debatable Bush’s African legacy not worth talking about Written by Kipchumba Some As President George Bush hands over the White House to his successor Barack Obama on Tuesday, it is worth considering whether Bush’s initiatives for Africa will stand out as his singular foreign policy success. After utterly failing at home and virtually everywhere else in the world, certain scholars opine that Bush can ride to his Texas home with the satisfaction that he did more for Africa than any other US president during his tumultuous eight years in office. They credit him for quietly tripling annual aid to Africa from $1.4 billion when he came into office in 2001 to $6 billion in 2008. This would ideally make it one of the largest expansions of US foreign assistance in recent times. But a closer examination of his policies reveals that Bush might not have an African legacy worth talking about after all. The president did not pursue a transformational policy that would wean the continent of aid dependence and set it firmly on the path of self-sustenance through development of infrastructure and improvement of trade terms. True, Bush made the most promises to Africa than any of his predecessors. But that is as far he got. After all, a 2006 report by Brookings Institution, a respected research institute in Washington DC, revealed that the Bush administration had been grossly exaggerating the levels of real aid it appropriated to Africa since he took office. The report, entitled US Foreign Assistance to Africa: Claims and Reality, revealed that real US aid between 2000 and 2005 alone was 56 per cent of what the Bush administration had been claiming all along. And even then, a larger share of the increase consists of emergency food aid and other relief projects rather than the traditional Oversees Development Assistance (ODA), which is used to promote long-term infrastructural development. Furthermore, his policies benefited a select few “strategic” countries on the continent, like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Uganda, which best serve US interests especially in the fight against terrorism. The Brookings Report revealed that most aid to these strategic countries was in terms of security funding. Since 2001, the report said, contributions for counterterrorism, peacekeeping operations, training and equipment had grown by more than 200 per cent in 2005. And an article published last November by the New York Times, a leading newspaper in the US, also criticised Bush for failing to take any substantive action to convince Congress to release the money for his Africa initiatives. “He delivers a speech calling for millions or even billions in funding for a new initiative and then fails to follow through and push hard for the funding in Congress,” read the article in part. One of the programmes trumpeted by the White House as proof of Bush’s positive impact on Africa, and contestably his only legacy in Africa, is the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), launched in 2003. The $15 billion initiative is credited with putting more than 1.5 million Africans suffering from HIV/Aids on anti-retroviral drugs, up from less than 50,000 in 2003. “This programmme is only successful in as far as it enabled millions of poor people to access crucial, life-saving ARV’s,” said Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o, Kenya’s Public Health minister. Abstinence programmes Critics say Pepfar is driven by ideological considerations that undermine its effectiveness. A third of its funds must be spent on abstinence programmes and it discourages condom use. Before groups can receive funding, they are required to take “loyalty oath” to condemn prostitution — a provision that Aids workers say further stigmatises populations in dire need of HIV education and treatment. As a result, countries that had made progress in combating the disease, like Uganda, are now reporting sharp reversals. By aggressively promoting condom use and sex education, Uganda had managed to cut its HIV rate from 15 per cent of the population to barely six per cent during the past decade, making it Africa’s biggest success story. Last December, director of Uganda’s Aids Commission Dr Kihumuro Apuuli reported that in two years after the emphasis on youth abstinence began, new HIV infections doubled from 70,000 to 130,000. First Lady Janet Museveni blamed the current situation of “regression amidst plenty” largely on poorly conceived prevention campaigns advocated by its main funder, the US. “The programme activities being funded may not be helping to prevent Aids but may actually be fuelling the rate of infection,” said Mrs Museveni. Overall, a 2006 UN Report on the Global Aids Epidemic found no clear sign of decline in HIV/Aids in Southern Africa. The diversion of funds from tried-and-true HIV prevention methods is clearly a misguided experiment that could mark a calamitous turn in Africa’s attempts to get a handle on the Aids epidemic. Another one of Bush’s key Africa initiative, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), has failed to gain traction and is faced with sharp budget cuts by Congress. The initiative, launched in 2002, was conceived as a new model to enable governments “that commit to rule justly, invest in people and encourage economic and political freedom,” to fight poverty through sustained economic growth. Tracking funding The initiative was meant to have disbursed $10 billion by 2006 to countries that meet this criteria. However, by 2005, it was yet to distribute a single cent though a White House website claims MCC has signed seven agreements with eight African countries totalling $2.4 billion by last year. Tracking funding and progress of Bush’s other smaller initiatives such as African Education Initiative (AEI), African Agricultural Development Programme (AADP) is virtually impossible since little is known about them. When he took office, Bush promised to put debt relief for Africa’s poorest and most indebted countries on the international agenda. Each year African governments pay more than $15 billion to service debts to creditors. These debts drain money from health care, education and other essential services. Indeed during his first term, Bush secured international agreement with the G-8 nations on the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. But most of these nations did not follow through on their promises. The debt relief initiative has so far reduced a debt of $34 billion for 19 African countries, according to White House statistics. However, this is a small bit of the $500 billion the continent owes to rich creditor governments and international financial institutions. Perhaps the only achievement of the Bush administration in this regard is convincing Congress to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act beyond 2008 to 2015. According to the White House, Agoa exports to the US in 2007 totalled $50 billion — more than six times the level in 2001, the first full year of Act. But even then, benefits have been termed as miniscule at best. Oil represent more than 80 per cent of Agoa exports which means only a few countries benefit from this form of trade access. By 2007, agricultural exports accounted for a paltry $3 billion of total exports. The eligibility for the programme is also pegged on restrictive conditionalities which have excluded many African countries from benefiting from the programme. Eritrea, Ivory Coast and Central African Republic have had their Agoa eligibility revoked as a result of human-rights abuses or failure to implement political or economic reforms. Despite several promises to do so, Bush did nothing to cut massive subsidies to US farmers which undermine competitiveness of Africa’s agricultural products. Having failed on the economic front, Bush can take home moderate credit for his role in the resolution of some of Africa’s long-standing civil conflicts. His administration played a crucial role in the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the 22 year conflict between the Muslim North and Christian Southern parts of Sudan. Security reasons According to Steve Radelet, an expert on African developmental issues at the Centre for Global Development, “the US began to be more interested in Africa for a variety of security and military reasons.” The US perceives Africa as a potential hub for terror organisations due to their weak governments. However, its campaign in Africa has received mixed reactions. On one hand, US financial, logistical and intelligence support has helped countries like Kenya and Tanzania track terror networks operating within their borders. On the other hand, the campaign has rolled back gains several countries had made on the democratic front. For example, the US supported a draconian anti-terrorism bill in Kenya which would have literally rendered the country a police state. And in Sudan, the CIA has been criticised for collaborating with Khartoum’s notorious security agencies. Any serious development initiative for Africa must focus on four interconnected priorities: growing more food, fighting disease, increasing access to education, and building a critical infrastructure that encompasses roads, energy, water and sanitation.
Matt Damon wants to sex W. Matt Damon came to The Atlantic last week to have dinner with a few of us (this sort of thing happens all the time) and I had the chance to sit down with him beforehand and talk about the cause that consumes much of his life: the hard-to-sell-but-indispensably-important issue of water -- specifically, ways to get clean, affordable water to hundreds of millions of people across the globe who suffer, and sometimes die, because their water is disease-ridden or prohibitively expense, or both. Damon is a co-founder, with the visionary water engineer Gary White, of Water.org, a leading NGO fighting for radical new ways to think about what is a solvable problem. (You can read about Water.org, and find some very alarming statistics, at its website, here. One such statistic: 3.5 million people die each year from water-related diseases, which of course is especially atrocious because humankind already knows how to make dirty water clean, and how to deliver water to large numbers of people. Water.org is not focused on digging charity wells, but on implementing market-based strategies to help poor people pool their resources in ways that would make utilities interested in serving their neighborhoods and villages.) Damon, as many people know, supported President Obama the last time around, but has become a critic for a range of reasons. One of those reasons is what some people might call the Obama administration's incomplete devotion to the cause of poverty- and disease-alleviation in Africa and elsewhere. This was a main topic of our conversation, which was joined by Gary White and Chevanee Reavis, of Water.org, as well as The Atlantic's editor, James Bennet. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation: Jeffrey Goldberg: Why is it so difficult to get more U.S. funding for this issue? Matt Damon: First of all, the foreign aid budget is what it is. Second, only a small part of that small budget goes to water. And yet water is this enormous problem that literally underpins all of these other issues -- disease, poverty, women's rights. All of them. Six years ago, when I was starting to learn this issue, that was one of my big takeaways, how interconnected it all was, the giant role that water and sanitation played in all of this. Of the $42 billion we give in foreign aid, 315 million bucks is for water. But people aren't up in arms about that. The first hurdle we have to clear in America is to explain to people that this is a problem. It's difficult, because this is a problem none of us can relate to. JG: The upcoming election is 90 percent about the economy and unemployment. These are very serious issues, but the question to you and Gary is, are we becoming too insular, that we're neglecting our responsibilities not only on water, but on a whole world of issues? MD: Yes. I think it's everybody's fault. The issue today is what you can message and how fast you can message it. Did you watch all the Republican debates? JG: Yes, masochistically. MD: You've got these guys saying the three things they're going to say and they just keep saying them and that's the way it is now. I talked to a political consultant in New York who is getting out of the business, and he said it was so fun when he was a kid, trying to hone messages and find the nuance and what was really going to connect to people. And he said then they just figured out that if they just threw **** at each other it didn't matter if it was true. In terms of substantive issues, you don't get a lot of substance in political campaigns. JG: Do you think there's tolerance in America for more foreign aid spending? MD: If you could get people to understand, yes. If you go to a mom in Ohio and say "Every 20 seconds a child dies because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation," they'd say "Get the **** out of here, that is unconscionable." Any American would react with revulsion to that idea. And Any American would be react with revulsion to that idea if you could get them to see this not in a Sally Struthers way, especially. Bono's group (the One Campaign) has done a lot of work trying to figure out how to message these issues, and what people respond to is things that work. They don't want to hear people are dying. People say, "I know, but I have my own life, I don't have a job, the economy, we're living in a tough world," and I get that. But once they go, "Wait a minute, there are solutions to these problems out there that really work, they're practical and they makes sense to me," people will pony up for that. Gary White: By definition, people have a higher threshold for foreign aid, because they already believe we give about 10 times more than we actually do. JG: Bush showed that you could increase aid budgets, I think. He did PEPFAR (a U.S. funded-program -- the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- that has brought anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) to more than a million AIDs patients in Africa). MD: I would kiss George W. Bush on the mouth for what he did on PEPFAR. JG: How long would you kiss him? MD: Three seconds. No tongue. You know, PEPFAR is an incredible thing just in terms of how many lives it saved. These ARVs have a Lazarus effect on people. You see a picture of them before and then you see them vibrant, alive, working. Their whole family has been dragged down by the illness and now this. I went on a trip in 2006 (to Africa) and I just had a sense of national pride going around, talking to these people, and they were so happy, they would say, "America," and I was saying, "Yeah, our president did that, and it's terrific." It's such an obvious connected thing. People aren't going to hate you when you're saving their lives. JG: Do you think the current administration should be doing more on this than a Republican administration did? MD: We were just having a jaded chuckle about this in the car. You would have expected that Obama, with his reputation as a pragmatist, would look at PEPFAR, looked at how effective it is, and thought that he should make similar investments in other issues, definitely water and sanitation. Water and sanitation need their own PEPFAR. GW: The administration has not been out front on development assistance. JG: Matt, is that what you were getting angry about last year? MD. All I said last year was that I was disappointed. Love that Jobs Act, though. (Laughs.) Last year, teachers were doing a rally here (in Washington), public school teachers, and my mom is a professor of early childhood education, and I came with her just to try to draw some attention to what's going on. I take issue with a few of the directions Obama has gone in. When you run on something as vague as hope and change, I think a lot of people put their own **** on you. JG: And you expected more in the area you're most concerned about? MD: Yes. Or at least some engagement. GW: The PEPFAR for water is nonexistent. JG: Why do you think they didn't do something dramatic like George W. Bush? MD: It's a different world now than it was when Bush was president. It's a harder sell. People are totally preoccupied with things here. He's got a lot of other water to carry, pardon the pun, and his political opponents would make a lot of hay if he were giving a bunch of money to Africa. I'm sure they would try to score political points. GW: Could a Democrat have done the rapprochement with China? It's the opposite effect. If Obama went to Kenya, people would say he's playing to stereotypes by focusing on Africa. When George Bush did it, it worked. I don't think Obama would have avoided doing more for water and for Africa had he not been dealt such a lousy hand domestically. And certainly the election cycle right now is all about the economy, and it's hard to plan a big foreign policy objective in the middle of your campaign. That's the answer to "Why?" But is that a worthy explanation? I don't think so. MD: I'm still on hope and change. I'm saying it all comes through in the second term. JG: Are you back on the hope-and-change team? MD: I'm not back, but I love the game, and it's my responsibility to vote and I can't -- well, the other team, even with an Etch-a-Sketch move, that's still a lot of shaking you have to do. JG: How much money are we talking about for a dramatic program to make clean water more accessible for poor people? GW: It's a billion dollars a year. A billion dollars, we could dramatically change the face of this issue. Right now, it's at about $315 million a year, that's across the foreign assistance budget. JG: How many countries is that spread around? GW: It's probably about 30 in in sub-Saharan Africa and a dozen or so in the rest of the world. And by the way, getting it back up to $315 million was a Herculean effort. It was down below $100 million. In fact, all of sub-Saharan Africa was getting $20 million. It was ridiculous. JG: What does a billion do? GW: It would help us move away from strict charity and help us activate the markets. We have to help poor people get access to capital and credit so that they can create their own water solutions. There is actually a huge market for people who will pay for a connection to a water utility, but we have to create the structures for this to happen. If you look at what the poor are paying in terms of time collecting water for themselves and their families, if you only value their time at 10 cents an hour, if you look at what they're paying these water mafias (small cartels in major developing-world cities who sell water at exorbitant prices) and to these informal vendors, it far exceeds $20 billion, and across the world, we have a total of about $20 billion being invested each year by the aid programs of governments, aid agencies, and the countries themselves. JG: So, back to the question of how you get Americans to want to increase the aid budget for a very difficult issue to understand. MD: When you have an earthquake or a tsunami it's a simple message: People see suffering on a very large scale. And people respond. Those things are, in communications terms, really easy to message. American people are generous, and I believe that that is going to save the day. JG: How did George W. Bush manage to sell the American people on spending money for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa? GW: AIDS touches people in this country. There was much more of an ability to tie yourself to the AIDS epidemic worldwide. You knew somebody in your family or your community who was dying of AIDS. MD: Americans don't know people who die from diarrhea. JG: What must be frustrating about this issue is that it's solvable. I mean, we're talking about diarrhea. MD: Gary said this a few years ago, and it stuck with me: imagine if we had a cure for AIDS and millions of people were still dying from it. Just think about that. That's the situation with water and sanitation..
Good for him. I'm glad it was Bush doing that and not Obama. I shudder to think what the criticism from republicans would be when our black moslem Kenyan socialist president took American taxpayer money -- or worse, money borrowed from our grandchildren -- and gave it to his cronies in Africa. I actually don't mean to be sarcastic -- it's something that needed to be done and Bush could do without people much questioning his motives, whereas a president like Obama unfortunately would have a harder time executing on it.
I agree. As someone who does admire the Dalai Lama I find this very disappointing. That said though the Dalai Lama isn't above playing politics and has made shrewd political moves. I suspect there might be more behind this statement. As for GW Bush's AIDS prevention moves in Africa definitely a good thing. While overall I feel GW Bush will go down as not too far from the bottom of US Presidencies he certainly wasn't the worst.
in addition to the national response to 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AIDS initiative in Africa, he'll also be remembered for this: -- Bush's lasting gift: big ocean reserve President Bush has made history by establishing the largest marine reserve ever created, designating three remote Pacific Ocean areas as national monuments. The protected areas, encompassing 195,280 square miles, include the Mariana Trench, the world's deepest canyon, and other mostly uninhabited atolls and reefs near American Samoa and the equator. Although Bush's overall environmental record leaves much to be desired, this is a rare bright spot that will leave a lasting imprint. The new reserve, which includes mountains, corals and a chain of 21 underwater volcanoes, is one of the most pristine places on Earth. It will forever protect hundreds of endangered and rare species of birds, fish, especially some sharks, and other marine life. Commercial fishing, mining and other threatening activities will be barred inside the reserve. U.S. naval ships and other approved maritime operations will not be inhibited. Environmentalists say Bush's move will have lasting global impact. "If we can keep that area untouched," said Diane Regas of the Environmental Defense Fund, "it will provide an unparalleled scientific resource and a huge investment in improving the planet's resilience to climate change." Not everyone, especially islanders near the designated tracts, likes the move. They argue that, among other limits, it takes away fishing rights and restricts plans for economic development. They may have good arguments, but two years of scientific study shows that the global benefits of the protected tract far outweigh the drawbacks. This time, Bush did a tremendously positive thing for the environment by signing an executive order to protect an enormous area in the Pacific. Perhaps it could have been even larger, and the restrictions could have been tougher. It also does not make up for his many wrong-headed policies that crippled endangered animal and plant protections, stymied climate change initiatives and handed over public land for oil and gas exploration. But it is a foresighted gift to the world during Bush's final days in office, and all it took was the stroke of his pen.
Bush will be remembered as one of the worst presidents to ever govern this country. No media blitz is going to erase that truth.
last article is from 2009, and the atlantic mention is a sidebar to another story (water.org). hardly a media blitz.
Alright. Bush will be remembered as one of the worst presidents to ever govern this country, despite this smattering of press that basso insists on posting in the D&D.
Matt Damon? Reminds me of: "Where's Ja Rule??!! <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/H7b5hJ0G_9c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I doubt that if there were no W, there would be 10 million less people in this world today. That's a medium size country.
Bush sowed the seeds of this desperate cut-back on everything by accepting the snide whispers of Wall Street and Greenspan that "no, we should not do anything to prevent the financial industry from destroying the world". On that single point alone, he stands as one the worst presidents of all time. Give him props for the little things he did do right, but a profile is built on both successes and failures.
I don't know about you but I gladly celebrate the saved lives, while remaining disgusted with GB. It's not like it's his money.
As someone who spent 14 months in Iraq and witnessed how many lives "GW' saved a President.............this is a total joke. Top to bottom.......joke. That is about as much as I can say on that......
