Black World column

Clinton in Africa-Why now?

by Lou Turner

"Why Africa? Why now?" is surely the skeptical response to President Clinton's 12-day trip to six countries in sub-Saharan Africa by anyone even marginally acquainted with the history of U.S. imperialist relations with Africa in the 20th century. The one thing Clinton's African adventure is not about is his public confessions of sorrow for slavery, sorrow for U.S. foreign policy which reduced Africa to a pawn of its Cold War rivalry with Russia, or sorrow for the backwardness of American attitudes towards Africa. Sorry, Clinton may be, but making the most significant trip to Africa by a sitting American president has nothing to do with confessing official sorrow for white supremacy. So why is Clinton in Africa, and why now?

READY OR NOT, HERE THEY COME

The story begins with the early 1996 trip of late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to Ghana where he extolled Africa as the "last frontier for American businesses" to the plane load of corporate execs he brought with him. The plot thickens in March 1997 when a high-powered corporate policy forum on Africa convened by The American Assembly in New York City urges Washington to adopt a new "Partnership with Africa", followed by Hillary Rodham Clinton's trip to Africa shortly after and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip in December. In between these trips, Clinton previews his Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity in Africa at the June 1997 G-7 Summit in Denver. The real denouement comes, however, at the end of 1997 when the Southeast Asian economic collapse catches the capitalist world by surprise.

By the time Clinton and his entourage of 800 government, business, and media groupies descend on his African hosts who must stretch their already stretched meager budgets to accommodate the "historic journey," the U.S. Congress has scrambled to make a little history of its own with the passage of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The AGOA mirrors Clinton's own Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity, and both push African governments to "unleash the market forces" of capitalism-the very ones that have historically underdeveloped Africa.

Hailed as opening a new chapter in U.S.-African relations and as signaling a shift from Cold War foreign policy made by the National Security Council to economic policy formulated by government agencies responsible for U.S. trade relations, the AGOA was nevertheless roundly criticized by Randall Robinson, president of TransAfrica, for being "aimed mainly at benefiting large foreign private investors and multinational corporations" instead of the people of Africa. This refers to the "trade not aid" debate that surrounded the passage of the AGOA and which split the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

TRADE VS. AID SMOKE SCREEN

This trade vs. aid debate has generated several curious, though diversionary, mini-dramas, splitting Black institutions like the CBC, families and continents. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, currently the chair of the CBC, reluctantly voted for the AGOA after failing to amend some of its IMF-style austerity measure. Not only did Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. go against Waters and sharply criticize the Act but Jesse Jr. is at odds with Jesse Jackson Sr. who is the chief salesman of the Congressional Act and Clinton's Partnership in his role as Clinton's special envoy for democracy in Africa. African leaders themselves are divided on Washington's new initiatives to make trade not aid the basis of U.S.-African relations. Ghana's Jerry Rawlings and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are on board, while South Africa's Thabo Mbeki jumped ship.

However, the differences over Washington's new Africa initiatives do not get us any closer to discovering what's really behind Clinton's African safari. The fact of the matter is that multilateral lending aid from the IMF and World Bank, as well as U.S. direct aid has reached an all-time low in any case. So "trade vs. aid" poses a specious distinction to begin with. At the same time, private net investment has increased by nearly 80%, while the aggregate growth rate of 35 sub-Saharan African countries has averaged 5% over the last three years, over twice the rates of the previous decade. With the IMF bailout of the Southeast Asian economies, sub-Saharan Africa could only look forward to that lending source drying up even more. South Africa's industrial economy, which has already embarked upon the structural adjustment path of IMF austerity, is the only exception to this-which also explains its opposition to the AGOA.

In any event, neither Congress' AGOA nor Clinton's Partnership relieves the crushing debt obligations that Africa must pay to multilateral institutions like the IMF or private financial institutions. But nor will ridding Africa of its debt burden eradicate human poverty, which the AGOA is also silent on. So while there have been criticisms of the AGOA's lowering of tariff barriers to African textile and apparel exports to the U.S., especially by trade unions, there is little expectation that the African share of the textile and apparel market will increase much beyond its projected 1 to 3% level. The real fear is that Africa will become a transshipment point for Asian textiles and apparel manufactures to flood the U.S. market.

OPENING A TELECOM BONANZA

More importantly, Clinton's trip and the AGOA opens up Africa, already the most open economy in the world, more to U.S. imports. Even now, U.S. trade with the 12 countries of Southern Africa totals $9 billion, more than U.S. trade with the 15 Republics of the former Soviet Union combined. Despite all of this, global capital flows to Africa still only amounts to less than 1%. So what is Africa's significance for the U.S. in the so-called new global economy?

Clinton has his eye on U.S. capital investment in the development of Africa's telecommunications infrastructure. It is one of the areas where the U.S. can gain a head start over its European competitors in Africa. Moreover, the very nature Africa's economic underdevelopment as a supplier of unprocessed raw materials to the global economy, and the nature of Western, especially U.S., high-tech development over the last 25 years dictate a new kind of capitalist penetration of Africa.

The telecommunication infrastructural needs of multinational corporations and global finance capital institutions in Africa are, of course, the primary destination of this high-tech development in underdeveloped Africa. And while Clinton and Africa's elites dream of secondary spin-offs and linkages from this high-tech infrastructure going to government, indigenous manufacturers, and social sectors (Clinton's favorite is linking Africa's school children to the Internet), there is absolutely no reason to expect that such linkages will be made, anymore than they have previously been in the history of the West's imperialist relations with Africa. On the contrary, this relationship will only be pushed to its logical extreme.

As the so-called new global economy has experienced newer and deeper commercial crises (e.g., Mexico, and recently Southeast Asia), underdeveloped Africa has become more important. However, far from signifying a new prominence of Africa in the world economy, Clinton's trip is indicative of how primitive capitalist accumulation is forced to become in today's vaunted globalized economy.


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