I talked about some of these challenges in a speech in Senegal in the summer of 2012. I emphasized that America was pursuing “a model of sustainable partnership that adds value rather than extracts it.” I hoped African leaders would become smart shoppers and prioritize the long-term needs of their people over the short-term benefits of a quick payday.
Democracy was under pressure across much of Africa. Between 2005 and 2012, the number of electoral democracies in sub-Saharan Africa fell from twenty-four to nineteen. That was still far better than in the 1990s, when there were hardly any, but it was not an encouraging trend. Over my years as Secretary, we saw coups in Guinea-Bissau, where no elected President has ever successfully served a full five-year term, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Madagascar.
The United States devoted considerable diplomatic effort to resolving these crises. In June 2011, I visited the headquarters of the African Union in Ethiopia and issued a challenge directly to the continent’s leaders: “The status quo is broken; the old ways of governing are no longer acceptable; it is time for leaders to lead with accountability, treat their people with dignity, respect their rights, and deliver economic opportunity. And if they will not, then it is time for them to go.” I invoked the upheaval of the Arab Spring, which was washing away stagnant governments across the Middle East and North Africa, and suggested that without change and a positive vision for the future, that wave could roll across sub-Saharan Africa as well.
When I visited Senegal, long viewed as a model of African democracy that had never suffered a military coup, it had recently weathered a constitutional crisis. In 2011, President Abdoulaye Wade, the country’s idiosyncratic eighty-five-year-old leader, attempted to circumvent constitutional limits and run for a third term, sparking widespread protests. This problem was all too familiar in Africa: aging leaders, especially former heroes of national liberation movements who saw themselves as the fathers of their countries, refused to retire when the time came or allow their country to move forward into the future without them. The most famous example of that is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who clings to power while his country suffers.
In Senegal, when Wade decided to remain in office, a handful of musicians and young activists helped build a mass movement with a simple slogan: “We’re Fed Up.” Johnnie Carson, my Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, tried to convince Wade to put the good of the country first, but he wouldn’t listen. Senegal’s civil society demanded the President honor the Constitution and step down. They got to work registering and educating voters. Students marched in the streets proclaiming, “My voting card is my weapon.” The Senegalese military, true to its tradition, stayed clear of politics.
In the February 2012 elections, long lines of citizens waited to vote. Activists fanned out to observe more than eleven thousand polling stations, texting vote counts and reports of irregularities to an independent clearinghouse in Dakar, called the Situation Room by the Senegalese women who ran it. All in all, it was perhaps the most sophisticated election monitoring program ever deployed in Africa. At the end of the day Wade was defeated. He finally acceded to the will of the voters, and there was a peaceful transfer of power. I called President-elect Macky Sall to commend him on his victory and told him, “Even more than your personal victory, the peaceful transfer of power is an historic victory for democracy.” The day after the vote, Sall visited the Situation Room to thank the activists who had worked so hard to protect Senegal’s Constitution.
In my speech in Dakar that August, I congratulated the people of Senegal and emphasized that promoting democratic progress was at the heart of America’s approach in Africa:
I know there is sometimes an argument that democracy is a privilege belonging to wealthy countries, and that developing economies must put economic growth first and worry about democracy later. But that’s not the lesson of history. Over the long run, you can’t have effective economic liberalization without political liberalization. . . . The United States will stand up for democracy and universal human rights, even when it might be easier or more profitable to look the other way, to keep the resources flowing. Not every partner makes that choice, but we do and we will.
* * *
* * *
As much as any place, Liberia represents the ongoing struggle for so many countries in Africa between a painful past and a hopeful future—between guns or growth.
Americans often worry about partisan warfare in Washington and wonder why our elected leaders can’t seem to get along. But our Congressional feuds pale in comparison to the battles fought by members of the Legislature of Liberia. When I visited in August 2009, the chamber was full of lawmakers who had literally taken up arms against one another for years. Here was Senator Jewel Taylor, ex-wife of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, who was then on trial at The Hague for war crimes. There was the former warlord turned Senator Adolphus Dolo, known on the battlefield as General Peanut Butter (many Liberian generals had colorful nicknames), whose election slogan was “Let him butter your bread.” The fact that they were sitting together as the elected representatives of a nation finally at peace would have been hard to imagine during Liberia’s long and bloody civil war. Between 1989 and 2003 roughly 250,000 Liberians were killed and millions fled their homes. The story of how Liberians finally managed to put that dark chapter behind them is one of hope, and a testament to the role that women can (and often must) play in making peace, restitching the torn fabric of society, and working together for a better future.
In 2003 Liberian women began saying to one another, “Enough is enough.” Activists like the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee formed a movement to agitate for peace. That spring thousands of women from all walks of life, Christians and Muslims together, flooded the streets, marching, singing, and praying. Dressed all in white, they sat in a fish market in the hot sun under a banner that read, “The women of Liberia want peace now.” The warlords tried to ignore them. Then they tried to disperse them. But the women wouldn’t leave. Finally the warlords agreed to begin peace negotiations. But the talks dragged on and on, so a group of the women traveled to the peace conference in neighboring Ghana and staged a sit-in. They linked arms and blocked the doors and windows until the men inside reached an agreement. This story is captured in a remarkable documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which I highly recommend.
A peace agreement was finally signed, and the dictator Charles Taylor fled. Still the women of Liberia did not rest. They turned their energies to making sure the peace would endure and deliver results for their families and reconciliation for their nation. In 2005 they helped elect one of their own, another future Nobelist, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, as the first woman President in Africa.
Like Nelson Mandela, President Johnson Sirleaf grew up as the grandchild of a chief. As a young woman, she studied economics and public policy in the United States, receiving a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 1971. Her career in Liberian politics was a high-wire act. She served as an Assistant Minister of Finance but fled the country in 1980 when a coup toppled the government. After stints at the World Bank and Citibank, she returned in 1985 and ran for Vice President. But she was promptly jailed for criticizing the repressive regime of dictator Samuel Doe. She was pardoned amid an international outcry, and then ran for and won a seat in the Senate, but refused it in protest. After being arrested and imprisoned once again, she sought exile in the United States in 1986. In 1997, she was back, this time running for president of Liberia against Charles Taylor. Finishing a distant second, she was once more forced into exile. After the civil war ended in 2003 and Taylor resigned, Johnson Sirleaf returned and finally won the presidency in 2005, and was reelected to a second term in 2011.
Under Johnson Sirleaf’s leadership, the country started to rebuild. The government adopted more responsible fiscal policies and began to attack corruption and promote transparency. Liberia made progress on debt relief and land
reform, and the economy grew despite the global economic crisis. Soon there was free and compulsory education for primary school children, including girls. Johnson Sirleaf worked hard to reform the security services and provide the rule of law that citizens could trust.
By the time I stood before the Legislature in 2009, I was able to congratulate the people of Liberia and declare that, if they kept making progress, their country had the opportunity “to be a model not just for Africa, but for the rest of the world.”
* * *
* * *
That August I also visited Kenya. With U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, I flew into Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, named after the founder of modern Kenya. On the day his country was born, December 12, 1963, he gave a famous speech that used the word harambee, Swahili for “all pull together,” and asked his country’s newly independent citizens to unite as one. The phrase was on my mind as we drove into town from the airport and saw the hundreds of little mom-and-pop businesses lining the roads and then the office towers of downtown Nairobi.
Ron and I were there to attend the annual trade and investment meeting held under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), legislation signed by my husband in 2000 to increase African exports to the United States. The United States imported hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Nigeria and Angola per day, and we worked persistently to support greater transparency and accountability for oil revenues. But we also wanted to encourage greater nonpetroleum exports, especially from small and medium-sized businesses.
Corruption was the major impediment to growth in most of Africa, so I was smiling when I entered the campus of the University of Nairobi and saw large crowds waving and holding banners of welcome, one of which announced, “You are entering a no-corruption zone.” Inside I held a raucous town hall discussion with students and activists, moderated by the American journalist Fareed Zakaria.
One of the participants was Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner who had led a grassroots movement of poor women to plant trees across Africa and reforest the continent. I was a fan and a friend of Wangari and was delighted to see her, and pained when she passed away too soon in 2011. At one point Zakaria turned to her for a comment about China’s growing influence and investment in Africa, noting that she had told the press that China was “willing to do business without conditions like respect for human rights.” In her response Wangari said something that has stayed with me ever since. “We are in a continent that is extremely rich. Africa is not a poor continent. Anything you want in the world is on this continent. It’s like the gods were on our side when the world was being created,” she said, to applause. “Yet we are considered among the poorest people on the planet. There’s something seriously wrong.” Africans, she urged, needed to demand good governance and accountability from their leaders, and also from the foreign investors and partners seeking to do business there.
I agreed completely and offered the example of Botswana as a model of how good choices could lead to good outcomes. In the mid-20th century that landlocked nation just north of South Africa was among the poorest places in the world. When it gained independence from Britain in 1966, it had only two miles of paved roads and one public secondary school. The next year the future of the country changed forever when a massive diamond mine was discovered. Botswana’s new government, led by President Seretse Khama, was faced with an influx of new wealth and powerful outside actors with their own agendas.
Many countries in this situation have fallen victim to the “resource curse,” squandering their potential windfalls due to corruption and poor governance. Leaders have lined their own pockets or grasped for short-term profits at the expense of long-term sustainability. Foreign governments and corporations have exploited weak institutions while leaving most people as poor as before. But not in Botswana. Its leaders set up a national trust fund that invests diamond revenues in the country’s people and infrastructure. As a result Botswana has thrived. USAID and the Peace Corps were able to pack up shop and go home. Democracy took root, with regular, free, and fair elections and a strong human rights record. The country boasts some of the best highways in Africa—which I saw when Bill and I visited in 1998—nearly universal primary education, clean water, and one of the longest life expectancies on the continent. Botswana’s leaders have stressed the 5 Ds: Democracy, Development, Dignity, Discipline, and Delivery.
If more African nations followed the example of Botswana, many of Africa’s challenges could finally be surmounted. As I told the audience in Nairobi, “Africa’s best days can be ahead if we get a hold of this whole question of the use of natural resources and who benefits and where the revenues go.”
After many more questions about the choices facing Africa’s people, Zakaria turned to a lighter topic. Five years earlier a Kenyan city councilman had written Bill a letter offering forty goats and twenty cows in exchange for our daughter’s hand in marriage. As I prepared to return to Nairobi, he made a stir in the local press by announcing that the offer was still on the table. To the delight of the crowd, Zakaria wanted to know what I thought of the proposal. I paused. I’d answered a lot of questions all over the world, but this was a first. “Well, my daughter is her own person. She’s very independent,” I said. “So I will convey this very kind offer.” The students laughed and applauded.
Despite the good feelings in the hall, the mood outside was complex and uncertain. The paroxysm of violence that followed the controversial December 2007 elections led to an uneasy alliance between former opponents, President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga (a newly created position). Their government included a Deputy Prime Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, who would later be elected President himself despite being indicted for the violence by the International Criminal Court.
President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga brought together their Cabinet to meet with me in the hope I would tell them that President Obama would visit soon. I explained instead that the President and I were concerned about the flawed election, political violence, and rampant corruption, and that the President expected more from them. My comments led to a spirited discussion, and I offered U.S. help to improve Kenya’s election system. Along with the United Kingdom, the United States offered assistance registering voters and electronically counting votes, which would work well both when the country voted in favor of a new Constitution in 2010, and when Kenyatta won the 2013 election. The United States also stepped up our support to the Kenyan military as it joined the fight in Somalia against Al Shabaab, a terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda.
Kenya is an economic and strategic hub for East Africa, so what happens there matters not just to Kenyans. Improving governance and growth are key to their stability and prosperity, and a key priority is increasing agricultural productivity. That’s why I visited the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. We toured a soil-testing lab and exhibitions on agricultural improvements made possible by U.S. development aid. For three decades, despite the fact that farming remained the dominant form of employment across Africa, agricultural exports declined. The lack of roads, inconsistent irrigation, poor storage facilities, and ineffective farming practices, including poor seeds and fertilization, undermined the hard work of farmers in the field and threatened food supplies. Unless this problem could be solved, neither Kenya nor Africa would ever achieve full economic or social potential.
Historically the U.S. government has sent large amounts of food aid to fight hunger in developing countries in Africa and around the world. Delivering free rice and wheat and other essentials helped feed hungry families, but it also undercut the market viability of indigenous agriculture, encouraged dependency, and did little to create homegrown, sustainable solutions. We decided to take a new approach, focused more on building up the capacity of local farmers and making sure the right infrastructure was in place to get their produce to consumers. The result was a program we called Feed the Futu
re. I later visited successful programs in Tanzania, where it had the strong support of President Jakaya Kikwete, and in Malawi, where President Joyce Banda stressed the importance of improving the country’s agricultural productivity. To date Feed the Future has reached more than 9 million households, and its nutrition programs have served more than 12 million children under five. I’m hoping that we will see the time when African farmers (most of whom are women) will be able to produce enough to feed the continent and export the rest.
* * *
* * *
Alongside much progress, Africa still offered many cautionary tales of countries that have tipped into conflict and chaos. There was probably no place on the map more grim than the eastern Congo.
In May 2009, Senator Barbara Boxer, a longtime champion of women’s rights, chaired a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on violence against women in war zones. She focused on the long-running civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where soldiers on both sides raped women as a way of dominating communities and gaining tactical advantage. At least 5 million people had died over fifteen years of fighting, and millions of refugees had fled their homes, destabilizing the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. The eastern city of Goma was full of displaced people and had become known as the rape capital of the world. Roughly thirty-six women a day, 1,100 a month, reported rapes, and there was no telling how many went unreported.
Following the hearing, Senator Boxer and two of her colleagues, Russ Feingold and Jeanne Shaheen, sent me a letter with a series of recommendations about how the United States could show greater leadership in the DRC. Horrified by the reports coming from Goma and concerned about the broader strategic stakes, I asked Johnnie Carson whether a personal visit from me could help deliver tangible results for the women of Goma. He thought that if I could convince the embattled Congolese President Joseph Kabila to accept help to crack down on gender-based violence, it would be worth the trip. Plus there was no better way to draw the attention of the world and galvanize a more robust response from international institutions and aid organizations. So we decided to go.
Hard Choices Page 35