US policy towards Africa should be strategically shaped to promote dialogue through greater African regional integration.
 

These were the sentiments conveyed by Dr Eric Silla, senior adviser to the assistant secretary of State for African affairs, during a dialogue cohosted by the Institute of Global Dialogue (IGD) and the University of South Africa, in Pretoria on Wednesday. The dialogue, titled ‘US Africa Policy under Obama’, seeked to gain insight into the current diplomatic climate within Africa and the US, that shapes the US foreign policy, as well as to investigate future cooperation between the two countries.

Both Silla and fellow speaker Francis Kornegay, a senior research associate at the IGD, agreed that through active strategic engagement through multilateral organisations such as the East African Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union, greater African unity could be achieved in overcoming the continent’s perennial problem of diversity and fragmentation.

Silla identified the lack of a unified African voice in advancing African interests as one of the major obstacles in advancing US diplomacy on the continent.

Although, on an economic level, it is difficult to foster regional cooperation owing to several trade and tariff barriers between countries in a given region, Silla said that it would be easier for the US to engage Africa through regional blocs as opposed to single parts in the process of mutual cooperation.

Barriers to Cooperation

Besides the difficulty in “finding consistency in the face of diversity” through a generic US Africa policy, Silla went on to identify a number of policy constraints that were hindering cooperation between the two groups.

The colonial legacies of the past were identified as a hindering factor in the way that many African States did not have the institutional capacity to create strategic diplomatic community’s to effectively engage with the US. Secondly, in the face of economic hardship, there was a lack of resources allocated to the US diplomatic mission in Africa owing to budget cuts in Washington.

The third constraint was that of legislation passed by the US government, which affected Africa, with the most recent being the Dodd Frank Financial Regulation Bill of Conflict Minerals (2010), aimed at regulating the trade of conflict minerals in Africa, specifically with the Democratic Republic of Congo. This legislation, according to Silla, acts as a deterrent to cooperation as some African countries view it as discriminatory.

The final obstacle hindering African States is that of the tension between integration and sovereignty, as many African countries hold their sovereign interests above those of the ideals of multilateralism.

Kornegay concluded that some of Africa’s most pressing issues, specifically the succession of South Sudan and the political crisis in the Côte d’Ivoire, could be advanced through multilateral and regional engagement with the support of the US.