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AFRICAN COUNTRIES ARE CRITICAL GEOSTRATEGIC PLAYERS

U.S. Department of State sent this bulletin at 08/09/2022 05:02 PM EDT


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FROM THE DESK OF


SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

U.S. DEPARTMENT of STATE



Our relationships across the African continent are absolutely central to meeting
global challenges. That's why, this week, I traveled to South Africa, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda. We're strengthening our
partnerships to build a better future for our people. Read the speech I gave in
Pretoria, South Africa on the Biden Administration's Sub-Saharan Africa
Strategy. 

For me, it is, simply put, wonderful to be back in South Africa. I’ve actually
had the privilege of visiting several times before, including with President
Clinton, President Obama, and then-Vice President Biden. And the impressions
from those visits are very much seared into my own memory.

Seeing President Clinton become the first U.S. president to address South
Africa’s parliament, joined by a delegation from our Congressional Black Caucus,
many of whom were stalwart supporters of the anti-apartheid movement and who
represent part of the vast African diaspora that enriches our nations’ ties.

Seeing our first black president, the son of a Kenyan father and an American
mother, stand in the two-by-two-meter cell on Robben Island that once jailed
South Africa’s first black president.

Or hearing the buzz of the vuvuzelas as the U.S. men’s team played the first
World Cup ever held in Africa.

Today, I have the honor of setting out our government’s new strategy for the
partnership between sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. It’s a strategy
that builds on the broad vision for our nation’s engagement in the region, which
I had an opportunity to share last November in Nigeria.

It is fitting to set out the strategy here, on the Future Africa campus, an
institution whose mission is bringing together people from different
disciplines, backgrounds, and nationalities to tackle some of the most vexing
challenges of our time.

Our future depends on young people like the scholars and practitioners who come
here to study. By 2050, one in four people on the planet we share will be
African. They will shape the destiny not only of this continent but of the
world.

It’s also fitting because South Africa’s struggle for freedom, and the courage
and sacrifices of those who led it, continues to inspire people around the
world. We know that in South Africa, like in the United States, the long walk to
freedom is unfinished. Yet the remarkable progress made is all around us.

In 1956, 156 activists were rounded up for rallying support for the Freedom
Charter, a document that had the audacity to claim that South Africa belonged to
its people. When the Treason Trial began here in Pretoria, the accused included
one of the charter’s drafters, Professor Z.K. Matthews, and a rising ANC
activist, Joe Matthews – father and son, and grandfather and father to the woman
who today serves as South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and
Cooperation, Dr. Naledi Pandor. 

We see that progress also in the achievements of her fellow South Africans – the
recent triumphs of the women of Banyana Banyana, the men of the Springboks. The
enduring musical influences of Makeba and Masekela, the new sway of the Amapiano
and DJs like Black Coffee, who just took home a Grammy.

Finally, it’s fitting to set out our strategy here in South Africa because there
is such a deep bond between our nations and people, and all we have in common as
vibrant democracies whose diversity remains our greatest strength.

Our strategy is rooted in the recognition that sub-Saharan Africa is a major
geopolitical force, one that shaped our past, is shaping our present, and will
shape our future.

It’s a strategy that reflects the region’s complexity – its diversity, its power
and influence – and one that focuses on what we will do with African nations and
peoples, not for African nations and peoples.

Put simply, the United States and African nations can’t achieve any of our
shared priorities – whether that’s recovering from the pandemic, creating
broad-based economic opportunity, addressing the climate crisis, expanding
energy access, revitalizing democracies, or strengthening the free and open
international order – we can’t do any of that if we don’t work together as equal
partners.

That is why I’d like to focus on four priorities that we believe we have to
tackle together which are at the heart of the U.S. strategy for sub-Saharan
Africa.

First, we will foster openness, by which we mean the capacity of individuals,
communities, and nations to choose their own path and shape the world we live
in.

When leaders of newly independent African nations came together in 1963 to
establish the Organization of African Unity, the predecessor to the African
Union, here’s how they began their charter: “Convinced that it is the
inalienable right of all people to control their own destiny.”

It was a conviction born of the struggle of generations of Africans whose
destiny had been determined by colonial powers. This inalienable right depends
on a system of rules and principles which Africans have helped forge over
decades through their leadership in institutions like the United Nations and the
African Union.

And yet too often African nations have been treated as instruments of other
nations’ progress rather than the authors of their own. Time and again they have
been told to pick a side in great power contests that feel far removed from the
daily struggles of their people.

The United States will not dictate Africa’s choices. Neither should anyone else.
The right to make these choices belongs to Africans, and Africans alone.

At the same time, the United States and the world will look to African nations
to defend the rules of the international system that they’ve done so much to
shape. These include the right of every country to have its independence, its
sovereignty, and its territorial integrity respected – a principle at stake now
in Ukraine.

We believe that all nations should be able to stand up for the right of a
country not to have its borders redrawn by force, for if we allow that principle
to be violated anywhere, we weaken it everywhere.

Openness also means creating pathways for the free flow of ideas, information,
investment, which in the 21st century requires digital connectivity. So the
United States is partnering with African governments, businesses, and
entrepreneurs to build and adapt the infrastructure that enables that
connectivity – an open, reliable, interoperable, secure internet; data centers;
cloud computing.

That’s what happened in March, when Mozambique became the first African country
to license SpaceX’s Starlink technology. The technology uses satellites to
provide internet service, and it’s going to help expand access and lower costs
for people throughout the country’s rural areas.

Now, one reason internet service is so spotty in places like Mozambique is
because providers rely on data centers that are hundreds or even thousands of
kilometers away. We’re working with African countries and businesses to change
that.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation is putting $300 million
in financing toward developing, building, and operating data centers across the
region, including in South Africa.

We recently awarded a $600 million contract to build an undersea
telecommunications cable that will stretch over 17,000 kilometers – from
Southeast Asia through the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, to Europe –
delivering high-speed, reliable, secure connections for people across the
continents.

The way this infrastructure is built will reverberate for decades. After all,
we’ve seen the consequences when international infrastructure deals are corrupt
and coercive, when they’re poorly built or environmentally destructive, when
they import or abuse workers, or burden countries with crushing debts.

That’s why it’s so important for countries to have choices, to be able to weigh
them transparently, with the input of local communities without pressure or
coercion.

Now, for as long as they’ve had their independence, African countries have also
recognized that the right of nations to chart their own path is bound up in
ensuring the right of individual citizens to do the same thing.

So this brings me to our second priority: working with African partners to
fulfill the promise of democracy.

The overwhelming majority of people across Africa prefer democracy to any other
form of government. Even greater majorities oppose the authoritarian
alternatives to democracy. More than 70 percent reject military rule; more than
80 percent reject one-man rule, according to the Africa-based polling
organization Afrobarometer.

African citizens want democracy – that is clear. The question is whether African
governments can make democracy deliver by improving the lives of their citizens
in tangible ways. That is a challenge that is not unique to Africa. It’s one
facing democracies in every part of the world, including the United States. And
it’s a problem that won’t be fixed by maintaining the same approach.

So here’s what we’ll do differently. We won’t treat democracy as an area where
Africa has problems and the United States has solutions. We recognize that our
democracies face common challenges, which we need to tackle together, as equals,
alongside other governments, civil society, and citizens.

That was the spirit that animated the 100 countries that came together for the
Summit for Democracy President Biden hosted last December. It will drive the
African Leaders Summit that the United States will host this December for the
first time since 2014 – providing an opportunity to build greater momentum
around tackling shared priorities.

We will work with partners to tackle 21st century threats to democracy like
misinformation, digital surveillance, weaponized corruption. We’ll launch a
novel approach to good governance, the Global Fragility Act, which will make a
decade-long investment in promoting more peaceful, more inclusive, more
resilient societies in places where conditions are ripe for conflict, including
Mozambique and the Coastal West African countries of Benin, Côte d’Ivoire,
Ghana, Guinea, Togo.

In each of these places, we’re starting by asking our local partners where our
help can make the biggest difference. And we’re drawing on decades of lessons
learned in conflict prevention, such as cultivating relationships between
community leaders, government officials, and security forces, which are vital to
defusing tensions before they erupt into violence; and building resilience to
the destabilizing impacts of climate change, like more frequent, more severe
droughts.

Thanks to bipartisan support in the United States Congress, this initiative can
count on $200 million a year in funding – every year, for 10 years. That’s the
kind of horizon that will allow us to look beyond quick fixes.

We’ll focus on the connection between democracy and security. History shows that
strong democracies tend to be more stable and less prone to conflict – and that
poor governance, exclusion, and corruption inherent in weak democracies makes
them more vulnerable to extremist movements as well as to foreign interference.
That includes the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group, which exploits instability to
pillage resources and commit abuses with impunity, as we’ve seen in Mali and the
Central African Republic.

The United States recognizes that African countries face real security concerns,
and that countless communities are afflicted by the twin scourges of terrorism
and violence. But the answer to those problems is not Wagner, it’s not any other
mercenary group. The answer is working to build more effective, accountable
African security forces, which respect people’s rights, and tackling the
marginalization that often drives people to criminal or extremist groups. The
answer is sustained diplomacy to end violence and open paths to peace –
diplomacy that’s increasingly being led by African leaders, regional
organizations, and citizens.

African countries can count on the United States to support these efforts – as
we’ve demonstrated through our engagement in places like Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan,
eastern DRC – which is a key focus of my visit this week.

Finally, the answer is peaceful transitions of power, through free and fair
elections. African leaders are increasingly underscoring the importance of these
transitions to regional security and prosperity. That includes ECOWAS, which is
debating whether its 15 member nations should adopt a ban on presidents seeking
a third term. Among the most outspoken proponents of the ban are the presidents
of Ghana and Nigeria, both of whom are in their second term.

This week, Kenyans will elect a new leader, and Angolans will follow suit later
this month. In 2023, the peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Nigeria, and Senegal will all go to the polls. Every one of these elections is
an opportunity for African citizens and nations to reaffirm that leaders are
accountable to their people, and strengthen the case for democracy in the region
and around the world.

Third, we’ll work together to recover from the devastation wrought by COVID-19
and lay the foundation for broad-based, sustainable economic opportunity to
improve the lives of our people.

We know the pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to Africa – lives lost,
livelihoods shattered. More than 55 million Africans have been driven into
poverty by the pandemic, setting back decades of hard-earned progress. The
economic pain has been deepened by Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine.

Even before President Putin launched his full invasion, 193 million people
worldwide were in need of humanitarian food assistance. The World Bank believes
that Russia’s invasion could add another 40 million people to this unprecedented
number. Most are in Africa.

The United States is there for African countries in this unprecedented crisis,
because that’s what partners do for each other, and because helping Africans
jumpstart a broad-based recovery and build resilience to weather future shocks
is vital to our shared prosperity.

So let me briefly share how we’re doing that. We’re rallying other countries and
international institutions to step up on key challenges, like debt relief.
Together with South Africa and other members of the G20, we helped develop a
Common Framework for Debt Relief, bringing in China and other creditors for the
very first time. For Zambia, this collective commitment is poised to unlock $1.4
billion in an IMF program designed to help the country return to a stable
economic path and foster more resilient, inclusive growth for the Zambian
people.

We’re also providing life-saving support. Since the beginning of the year, the
United States has sent more than $6.6 billion in humanitarian and food
assistance to Africa.

In May, I brought together a Global Food Security Ministerial meeting at the
United Nations to try to rally donors to close some of the urgent funding gaps
and allow affected countries to highlight the areas where they need support. Our
African colleagues made clear that, beyond emergency relief, what they really
want is more investment in agricultural resilience, innovation,
self-sufficiency. We’re responding to those calls.

Our initiative called Feed the Future will invest $11 billion over five years in
20 partner countries, 16 of which are in Africa. And a new initiative we
launched with the United Arab Emirates is turbo-charging investment and
innovation in climate smart agriculture.

Now, it’s not just agriculture. Across a range of fields, the United States is
working with African partners to try to unlock innovation and growth. As we do,
we’re building on African-led initiatives, such as the Africa Continental Free
Trade Area, which, when fully implemented will comprise the fifth largest
economic bloc in the world, and also the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

Now think about infrastructure for a minute. At the G7 meeting just recently
held, President Biden led in launching the Partnership for Global Infrastructure
and Investment, which will mobilize $600 billion globally toward concrete
projects over the next five years. The United States is committed to raising
$200 billion towards this effort, and we’re already implementing projects that
are focused on health, on digital infrastructure, empowering women and girls,
energy, and climate.

Consider youth. During this trip, I met with alumni of the Mandela Washington
Fellowship. Since President Obama launched the program eight years ago, more
than 5,000 rising leaders from every country in Sub-Saharan Africa have come to
the United States for academic and leadership training – building skills and
relationships that will last a lifetime. The broader YALI Network, which
provides tools, resources, and a virtual community for young African leaders,
now has more than 700,000 members.

Consider what we’re doing in health. In 2003, President George W. Bush created
PEPFAR to make a transformational investment in HIV prevention, detection,
treatment, and care. It’s one of the greatest initiatives, I think, the United
States has undertaken in my lifetime. Since that time, we’ve invested over $100
billion in the effort, nearly all of it in partners in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Together, we have saved the lives of an estimated 21 million people. We
prevented millions more infections, including five and a half million babies
born HIV-free.

Now, think about that for a second. These are big numbers. We talk about
numbers, and it sometimes defies us really understanding what it’s all about.
Each of these numbers is an individual life, an individual destiny, an
individual story. And thanks to this incredible work, those stories have
continued, and they’re going to contribute so much to the world that we share.

Today, PEPFAR supports 70,000 health clinics, 3,000 laboratories, 300,000 health
workers, and countless DREAMS ambassadors, who help keep adolescent girls and
young women safe from HIV.

These efforts are making a lasting difference in the lives of millions of
Africans. That’s what we’ve seen during the pandemic, when, in addition to
providing more than 170 million doses of safe, effective COVID vaccines to
African countries – free of charge and with more to come – the health systems
we’ve built together over decades have saved countless lives. Clinics that we’ve
built together have tended to people with the most severe COVID cases. Community
health workers we helped train have gone door to door, getting jabs into arms.
Research partnerships that we’ve co-developed have led to breakthroughs in
identifying new variants of COVID and treatments.

Meanwhile, our partnerships with national and regional health institutions –
like the Africa CDC – have helped detect and respond to new outbreaks like our
recent collaboration with Ghana to contain that country’s first case of Marburg
disease.

And where the pandemic has also exposed gaps, we’re working to address them
together.

Back in February, I brought together foreign ministers from 40 countries –
including Minister Pandor – as well as multilateral bodies like the African
Union. We put together a Global Action Plan that defines key priorities, like
ensuring more equitable distribution of vaccines, and we set concrete targets.
Then we divided up responsibility among our nations to meet those targets,
drawing on our complementary strengths. And we’re getting together regularly to
make sure that we’re tracking our progress.

Together with South Africa, Indonesia, and other G20 members, we also stood up a
historic new fund at the World Bank and the World Health Organization for
pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. This will be critical in
providing sustainable support to strengthen the health security of countries and
regions in need and break the cycle of crisis and neglect. We go through this
every time: major crisis; we rally; we mobilize; the crisis is over; we go back
to business as usual. We can’t afford to do that, and we won’t.

We’ve also heard the desire of African countries for vaccine self-sufficiency.
We’re working together to help you achieve it. In November, I visited one of the
vaccine production facilities that we’re helping support in Senegal. And just
last month, the U.S. National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
teamed up with Afrigen to share technical expertise on the development of
next-generation mRNA vaccines as well as therapeutics, and that is happening
right here in South Africa.

All of this collaboration is in our mutual interest because – as the pandemic
has demonstrated – as long as any of us are at risk, all of us are at risk.

That brings me to the final area where our partnership is crucial: leading a
clean energy transition that saves our planet, adapts to the effects of climate
change, and provides energy to power economic opportunity.

The United Nations recognizes Africa as the most vulnerable region in the world
to the effects of climate. Not too long ago, we had to imagine those effects.
Today, we’re living them. You saw it in April, when catastrophic flooding killed
more than 400 people around Durban. Storms like the ones that caused those
floods are now twice as likely to occur due to climate change, and that will
only increase in frequency and intensity as the Earth continues to warm. As in
the United States, the people who are already struggling are being hit the
hardest.

Not all countries bear equal responsibility for this crisis. The United States
has around 4 percent of the world’s population; we contribute about 11 percent
of global emissions, making us the second-biggest emitter after China.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 15 percent of the world’s population,
produces only 3 percent of emissions. And historically, major economies like
ours took steps to develop that we’re now asking others to forgo because we’ve
understood the impact on climate.

We recognize this imbalance places a greater responsibility on countries like
the United States, both to reduce our own emissions, but also to help other
countries make the transition to clean energy and adapt to a changing climate.
That’s why, at COP26, President Biden committed to work with our Congress to
dedicate $3 billion a year to help people in the most vulnerable countries adapt
to the impacts of climate change. As home to 17 of the world’s 20 most
climate-vulnerable countries, much of this aid will go to sub-Saharan Africa.
And we will look to build on these and other efforts at COP27 in Egypt later
this year.

Leaders across Africa have made clear that while they are committed to doing
their part to reduce climate change, they need greater and more reliable energy
access to meet people’s urgent needs and growing needs. 

We know that this transition will not look the same in every country or
community – that it will need to be tailored to individual capacities and
individual circumstances. And the United States is committed to working closely
with you as you determine how best to meet your specific needs for expanded
energy access and economic development, as well as the climate targets that
you’ve set. We’re also committed to helping you support the workers and
communities who will bear the greatest short-term costs of the shift to clean
energy. All that is part and parcel of making what we call a just energy
transition.

But I think it’s a mistake to think about climate only through the prism of
threats, burdens – or to frame this as a choice between preventing a catastrophe
and creating opportunities. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to expand
energy access and create opportunities – for Africans and for Americans. That’s
what President Biden means when he says, “When I think of climate change, I
think jobs.”

We’re already showing how that can be done. In Ghana, we’re working with
partners to build West Africa’s first hybrid solar-hydro plant. It’s going to
improve reliability, reduce costs, and cut more than 47,000 tons of emissions
every year. That is the equivalent of taking about 10,000 cars off the road. In
Kenya, where 90 percent of the energy comes from renewable sources, U.S. firms
have invested $570 million into off-grid energy markets, creating 40,000 green
jobs.

We’re also working together to conserve and restore the continent’s natural
ecosystems, which is crucial to reducing emissions and preserving the
continent’s unique, extraordinary biodiversity. That means delivering real
incentives for governments and communities to choose conservation over
deforestation because the lasting consequences of losing forests like the one in
the Congo Basin – the world’s first lung – will be devastating and irreversible
for local communities as well as for communities around the world.

If you step back and think for a minute on the priorities that I’ve set out, the
reality is that every single one of them was championed by Africans first – the
interconnectedness of our health and our climate, the principle that all nations
should have the right to choose their own fate, the idea that inequity within
and between nations threatens our shared security and prosperity. For decades,
African citizens, African countries, and the bloc of African nations pushed for
these very priorities. And today, to the benefit of people in the United States
and all nations, these are the world’s priorities.

Right now, in South Africa’s Northern Cape, the biggest radio telescope in the
world – the MeerKAT – is capturing some of the most detailed views we’ve ever
had of space. A series of images released in January show kinetic bursts of
energy – incandescent reds and oranges – generated by a hundred million stars in
the Milky Way, 25,000 light years away.

Producing just one of these images required 70 terabytes of data. It took three
years to process – part of the cutting-edge research being led right here in
South Africa. And this in a country where, as one scholar wrote, and I quote,
“Prior to 1994, public investment… was largely an instrument for advancing the
objectives of the apartheid government.”

When MeerKAT’s images were published, the chief scientist at the South African
Radio Astronomy Observatory said, “The best telescopes expand our horizons in
unexpected ways.” Just think, for a moment, of all the horizons expanded by
those images. Think of the scientists around the world using MeerKAT’s data to
unpack the greatest mysteries of human existence, like whether there’s life
beyond Earth. Think of the South African school kids who regularly visit
MeerKAT-64’s massive antennae – and imagine all the things that they will be
inspired to do.

What’s true of the best telescopes is true of the best partnerships: They expand
our horizons in unexpected ways. To solve problems, yes, but also to marvel, to
explore, to inspire. There is so much more for African nations and the United
States to do together across so many fields, including some we may not even have
discovered yet. As partners, that horizon is ours to make.

I appreciate those who have taken the time to write to me in the past several
months. To share your thoughts – please write to me and my team at
EmailTeam@State.gov.

Sincerely, 

Secretary Antony J. Blinken

 

Note to Readers
This new flagship email – “From the Secretary’s Desk” – features the Secretary’s
remarks and speeches on important current events. Sign up to receive this email
regularly

This email was adapted from Secretary Blinken’s speech “Vital Partners, Shared
Priorities: The Biden Administration’s Sub-Saharan Africa Strategy" given on
August, 8, 2022.

Find all my speeches, remarks, and other press statements on State.gov. You can
follow me on Twitter and Instagram to learn more about my work. I’m also on
Spotify, where I'm creating playlists of my favorite music from around the
world.

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