Clinton’s visit shows US has finally come to see Africa through Chinese eyes

In all probability, the past 10 days US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent in Africa will be her last as America’s top diplomat.

In May last year, Clinton told CNN that she would not be in the Cabinet next year, if US President Barack Obama were re-elected to office.

She affirmed this in January this year when she told State Department staff during a town hall meeting that she will be leaving politics.

With Clinton leaving African soil this weekend, it may be a good time to take stock of US-Africa relations. It is also a good time since this is the first trip Clinton has made to the continent since Obama announced America’s sub-Saharan Africa strategy in June this year.

The profile of the continent has certainly risen at the State Department since Clinton took office in January 2009. She has visited Africa for long stretches of time in the past four years.

Her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, made brief visits, which means African leaders, policy makers, businesspeople, civil society members and ordinary citizens got more “face time” with Clinton than they did with Rice.

Clinton has visited 13 African countries during the past four years, namely Cape Verde, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

In the case of Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, she has visited twice. Rice in her four years visited 10 African countries, namely Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan and Tanzania.

But the bulk of those countries she visited in her final year in office, accompanying then President George W. Bush, so the profile of Africa in the State Department was lower during her tenure.

But the number of visits does not matter as much as what is said and where the US Secretary of State goes during these visits. What is not said also counts.

When Bush made his whirlwind farewell tour of the continent in February 2008, he went to Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia.

Rice accompanied him throughout. That tour was used to highlight US economic and social development projects and demonstrate support for newly elected leaders such as Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Somewhere in between, Rice also made a trip to Kenya to give a talking-to to President Mwai Kibaki and then opposition leader Raila Odinga to end the post-election violence.

It is this fire-fighting role that defined most of Rice’s visits to Africa.

Not long after she took office, she went to Sudan in July 2005, visiting the Darfur region and pressing the leadership in Khartoum to honour the commitments it made in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement it had signed six months earlier with the then autonomous region of Southern Sudan.

She also visited Senegal during that month to attend the annual Africa Growth and Opportunity Act forum. In 2007, her only trip was to Ethiopia to discuss the insurgency in Somalia and stability in the Great Lakes region.

It was only in 2006 that Rice came to Africa without a crisis to handle. That year, she attended the inauguration of the first African woman president, Liberia’s Johnson Sirleaf.

Clinton’s visits have involved a broader agenda. There have been the traditional lectures many African governments have learnt to endure about practising democratic norms, non-tolerance of corruption and embracing more freedoms.

Clinton has also pushed for enhanced trade and investment between America and Africa, attending both the AGOA summits held on the continent (Kenya 2009 and Zambia 2011), raising the profile of those events.

She’s also highlighted social development initiatives the United States is funding in agriculture, health and education on the continent. And she’s also challenged the growing relationship between Africa and China.

Clinton addressed all these themes on her latest tour of Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana.

She also engaged in traditional fire-fighting on this tour, going to South Sudan to press the leadership there to reach agreement with its neighbour Sudan over oil revenues.

A key concern for the United States in the months-long disagreement between South Sudan and Sudan over oil revenues was that Juba would run out of foreign exchange in October and Khartoum was already facing an economic crisis.

None of this, however, is being done for purely altruistic reasons. And this higher-level interest in Africa is not just because Obama had a Kenyan father.

It is because decision-makers in America have taken a closer look at the continent. They are no longer looking at Africa just in the context of other global agendas such as counter-terrorism or climate change.

They are also looking at Africa beyond being a series of crises of conflict or food.

This is similar to China’s approach, which has a conference focused on the continent where Chinese leaders meet with their African counterparts every two years.

Or what Japan has been doing since the 1990s. This seems to be the motivation also of the US Strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa of June this year.

“We believe that Africa can be the world’s next major economic success story,” wrote Obama in the foreword to the sub-Saharan Africa strategy paper. He said the US government will work with African governments to build strong institutions, remove trade and investment barriers and expand opportunities, among other things.

He continued: “As we support these efforts, we will encourage American companies to seize trade and investment opportunities in Africa, so that their skills, capital, and technology will further support the region’s economic expansion, while helping to create jobs here in America.”

Tom Maliti is a Nairobi-based journalist who has covered African affairs for more than a decade