What Trump's Return Means for Africa

Dec 28 , 2024
By Adekeye Adebajo

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United States accounted for 16pc of arms sales in Africa between 2019 and 2023, compared to China's 13pc. Most of Africa's debt is owed to Western creditors, and not China. Only seven of the 22 debt-distressed African countries owe China more than one-quarter of their public debt. In this commentary provided by Project Syndicate (PS), Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, wondered what this could say about the shifting balance of influence and interests on the continent.

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President Joe Biden's recent trip to Angola was only his second to Africa, following his appearance at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh. Coming near the end of his presidency, the visit perfectly captured America's disregard for the continent. To the United States (US), Africa is an inconvenient theatre of strategic rivalry, demanding attention only for its valuable minerals and raw materials.

Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the US established a military presence in more than a dozen African countries as part of a largely ineffectual counter-terrorist strategy against al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) affiliates. And during Donald Trump's first presidency, the US paid hardly any attention to the continent.

Although Biden hosted a US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington in 2022, his administration did not seek African input when shaping the event's agenda or drafting a strategy for sub-Saharan Africa. The latter focused largely on containing China's presence on the continent while paying lip service to Africa's development and security needs. The US State Department's Bureau of African Affairs has remained massively under-resourced.

Although China is America's third-largest trade partner and second-largest creditor, the US frequently warns Africans that it is a "malign" influence advancing "its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests" on the continent. True, China sometimes pursues one-sided deals – as it did in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – and has a military base in Djibouti. But this hardly compares to America's overwhelming military presence in the region.

America accounted for 16pc of arms sales in Africa between 2019 and 2023, compared to China's 13pc.

China's focus has been more on development, with its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) funding the construction of roads, bridges, and railways across Africa. China remains Africa's largest bilateral trade partner, with turnover reaching 282 billion dollars in 2023, four times more than Africa-US trade. In addition to lending African governments 160 billion dollars over the last two decades, Chinese-backed projects now account for 20pc of Africa's industrial output and nearly one-third of new infrastructure projects worth more than 50 million dollars.

The overwhelming majority of African debt is owed to Western creditors. Only seven of 22 debt-distressed African countries owe China more than one-quarter of their public debt.

Unlike China, the US views Africa primarily through the lens of its multinational corporations. US funding mechanisms are maddeningly bureaucratic and slow compared to China's flexible and fast approach. The US-led G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure & Investment has produced mostly talk and little action.

Biden's visit to Angola was supposed to showcase the Lobito Corridor, a project (backed by 803 million dollars in US loans) to renovate the 1,700Km railway linking Angola to land-locked cobalt and copper mines in the DRC and Zambia. But if the US was sincere about promoting Africa's development, it would work with China, which is renovating the Tanzania-Zambia railway it built in 1975. Ironically, exporters of cobalt to China could end up benefiting the most from America's Lobito Corridor project.

On the matter of global governance, the US has pushed for two African permanent seats on the UN Security Council; but these, notably, would not come with the veto power enjoyed by other permanent members (the US, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom). More positively, sub-Saharan Africa was awarded a 25th seat on the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Executive Board in July (though Mexico still received more in IMF loans last year than all 55 African countries combined). But, US-dominated institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) remain hostile to debt suspension and trade preferences that would benefit African countries.

Similarly, the Biden Administration has contributed funding to peacekeeping efforts in Africa, and it backed a UN Security Council resolution last December to use funds from the UN's regular budget to support African-led operations on "a case-by-case basis." However, it has balked at using these funds for the African Union (AU) force in Somalia (now in its 17th year), and is instead pushing to fund a mission in Sudan, where there currently is no peace to keep or any realistic prospect of such a force being deployed.

Worse, the US has turned a blind eye to reported arms sales to Sudan's genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) by its ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

During Trump's first term, he famously referred to African countries as "shitholes" and never set foot on the continent or held a summit with African leaders. In contravention of a UN plan to organise a referendum on self-determination in Western Sahara, his administration recognised Morocco's 1975 annexation of the phosphate-rich territory. Several of his advisers are reportedly keen on recognising Somaliland (a self-governing part of conflict-wracked Somalia), which could further destabilise the Horn of Africa.

More positively, the first Trump Administration sought to mediate a dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). And, Trump withdrew America's 700 soldiers from Somalia on the eve of his departure, though the Biden Administration reversed that decision.

But the writing is on the wall. Recognising that the US Africa Command is not prepared to risk the lives of American soldiers in dangerous counterterrorism operations (it prefers to use African troops as cannon fodder), Niger's military junta recently ordered the closure of America's 100 million dollars air and drone base. Likewise, France's decade-long counterinsurgency force in the Sahel has collapsed. The US would be unwise to try to throw a lifeline to the French, lest it be tarred with the same neo-colonialist brush.

Perhaps the best that Africa can hope for from an isolationist Trump Administration is a further withdrawal of US troops from Africa. Greater US cooperation with China would benefit everyone, but that seems unlikely.

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PUBLISHED ON Dec 28,2024 [ VOL 25 , NO 1287]

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