An Open Letter to His Excellency President Barack Obama on the Eve of Your Historic African Trip

US President Barack Obama

Your Excellency:

Allow me the singular honour to say Akwaba! (Welcome) in advance of your historic visit to “Black Africa.” I applaud you for standing by Africa in the midst of the seeming encircling gloom and the fog of Afro-pessimism that hang over the continent.

As you make this monumental trip to your ancestral continent, I would like to make the following humble suggestions to you in this open letter.

Sir, allow me first to ask for the wisdom and guidance of our ancestors as you prepare to outdoor your brand new Africa Policy. It is my humble opinion that, for your Africa Policy to be positively life-altering for ordinary Africans, it must be a revolutionary one; a radical departure from policies of your predecessors. It must revolve around a people-centred ideology of “Africa for Africans”, a pragmatic policy and action that places the interests of ordinary Africans above those of African and Western elites. Five areas are crucial: Trade, Education, Technology, Security, and Self-determination.

On behalf of the suffering masses of Africa, I entreat you to promote real trade with Africa and to end the double standards about free trade adopted by your predecessors and leaders of the G-8 countries. Free trade should mean free trade for all countries. If you really are interested in Africa’s development, (I have no reason to doubt that) then act to remove all barriers to the free flow of goods from Africa to U.S. markets. The World Bank estimates that dismantling import barriers by rich economies can raise national income in the Less Developed Countries by about $100billion.

Your Excellency, I trust you can lead by example and urge other G-8 countries to end their sugar-coated hypocrisy in the form of words about how African countries would benefit from more trade while at the same time they impose heavy tariffs on African commodities. So far, the West’s rhetoric is all about the virtues of free trade, but its actions are pedantic and mercantilist.

Esteemed President, what Africa needs is not crumbs from the table of the rich nations, but a massive and comprehensive bail out in the form of an African Marshall Plan premised on the philosophy of helping Africans help themselves, a plan that will build schools, roads, railways, green energy, technology hubs, and “bread baskets” in rural communities. Throwing in a dollar here and there as has been the practice now only fuels the corruption-frenzy on the continent as politicians and their hirelings scramble to line their pockets.

Dear Mr. President, Africans need assistance in the fields of education and technological know-how. Such assistance must be framed around the wisdom in the Chinese proverb: the hungry Africans must not be fed with fish, but helped to learn how to fish, in order to feed themselves for life, rather than be offered fish, which they would consume once and for all.

That an African Marshall Plan is long overdue is an understatement. After all, Africa contributed, and continues to contribute significantly to the building of “the shinning cities” of the West, thanks to the trilogy of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. An African Marshall Plan will be the West’s reparations, which will be less controversial and less emotionally charged than outright reparations.

Please, dear President, your Africa Policy must put a freeze on arms sales or supplies to corrupt African regimes. Sir, this is a moral obligation and a social contract of sorts between the peoples of your country and other rich countries and the suffering masses of Africa. The guiding philosophy must be: “Africans need bread today for tomorrow’s world security.”

Your Excellency, I urge you to support an international campaign against arms peddling in Africa in the same way as the international fight against drug trafficking. The devastating effect of cocaine and heroin in the inner cities of your country pales into nothingness when compared with the destruction wreaked on Angolans, Ethiopians, Liberians, Mozambicans, Rwandese, Sierra Leoneans and Somalis by weapons proliferation aided by Western nations and arms barons.

To be sure, the arms industry offers jobs for millions of citizens in the G-8 countries and stopping the sale of arms in Africa would mean significant job losses. However, the radical truth is that unless the arms trade is stopped now, tax payers in your countries would end up sacrificing more in the future to intervene in wars on the continent. Fact: In 1993 and 1994 alone, the U.S. spent over $3bn on relief and peacekeeping in Somalia and Rwanda. This amounts to nearly twice as much as it allocated for development assistance to the entire continent. A stitch in time saves nine.

Esteemed President, your Africa Policy must end the practice of granting asylum to African leaders who embezzle funds and commit other crimes against their people. Those who have already been offered sanctuary in the West to enjoy their ill-gotten, blood-soaked wealth should be exposed and prosecuted, together with Western citizens and companies who condone and connive to defraud the continent.

Please, be kind to end all covert Central Intelligence Agency operations that undermine and destroy progressive regimes in Africa as was visited upon Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, your port of call on your visit to Sub-Sahara Africa. In this regard, act immediately to dismantle AFRICOM, the United States African Command founded by your immediate predecessor, George Bush. Africa must learn to defend itself in the spirit of self-determination.

Your Africa Policy must therefore aim at supporting the fledgling African Union, rather than torpedoing it as your predecessors sought to do with attempts to build a continental African Government earlier on in the past century. A united, prosperous Africa is boon and not a bane to world peace and global prosperity. Africa’s 800 million people constitute a huge market, its rich, largely untapped natural and human resources are ingredients to fuel the future global economy. The future belongs to Africa.

Finally, Sir, your Africa Policy must be driven by even-handedness, fairness, and justice. Ensure that international law is applied fairly and equitably to your kindred in Africa. So far, Euro-American kindred politics and favouritism towards the West’s African cronies, rather than fair play is the linchpin of the West’s African policies. Fact: Charles Taylor of Liberia and Omar Al- Bashir of Sudan have been singled out for prosecution by the International Criminal Court, while Ian Smith former leader of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), who committed one of the most heinous atrocities on the continent is walking free. Fact: Robert Mugabe is branded a long-serving dictator who must be deposed through “a regime change,” yet Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who has ruled longer and whose anti-democratic record is no better, is left untouched because of his pro-Western position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sir, act swiftly to end sanctions against Zimbabwe if you’re to be considered a fair and just leader. To most Africans, the reasons for Western sanctions against Zimbabwe are a red herring. Otherwise, why maintain the sanctions when Zimbabweans have formed a unity government, which is working? The real reason is kindred politics. It stems from Mugabe’s audacity to reclaim land usurped from Zimbabweans by “Euro-ancestrals.” The Euro-ancestral blood is thicker than the African water running through the Limpopo River! I trust your sense of justice and fair play. Your unique position as the leader of a Euro-ancestral nation and as being both a Euro- and Afro-ancestral puts you in a strategic position to be fair and just.

Truly yours,
Charles Quist-Adade, PhD.