Obama’s Ghana speech

Hawking Obama t-shirts in Ghana

In the same fashion that was on display in his Cairo speech, Obama understood how to use words in Ghana that would make him appear as transcending colonialism, almost like the second coming of Franz Fanon.

He alluded to his Kenyan grandfather:

My grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him “boy” for much of his life. He was on the periphery of Kenya’s liberation struggles, but he was still imprisoned briefly during repressive times. In his life, colonialism wasn’t simply the creation of unnatural borders or unfair terms of trade — it was something experienced personally, day after day, year after year.

He even had the nerve to invoke Martin Luther King Jr., who regrettably is not alive today to be leading Detroit auto workers in protest against the vicious onslaught organized by America’s first Black president:

Fifty-two years ago, the eyes of the world were on Ghana. And a young preacher named Martin Luther King traveled here, to Accra, to watch the Union Jack come down and the Ghanaian flag go up. This was before the march on Washington or the success of the civil rights movement in my country. Dr. King was asked how he felt while watching the birth of a nation. And he said: “It renews my conviction in the ultimate triumph of justice.”

Obama’s knack for using such phraseology was what of course helped him sucker the Nation Magazine and the housebroken 60s radical left into backing his presidential bid. That is why in a sense it was a waste of time for Hugo Chavéz to present Obama with a Galeano book. He had probably read it and books like it as a young man in order to mine them for the telling phrase that could be used before a left-leaning audience. If any good came out of the Chavéz gift, it was putting Monthly Review books in the black for a year.

Once you penetrate through the verbiage, however, you discover that Obama’s recommendations for Africa are practically the same as those offered in books like Robert Guest’s “A Shackled Continent” or Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid”. Such books attribute Africa’s “backwardness” to internal failings of leadership. A lack of democracy and endemic corruption hold Africa back, not imperialism. Here’s how Obama puts it:

In many places, the hope of my father’s generation gave way to cynicism, even despair. Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

It was exceedingly clever for Obama to bring up the case of Zimbabwe since it cannot be denied that Mugabe has been responsible for much of the country’s ruin but the lion’s share of the responsibility falls on Great Britain that has punished the people of Zimbabwe for Mugabe’s sins. More to the point, Mugabe brought down the wrath of Great Britain for moving against the white agrarian gentry more than anything else. Crying crocodile tears over Mugabe’s repression, Great Britain found it easy to ignore far worse offenses to democracy in Nigeria where British-owned oil companies like Shell conspired with the generals to kill Ken Saro-Wiwa. If the generals threw out Shell, you can bet that sanctions of the most extreme sort would be imposed on Nigeria.

The reference to Kenya ignores the main cause of poverty there and that is the role of the country as an exporter of agricultural commodities to the Western marketplace like tea, coffee and cotton. Even if corruption were cleaned up tomorrow, the country would still be miserable. If Obama was truly concerned about Kenyan poverty, the first thing he would do is abolish the IMF and World Bank. Pambazuka News reported:

Kenya’s health care crisis has been 20 years in the making. Its dimensions are spelled out in the 2004 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) – a government document written in consultation with the IMF and World Bank and approved by both bodies’ boards. Life expectancy declined from 57 in 1986 to 47 in 2000; infant mortality increased from 62 per thousand in 1993 to 78 per thousand in 2003; and under-five mortality rose from 96 per thousand births to 114 per thousand in the same period. The percentage of children with stunted growth increased from 29% in 1993 to 31% in 2003, and the percentage of Kenya’s children who are fully-vaccinated dropped from 79% in 1993 to 52% in 2003.

Why this deterioration? As in most African countries, Kenya’s health care system was hit hard by the “structural adjustment” policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank as conditions on loans and as prerequisites for getting IFI approval of the country’s economic policies. Those policies were introduced in the 1980s, and have left a lasting mark on Kenya’s health. As usual with such programs, the emphasis was on cutting budget expenditures. As a result, local health clinics and dispensaries had fewer supplies and medicines, and user fees became more common. The public hospitals saw their standard of care deteriorate, increasing pressure on the largest public facility, Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi. As a consequence, that hospital, once the leading health facility in East Africa, began, like so many other African hospitals, to ask patients’ families to provide outside food, medicine, and medical supplies. Most beds at Kenyatta and the regional and local hospitals accommodated two patients. Professional staff have taken jobs – some part-time, some full-time, at private healthcare facilities, or migrated to Europe or North America in search of better pay.

Given Obama’s willingness to “play ball” with Republicans in the U.S. over health care, including the ditching of a “public option”, one doubts that he would shed a tear over the disasters taking place in Kenya. After all, if the IMF and World Bank cannot rely on prompt debt repayment, the whole system might collapse taking American investors and their Kenyan stooges down the toilet with them.

This week Obama asked for an additional $108 billion for the IMF, all in the name of rescuing the world economy. It goes without saying that the same criterion being applied inside American borders is being applied overseas. Rescue the banks and hospitals and schools be damned.

As opposed to basket cases like Zimbabwe and Kenya, Obama sees great signs of hope in a democratic and increasingly prosperous Ghana:

Now, we know that’s also not the whole story. Here in Ghana, you show us a face of Africa that is too often overlooked by a world that sees only tragedy or a need for charity. The people of Ghana have worked hard to put democracy on a firmer footing, with repeated peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections. And by the way, can I say that for that the minority deserves as much credit as the majority. And with improved governance and an emerging civil society, Ghana’s economy has shown impressive rates of growth.

Perhaps Obama got all worked up over Ghana after reading an April 24, 2001 Tom Friedman article titled “Protesting for Whom?” that scolded anti-globalization activists and that claimed that Africans favored globalization—the more the better. He cited Ghana as an example of the kind of success free capitalist trade offers:

Ghana, like so many African countries, has largely lived off aid and the export of raw materials. But for the first time it is developing an information sector to do data processing for American Express and Aetna, which is providing jobs that pay much higher than average Ghanaian salaries. “People here want into the global marketplace; they know it’s the only way out of poverty,” says George Apenteng, director of Ghana’s Institute for Economic Affairs. “But people here are also worried they won’t be able to compete and that [Western] markets aren’t as open to what we can sell, like agriculture, as ours are to what they sell.”

If Ghana is the best that Africa can do, then this continent’s version of “Slumdog Millionaire” would be a lot grimmer than anything seen in the movie based in a Mumbai call center. A recent UNICEF report noted:

With more than two decades of progressive, peaceful and democratic political stability, as well as a robust and growing economy, Ghana has emerged as a leader in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Yet, despite Ghana’s relative prosperity, poverty remains pervasive in the country’s three northern regions, which now account for half of Ghana’s population living under the poverty line.  This situation was exacerbated by a recent energy crisis coupled with a humanitarian emergency caused by a combination of severe rains and overflowing rivers.

One third of rural populations lack access to safe drinking water, and only 11 per cent have adequate sanitation. Guinea worm, a parasitic infection largely attributable to drinking unsafe water, continues to plague Ghana which reported more cases of Guinea worm than any other country in 2004.

While parroting the Obama/Friedman line about Ghana’s “success story”, the July 11^th Toronto Globe and Mail issued these warnings:

Despite its progress, Ghana is still ranked only 142 of the 179 countries in the UN human development index, which measures quality of life. Some Ghanaians are so poor that they turn to desperate measures. Just last week, when a Ghana International Airlines plane landed at Gatwick Airport near London, the undercarriage contained the dead body of a man who had apparently risked his life to flee the country. He perished at high altitude.

Ghana has been fortunate that its major export commodities, gold and cocoa, have been immune to the global financial crisis. But many people are excluded from this export-driven growth. Inflation is high, and Ghana’s currency has plunged in the past year.

“It looked like Ghana had turned the corner, but it’s a fragile model,” says Yao Graham, co-ordinator of Third World Network-Africa, a research and advocacy group in Ghana. “Many enterprises have collapsed, and there are loads of young people who can’t get a job, while the rich are living in compounds with barbed wire and guard dogs.”

How odd that Obama can hold up Ghana as a symbol of success when it ranks 142 in the UN HDI index. By comparison, Cuba ranks 51^st and is grouped with the highest tier of industrial nations. (Iceland was number one in the world until it fell off the map during the financial crisis, an argument against integration in the world capitalist economy if there ever was one.) Cuba achieved this rank despite having no access to the IMF or World Bank (or because of). It was also forced to spend a disproportionate share of its national income on defense, a function of being under the gun of Uncle Sam. It was also still recovering from the loss of its main trading partner, the USSR.

It is understandable why Obama would be reluctant to allow Americans to visit Cuba. Some might come back with an unaccountable admiration for a planned economy that places its emphasis on human need rather than private profit. This might lead them to question a government that subsidizes the IMF with an extra $108 billion and forks over $533 billion to the Pentagon, not to speak of the entire miserable system that Obama goes around the world huckstering for.

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