To Lecture and Do Business

Barack Obama traveled to Kenya and Ethiopia as his presidency begins to near its end. Has the president kept his promises regarding Africa?

In June 2009, barely arrived to the presidency, Barack Obama gave a memorably reformative speech in Cairo, where he announced an advantageous reconfiguration of U.S. relations with the rest of the world, and particularly with the Muslim world. He would soon be entangled in the historical realities and the excrescence of al-Qaida that is the Islamic State. The White House will decide rather soon if its interests are aligned with the Egyptian army and the “counter-revolution.”

When the first buds of the Arab Spring blossomed in Tunisia, as an article published in Le Monde over the weekend recalls, Mr. Obama specifically addressed Africans in a speech given before the Ghanaian parliament in which he spoke of “Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world,” a world interconnected by peace, development and democracy.

Yet, it should be noted that, while the second term of President Obama slowly draws to an end, when all is said and done, he will not have implemented an approach in Africa, neither in the Mediterranean nor the sub-Saharan regions, that is fundamentally different than that of his predecessors in dealing with the defense of civil rights.

In Kenya, within the framework of a symbolically charged visit to the native country of his father, it is not without his classic eloquence that he called on this country and its elites to attack the corruption that plagues them, to expand individual and democratic freedoms, to fight against violence committed against women. He denounced the hateful homophobia of which Kenyan authorities boast, aptly comparing it with the racial discrimination from which the United States suffers. He was also troubled by the xenophobia and harassment to which the Muslim minority of Somalian origin is subjected. In Ethiopia, where Mr. Obama will find himself on Monday and Tuesday, the government of Addis Ababa in turn gave its own lessons on democracy and respect for human rights.

In reality, the America of Mr. Obama continues too easily to accommodate its allies, who trample on civil and political rights in the name of the war against terrorism and its commercial interests.

The fact is, the Kenyan presidency of Uhuru Kenyatta has greatly degraded individual liberties, and the situation is even worse in the “democracy-dictatorship” that is Ethiopia, where political opposition and independent media have been completely silenced. Addis Ababa and Nairobi, to a lesser extent, provide Washington with cannon fodder in the fight against the Islamist al-Shabab, which strikes in neighboring Somalia. Kenya and Ethiopia are then mere economies, with a gross domestic product that grows at a good pace. The war against terrorism is juxtaposed with the imperatives of an economic war against China, which has since become the main commercial partner of the African continent.

Even though the speeches are beautiful, they end up getting on your nerves due to the distance that separates practice from declarations of principle.