of the region’s two economic powerhouses, South Africa and Nigeria, are expected to attend.

Omitted were Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, the subject of U.S. diplomatic sanctions, Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as the leaders of the Central African Republic (CAR), Eritrea, and the Western Sahara, which, despite its membership in the African Union (AU) is occupied by Morocco, a close U.S. ally.

Despite his indictment by the ICC, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was included, in part because Nairobi is seen as a “key regional partner” of Washington’s, according to Rhodes.

Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma and Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the region’s only female head of state and a long-standing Washington favourite, will reportedly be staying home in order to deal with the Ebola outbreak which has killed more than 700 people in recent weeks and which U.S. officials hope will not overshadow the “good news” of African economic growth and opportunity that the Summit will spotlight.

Given his African roots, Obama’s 2008 election spurred hopes that he would give the region unprecedented attention.

During his first term, however, he spent less than one day there – in Ghana – and offered no major new initiatives, although he maintained multi-billion-dollar funding levels for – and eased restrictions on — George W. Bush’s highly popular President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). He also played a key role in securing independence for South Sudan and supporting UN and AU peacekeeping efforts across the region, especially in Somalia.

Last summer, he travelled to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania where he unveiled his “Power Africa” programme – an initiative designed to increase access to electricity to some 20 million households and businesses in six countries by leveraging some 14 billion dollars in private investment from seven billion dollars in federal aid and guarantees.

Congress has yet to authorise the programme, and officials hope next week’s Summit will boost its prospects, as well as those for the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade initiative launched under Bill Clinton that provides duty-free access for some 6,000 products from sub-Saharan Africa. It is due to expire next year.

In addition to the Business Forum, Obama will participate with the other leaders on panels at the State Department Wednesday covering investment, “peace and regional stability” and “governing for the next generation.”

The Summit will also include an all-day conference at the National Academy of Science Monday for civil-society representatives, an event that was added to the agenda in response to criticism from human-rights, development, and anti-poverty activists here who complain that the Summit is too heavily weighted toward business interests.

“There’s no doubt that this is a continent that is rising in economic terms,” said Emira Woods, an Africa specialist at the Institute for Policy Studies here. “But it’s also rising in terms of inequality and environmental damage, and these aren’t on the main agenda.

“This is really a very high-profile photo-op to better position U.S. stakeholders to compete for the continent’s natural resources, particularly in oil, gas, mining, and biofuels, without regard to the basic human needs of its people at a moment when they lack even the basics of a health-care infrastructure that can effectively halt the spread of the Ebola virus,” she told IPS.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at ipsnoram@ips.org

LGBT activists, human rights observers and police officers wait outside a courtroom in Uganda's constitutional court on Jun 25, 2012. Four activists had brought a case against Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

By Julia Hotz
WASHINGTON, Jul 31 2014 (IPS)

As the White House prepares to host more than 40 African heads of state for the upcoming U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, civil society actors from the U.S., Africa and the international community are urging the Barack Obama administration to use the summit as an opportunity to more thoroughly address some of Africa’s most pressing human rights violations.

“While President Obama has unveiled specific initiatives to strengthen U.S. development work on the continent and connect it to core national security objectives, he has not done the same for human rights and the rule of law,” Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch,  said in the group’s 2014 Human Rights in Africa report.“Evangelical extremists from the U.S. have contributed to making society more dangerous than it ever was before." -- Richard Lusimbo

Although the policy agenda for next week’s summit has received praise for its proactive stance on energy, security and economic development, human rights advocates from both Africa and the U.S. are specifically condemning the agenda’s lack of concern over two critical humanitarian issues: freedom of expression and rights for the LGBT community.

“On the two issues we’re discussing today, the administration should be more straightforward, open and critical about these issues occurring in many countries in Africa,” Santiago A. Canton, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

Canton spoke Wednesday about these issues alongside fellow human rights advocates, as well as African journalists and LGBT activists, who collectively agreed that the current state of both press freedom and LGBT equality across Africa is “unacceptable.”

“Right that leads to other rights”

Citing terrorism laws, access to funding, and discrimination against independent media  as some of Africa’s  main obstacles to free expression, Wednesday’s panel spoke first and foremost about the need for press freedom to be recognised as not only a human right, but also as a key factor in development.

“This is a right that leads to other rights,” Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, said Wednesday.

Within his plea for governments to take a more active stance on freedom of expression and provide for more internet access, La Rue stated that 90 percent of young men in rural Africa already know how to use the internet, while 90 percent of rural women, who tend to be forbidden from the cyber cafes where such knowledge circulates, do not.

“If not everyone is convinced that freedom of expression and access to technologies are important development goals, then we cannot talk about things like education and access to health, especially women’s health…we need to first allow access to information,” he said.

In addition to urging that such freedoms be integrated into the next set of Sustainable Development Goals, La Rue has requested that the U.N. hire more legal and communications personnel to defend freedom of expression, adding that the understaffed office receives up to 25 cases per day.

Yet for Wael Abbas, a prominent Egyptian journalist, blogger and human rights activist, the blame rests primarily on the U.S. government alone.

“Egypt is the biggest country that receives U.S. aid – some in military, some in development – but if Egypt is  a dictatorship, and there is no regulation of how this money is being spent, than the U.S. is just bribing a corrupt regime and dumping huge amounts of money into the ocean,” Abbas told IPS.

Explaining how the Egyptian state is “waging a war against [independent journalists] and trying to destroy [their] credibility and presence,” Abbas argues that independent journalists like himself, who show “what is really going on in Egypt,” need assistance and attention paid to the fact that most media outlets are owned by corrupt businessmen.

Arthur Gwagwa, a Zimbabwean human rights defender and freedom of expression advocate, agrees that the U.S. should take more initiative in protecting freedom of expression and ensuring governmental compliance in Africa, informing IPS of a set of policy recommendations to address at next week’s summit.

A fundamental, not special, human right

Related to this call for a greater focus on freedom of expression in the press is the need for a more active U.S. role in protecting Africans’ freedom of sexual expression and identity.

“This is a time that we have to think about how we’re addressing sexual minorities’ rights overseas,” Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said in Wednesday’s discussion.

Citing Africa’s passage of an anti-gay law and the recent comment by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni that “gays are disgusting,” Kennedy expressed disappointment that there has been “no real pushback” from the U.S. on LGBT rights in Africa. She said a concerted U.S. effort “could have helped a lot,” and that there are now many LGBT individuals in Africa who are afraid to attend HIV clinics for treatment.

Tom Malinowski, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, considers such discrimination to be ironic on a continent that is diverse as Africa.

He spoke of the challenges posed by authoritarian leaders, both in Africa and around the world, who have called LGBT equality part of a “Western sexual agenda,” and believes it is extremely important for not only governments, but also artists, celebrities and business leaders, to challenge such a characterisation.

“This is a fundamental human right, not a special human right…everyone has the right to not be persecuted for who we are as human beings,” Malinowski said.

Lip service?

In addition to Kennedy’s suggestion that the U.S. pass legislation to create a special envoy for LGBT rights, Malinowski is calling on his government to provide “direct assistance” to people, such as doctors and lawyers, who serve on “the front line of the struggle,” and to continue to put LGBT equality “front and centre” in its diplomatic engagements.

Yet HRW’s Sarah Margon warns that the U.S. has sent “mixed signals” on this issue, and suggests that that the U.S. government is “simply paying lip service to human rights.”

Indeed, Richard Lusimbo, representative of Sexual Minorities Uganda, has similarly urged the U.S. to speak out more strongly, calling on Washington to “hold homophobic people responsible” for the subsequent discrimination in Africa.

“Evangelical extremists from the U.S. have contributed to making society more dangerous than it ever was before…and because we have no opportunities to go to radio and TV to show our side of the story, it makes things very difficult,” he noted.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at hotzj@union.edu