Monday
July 13, 2009 |
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President Barack Hussein Obama, a man
who embodies hope and a can-do spirit, went to Accra, Ghana last week to
deliver a clear message: Africa’s future lies in African hands.
It was Obama’s sermon from Mount Accra. As speeches go, this one had two
parts to it. Obama used part of his speech to deliver a rousing, and
well-earned, praise of Ghanaians – a people who have beaten a path out
of forlorn despair into hope, an energetic present and a promising
future. He professed pride that “this is my first visit to sub-Saharan
Africa as President of the United States.” And then, in a line that must
have made every Ghanaian heart swell with pride, he added: “I have come
here, to Ghana, for a simple reason: the 21st century will be shaped by
what happens not just in Rome or Moscow or Washington, but by what
happens in Accra as well.”
Obama’s speech was also a thinly veiled rebuke to those African
countries that still murk around, fiddling away opportunities to achieve
their promise. Among those countries, Kenya (Obama’s patrimonial
homeland) and Nigeria (home to the vast majority of the world’s Black
people) stand out.
In 1998, novelist Chinua Achebe gave a lecture at the World Bank and
gave his audience the simple, but not always understood, message that
“Africa is people.” In Accra, Obama echoed that sentiment when he
asserted: “the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our
connections…I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected
world – as partners with America on behalf of the future that we want
for all our children.”
Obama’s speech was part rallying cry, part deep cry from the heart of
one who confessed, “I have the blood of Africa within me,” testifying
that “my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs
of the larger African story.”
Today, Ghana represents the renascent spirit of Africa’s triumphs as
surely as Nigeria emblematizes the continent’s abiding tragedies. And
Obama’s sermon was attentive to the contrasting narratives of success
and failure, hope and grimness, Ghana (as well as Botswana, South
Africa, Senegal, Namibia etc) and Nigeria (as well as Kenya, Zimbabwe,
Sudan, Niger, Somalia etc).
With his host country in mind, the American president credited
“considerable progress in parts of Africa” but also noted, with Kenya
and, likely, Nigeria in mind, that much of the continent’s promise “has
yet to be fulfilled.”
Obama’s speech was not always historically honest. He seemed in a haste
to play down the West’s culpability for Africa’s travails, in the past
as now. He acknowledged that the cavalier colonial map “made little
sense” and “bred conflict,” and also that “the West has often approached
Africa as a patron, rather than a partner.” Yet, instead of recognizing
that those foreign interventions and meddlesomeness incubated much of
Africa’s malaise, he sought to exonerate the West for “the destruction
of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which
children are enlisted as combatants.”
A more nuanced posture would admit that the West, in failing to follow
through on its pledge to help Zimbabwe redress decades of racial
inequity in land ownership, helped foster violence and precipitate an
economic free-fall in that country. Besides, the West’s inordinate
appetite for diamonds and gold has fueled many of the calamitous wars in
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Congo in which children have become villains
and victims.
Despite this historical short circuit, Obama’s message was on target.
The European and North American media are often fixated on the image of
Africa as a dysfunctional, misaligned location. In Ghana, Obama detected
something different, “a face of Africa that is too often overlooked by a
world that sees only tragedy or the need for charity.” He pointed to
Ghanaians’ effort to “put democracy on a firmer footing”. He lauded them
for nurturing “improved governance and an emerging civil society” that
have, in turn, produced “impressive rates of [economic] growth.”
Obama could have been looking Nigerian leaders in the face when he
uttered the “fundamental truth” that “development depends upon good
governance.” He might as well be chiding the “stake holder thieftains”
in Abuja who stake out their country’s resources when he described good
governance as “the ingredient which has been missing in far too many
places, for far too long.” When he declared, “governments that respect
the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable and more
successful than governments that do not,” he doubtless wanted Nigerians
to take note.
Obama made a wise choice not to grace a disappointing Nigeria with his
presence. But he also made sure that his message, taken from Accra,
resonated with Nigerians. In condemning repression and the plague of
man-made problems “that condemn…people to poverty”; in warning that “No
country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to
enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” in
portraying a state where “the government skims 20 percent off the top,
or the head of the port authority is corrupt,” Obama wanted his voice to
resound in Nigeria.
