Africans Less Impressed By Bush’s Visit Than Clinton’s

American President George Walker Bush’s choice of Benin, Tanzania, Ghana, Rwanda and Liberia for his just-ended weeklong tour of Africa continues to receive a mass of cross-cutting criticisms from various sectors of the continent.

However, by the end of the tour in Liberia, public opinion remained overwhelmingly consensual at least on the continent, that the American leader’s visit was spurred much more by a military ambition than a humanitarian motive as manifested by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

However, both presidents placed the fight against HIV/Aids on top of their agenda and pledged millions of dollars to combat the epidemic in Africa when they visited the continent.

But many African political analysts have argued that the timing of Bush’s visit was contingent on his military ambition to gain a foothold for the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and for a second US military base on the continent after the one in Djibouti.

Liberia, which has at least for the moment, offered to host AFRICOM after Nigeria accepted and later rejected the idea, is host to other strategic American military outfits.

But George Bush gained a plus in Tanzania when he greeted his hosts in Kiswahili: “Vipi mambo!” and received a thunderous response: “poa!”.

It was the only country he promised to return in the future and ostensibly as a result of the hospitality he enjoyed in Dar es Salaam and in Arusha.

In Ghana, the feeling is that ‘Bill Clinton was the man of the people’ because he took time to address Ghanaians at the Accra Sports Stadium in which thousands of people attended, although he spent only a few hours there.

Rwandans will remember Bush for acquiescing that America should have done more to forestall the genocide, while in neighboring Uganda, which he did not visit, the opposition claims Bush snubbed the country because of bad governance.

Benin, considered as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ in Africa was certainly on Bush’s agenda for good governance, just like Ghana.

In Liberia, which is commonly regarded as ‘Small America’, the sentiment there was that Uncle Ben has done very little or nothing in the past to set the country straight on the road to economic and infrastructural development. Everyone agrees that it was thanks to the military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)’s ECOMOG, and much later by the United Nations that the country managed to survive its internecine conflicts, but not the United States.

Source African Press Agency

Net News Publisher