"During his first term, Mr Obama visited sub-Saharan Africa only once, dropping in for less than 24 hours to make a speech in Ghana that raised expectations of greater engagement that went unmet. His second term has been better, but only a bit: two trips so far, including one to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela; plus an African summit in Washington.
Policy has been allowed to drift. Mr Obama has passively continued with the actions of his bolder predecessors. Even his successes have underwhelmed. Mr Obama did not extend AGOA to farm products, for example. Power Africa, which began in 2013, is yet to live up to its transformative rhetoric. On aid and development, nothing Mr Obama has done can rival George W. Bush's launch of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which promotes reforms (ranging from better vocational education to stronger property rights) in willing African countries, or his huge AIDS-relief effort, which has saved millions of lives. And on security, which critics argue ought to be Mr Obama's priority in Africa but has not been, the situation has deteriorated. Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgency with a taste for enslaving young girls, has spread from northern Nigeria into Chad and Cameroon. The Shabab, a similarly brutal group, is terrorising Kenya as well as Somalia. A dozen sub-Saharan countries face jihadist threats.
Part of the trouble is that a president's time is limited, and much of Mr Obama's has been filled by the chaos in the Middle East, the rise of China and the predations of Vladimir Putin. Mr Obama himself has exacerbated this tendency with his management of foreign policy. His administration trusts its diplomats too little and tries to micromanage them too much using the National Security Council, a body that lacks the bandwidth to master Africa's everyday complexities."
- The Economist
- Ikhide
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