Emmanuel Ogebe
Many would be forgiven for assuming that President Biden’s hastily scheduled Africa trip was an escape from Washington after his controversial pardon of his son Hunter Biden. However it was actually a trip rescheduled from earlier which proved quite convenient when Biden needed temporary asylum abroad from political outrage at home.
Sadly, Biden’s lame duck Africa trip – the first of his presidency and probably the last – is worse than being overshadowed by the pardongate brouhaha.
A candidate ousted by his own party from a second term run, which party then lost the election has very little street cred left to go on an international diplomatic blitz except for presidential photo op collage – for which Africa is quite photogenic!
However Biden does still get credit for the first US presidential visit since President Obama. In my quarter century in the US, all the presidents have visited Africa multiple times – Clinton, Bush and Obama – except Trump. Biden will be the first to visit only once. However it is better than the Trump debacle when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired while he was on an official visit to Nigeria – reportedly while at toilet no less!
That said, Biden’s Africa report card is abysmal. Two of America’s top continental allies floundered domestically. Kenya’s President Ruto was hosted to a state visit in Washington as the US bankrolled his troops for peacekeeping in Haiti. Not only is Haiti still in shambles but massive anti-taxation protests at home crippled Kenya humiliating the newly elected and once popular opposition leader of the key East African nation.
In West Africa, America’s misfortunes were far worse. The US strangely condoned the massively flawed election of Bola Tinubu despite depiction by US court records as a Chicago drug money launderer in the ‘90s. The gambit, whether by kompromat or compromise, seeming to be wielding Manchurian influence over Africa’s giant and thusly the region.
Tinubu consolidated his weight as a 900 pound gorilla becoming chair of the ECOWAS subregional bloc which decades before had served as US boots on the ground salvaging Liberia from ruinous civil by proxy pretty much as Biden was now replicating in Haiti with Kenya.
Unfortunately Tinubu’s hasty push to invade neighboring Niger, following a military coup there, within months of his presidency backfired disastrously threatening his stranglehold on parliament.
Consequently the coupists kicked out both the French and US military bases in Niger (considered the real reason behind Tinubu’s failed invasion) weakening western counterterrorism capabilities in the region.
It got worse. Niger and a couple other countries that also had coups, pulled out of the west African regional bloc ECOWAS and realigned with Russia. So unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which galvanized NATO and gained new memberships, Tinubu’s US-prompted pre-invasion of Nigeria devastated ECOWAS and lost memberships to Russia!
As if it couldn’t get worse, unprecedented anti-hunger protests have wracked Nigeria and a labor strike crippled several major cities over Nigeria’s 25 cents an hour minimum wage while Biden was visiting the continent. Yet Biden’s Department of Justice has reached a settlement to transfer millions of dollars looted from Nigeria ( by the dictator who abducted, tortured and exiled me to the US) not to the country but to Tinubu’s cabinet member who laundered it abroad in the ‘90s!
It is perhaps telling that Biden is visiting Angola and not Nigeria the continent’s most populous country and a huge market and trade partner. Angola has displaced Nigeria as Africa’s top oil exporter as the latter has also declined from number one economy to number four in a few years.
It is unclear what a Trump presidency 2.0 spells for Africa – the only U.S. president in over a century not to visit so Biden has managed a last minute checked box.
However in terms of comparative legacies, two things stand out re their respective Nigeria policies: the Trump administration designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious persecution but then counterintuitively banned Nigerian immigration to the US while Biden refused to designate Nigeria a CPC but reversed the Trump Nigeria ban.
It is left to history and Biden and Trump how they will be remembered. There is a current push to grant Nigeria Temporary Protective Status (TPS) in the US – will Biden do it on his way out or Trump do it when he comes in? The same goes for this year’s CPC designations now due. Will Biden do the legally required or will he fail and let Trump have an easy win?
*Emmanuel Ogebe is an international human rights lawyer and US-Africa Affairs Expert with the US Nigeria Law Group in Washington