WASHINGTON — Africa has received intermittent U.S. attention over the decades, with periods of neglect interspersed with spasms of activity. To the surprise of many, President Bush has been very much in the latter camp.
As he heads into the Group of Eight summit meeting this week in Scotland, Bush seems almost to have a fixation with getting the troubled continent on the right track.
The administration said two weeks ago that aid to Africa has tripled since 2001; it plans to double the 2004 level to $8.6 billion by 2010.
“Helping those who suffer and preventing the senseless death of millions of people in Africa is a central commitment of my administration’s foreign policy,” Bush said recently, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side.
Blair has pushed the president to join with other G-8 leaders to attack Africa’s suffering. In Scotland, he will seek agreement with his colleagues on an Africa aid plan.
The Blair-led Commission for Africa issued a report in March that called for doubling foreign aid from wealthy nations to Africa to $50 billion per year by 2010. It also recommended a second $25 billion increase in aid to Africa, to $75 billion annually, by 2015.
Bush has rejected the proposals, saying an incumbent government cannot tell a future government how to spend money. Blair’s proposal, he said last month, “doesn’t fit our budgetary process.”
Nonetheless, Bush’s own Africa aid targets are far higher than any previous administration’s.
Generosity toward the less fortunate in Africa appears to play well among some important domestic constituencies; it is particularly welcomed by some conservative Christian allies of the president.
But there is a strategic component to the policy as well. The Sept. 11 attacks called attention to the way in which terrorists can thrive in unstable environments on any continent, and none has a greater stability problem than Africa.
Money alone will not eliminate poverty in Africa, said Andrew Natsios, administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Changes in how programs are managed and the rule of law also are needed, he said, citing corruption as an impediment to economic development.
“If you don’t have those other conditions, you can put huge amounts of money into aid programs and they’ll be ineffective,” Natsios told CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday.
Natsios said if the U.S. were to provide a portion of its gross domestic product, as some allies have suggested, it would be criticized for “imperial aid” and dominating the African assistance system. That occurred during relief efforts for victims of the Asian tsunami, he said.
“They were criticizing us for providing too much assistance,” he said.
Conflict throughout Africa has created suffering on a mass scale, as well as the need for costly U.N. peacekeeping operations.
Six of the world’s seven most at-risk countries are in Africa, according to a recent study by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.
Among them was Sudan, where tens of thousands have died and more than 2 million displaced since 2003 mostly as a result of a brutal counterinsurgency campaign waged by government-backed Arab militias against black African rebels. Bush has made peace in Sudan a high administration priority.
Energy is another component of Africa’s growing importance to policymakers, given the increasing role of West Africa as a supplier of oil to world markets.
The AIDS pandemic in Africa also has the administration’s attention. A U.N. estimate released on Friday said that AIDS claimed 1 million lives in southern Africa last year and that life expectancy in the region has plummeted by an average of 20 years.
Bush has sought $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS, mostly in Africa. On Thursday, Bush called for spending $1.2 billion to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010 in Africa.
Africa also is prospectively the largest beneficiary of a Bush foreign assistance initiative that rewards countries that are led by effective governments.
Of 17 countries deemed eligible for money from the program, nine are in Africa. But the program could suffer sharp congressional cuts from the administration’s $3 billion request for 2006 because of the slow pace of the program’s disbursements.
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On the Net:
State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs: http://www.state.gov/p/af/
AP-ES-07-03-05 1147EDT
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