Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
Analysis and Action on Policies Impacting Africa

By Goran Hyden
February 14, 2008

Originally published in the Gainesville Sun

President Bush is on his way to Africa this week. One of his destinations is Tanzania. He will be the first American president to ever visit the country.

Unlike its northern neighbor Kenya, Tanzania is relatively little known in the U.S. although it is the location of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain on the African continent, Serengeti, the richest endowed wildlife reserve in the world, and - for all Valentine lovers - the exquisite Tanzanite gemstone.

There are reasons why no U.S. president has visited Tanzania and why the country remains little known to Americans. For a long time, Tanzania was devoted to building a socialist state - an experiment that collapsed in the 1980s leaving the country to rebuild its economy along market economy lines.

There was no love lost between the United States and Tanzania during those socialist years, although, paradoxically, according to a study of foreign aid to Tanzania, Republican presidents - Nixon, Ford and Reagan - gave more money for its development than their Democratic counterparts Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter did.

Today socialism is history in Tanzania. President Bush will visit a country that is an African economic success story. Its growth rate in recent years has averaged over 6 percent. Its mineral and natural gas resources are drawing in foreign investors. Its large tracts of unused land are being developed for agriculture and cattle ranching. Its beautiful beaches on the islands of Zanzibar as well as the mainland are attracting increasing numbers of tourists.

Some of these developments may be met with mixed feelings by ordinary Tanzanians but there is little doubt that Tanzania is now on the move.

Rapid changes like those taking place in Tanzania now have caused social and political upheavals in other African countries. No one can rule those out even in Tanzania. Yet, it has a record of political stability that none of its neighbors, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo or Mozambique can match. It is a true haven of peace in Africa living up to the name of its largest city. Dar es Salaam means exactly that.

Governments in Africa have been difficult to hold accountable. Despite corruption and misrule they have stayed on, a shortcoming that afflicts these countries as they try to democratize. President Bush will come to Tanzania just a few days after it struck a political first in Africa.

Its Prime Minister, Edward Lowassa, was forced to resign after parliamentarians in his own party revealed his involvement in a scandal involving misappropriation of government funds. President Jakaya Kikwete immediately dissolved the cabinet and has just appointed a fresh one with a new Prime Minister, Peter Mizengo Pinda.

This change of government is all the more remarkable as Lowassa was a very close ally of the president. Kikwete’s decision to let him go is an indication that he is ready to tackle the issue of corruption that has eluded so many of his fellow African heads of state. It raises eyebrows among investors and foreign donors alike. It augurs well for Tanzania.

The country’s political stability is not a coincidence. Ever since independence, the ruling party - Chama cha Mapinduzi (Revolutionary Party) - has been careful in choosing presidents who come from small and insignificant ethnic groups rather than from the larger and more prosperous ones. This has spared the country from the tensions that have afflicted Kenya and Uganda where the largest ethnic group has tried to rule the country and ignored the interest of other groups.

Tanzania was for a long time the darling of European donors. Ever since its socialist days, China has also been an important investor and donor.

In the past two years, Tanzania has gone out of its way to lure Americans to take an interest in the country. President Kikwete has visited the U.S. three times and not only attended the odd meeting at the United Nations as his predecessors did. Kikwete has been as interested in Washington as in New York.

President Bush will get a warm welcome in Dar es Salaam when he arrives this week. He will see for himself an African country that is a genuine haven of peace; one that has turned its economy around and is now a showcase of what other African countries should aim for.

Goran Hyden is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. He can be reached at [email protected]

The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS), an organization of United States-based academics and activists, today rejected superficial and misleading popular and media portrayals of the post-electoral violence in Kenya as “tribal.”

Now that President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it is easy to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks ago declared the elections free and fair.

Once President George Bush’s special envoy to the Kenyan crisis, Jendayi Fraser (US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) has admitted that the elections in Kenya were seriously flawed (a polite way of saying they are fraudulent) and ordered President Mwai Kibaki to meet the opposition leader, Raile Odinga, it was easy for the corporate Western media to forget that the United States Ambassador in Kenya only weeks earlier had declared the elections free and fair. Bush and Fraser’s hands were pushed by the emerging evidence that the elections were illegitimate and that the violence, on both sides, had been orchestrated.1 Maintaining a lopsided alliance with the Kibaki government would not be so easy in the glare of public opinion, now cast briefly on the Kenyan nation, and so we saw a total flip-flop in US policy. But neither position is contradictory as the US is heavily invested in stability in Kenya.

President George W. Bush approved a Pentagon plan in January 2007 to set up Africa Command Center, to be known as AFRICOM. According to the plan, the Command Center is set to complete and go into service by the end of September 2008. The United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the new plans as he addressed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the defense spending President Bush proposed in his 2008 budget submitted to the Congress that, “The main purposes of the Africa Command Center would be to fight the war on terror, cooperation, provide humanitarian aid, building partnership capability, oversee security, defense support to non-military missions, and if directed, military training operations designed to help local governments.”

Until the creation of Africom, the administration of U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands. All three were primarily concerned with other regions of the world that were of great importance to the United States on their own and had only a few middle-rank staff members dedicated to Africa. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States. But when the Bush administration declared that access to Africa’s oil supplies would henceforth be defined as a “strategic national interest” of the United States and proclaimed that America was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Africa’s status in U.S. national security policy and military affairs rose dramatically.

In February 2007, President Bush announced that the Defense Department would create a new Africa Command (Africom) to coordinate U.S. government interests on the continent. Under this plan all governmental agencies of the US would fall under the military, i.e., USAID, the State Department, the US Departments of Energy, Treasury, and the Department of Education, etc. In pursuance of the plans for the militarization of Africa, the US Department of Defense announced the appointment of General William “Kip” Ward (an African American) as head of this new military command. On September 28, 2007, Ward was confirmed as the head of this new imperial military structure and, on October 1, 2007, Africom was launched in Stuttgart, Germany. The major question that is being posed by African peace activists and by concerned citizens is, why now? One answer may lie in the diminished power of the United States in the aftermath of the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will maintain in this article that it is urgent that peace activists who want reconstruction and transformation in Africa oppose the plans for the remilitarization of Africa under the guise of fighting terrorism in Africa.

In the summer of 2007, a group of concerned U.S. and Africa based organizations and individuals opposed to the creation of Africom—the new U.S. military command for Africa—came together in Washington, DC, to organize Resist Africom to campaign against the increasing militarization of U.S. policy toward Africa. ACAS voted to join Resist Africa at the membership meeting on 20 October 2007, during the ASA meeting in New York City. Resist Africom is working to educate people both in the United States and abroad about Africom and to mobilize people in a campaign to prevent the creation of Africom in its present form.

Book Party for No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000.

Photos taken at the ACAS membership meeting, New York, Oct 2007, during the African Studies Association annual meeting.