Africa more important than ever: Column

Africa is no longer the backwater of U.S. foreign policy. President Obama will host the first-ever African heads of state summit with 47 leaders in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 4-6. The top agenda items are security and private investment, areas where both Americans and Africans have growing shared interests.

Yet the summit has undertones of too little, too late. Even as more Americans begin to update their views of Africa, a big question is whether our government is adapting quickly enough.

A major driver of a new relationship should be Africa's resurgence. The region's $2 trillion economy has been growing on average above 5% per year for more than a decade. The continent is home to six of the 10 fastest expanding economies in the world.

Africa's growth story is not just about oil or gold. Nigeria's $500 billion economy is humming along above 6% annual growth, even as its oil sector is stagnant. Countries without major petroleum or mining sectors, like Ethiopia and Rwanda, are also booming.

Rising incomes among Africa's nearly one billion people mean exploding demand for energy, services, and consumer goods ­— and U.S. firms stand to benefit. General Electric has already made major new investments in power, rail, and aviation in Nigeria. GE is now looking to expand further in Ghana, Kenya, Angola and other markets. Walmart invested more than $2 billion to move into South Africa in 2012 and now it is planning to enter East and West Africa.

Hungry for high-return frontier markets, some of the largest private equity firms, including Carlyle and Blackstone, have launched their own Africa funds. Even small U.S. companies, like Precision Tune Auto Care of Leesburg, Va., are opening branches in West Africa.

While the economic picture is bright, Africa is rising on the security agenda. The principal future national security threats to the United States are terrorism, cross-border disease, and underground criminal networks. As the U.S. has squeezed these problems in the Middle East and elsewhere, they have popped up in Africa. Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have emerged in Somalia and across the Sahara Desert. The U.S. ousting of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 added to instability by flooding the region with well-armed militants. Narcotics traffickers and criminal cartels have also penetrated most of West Africa.

The U.S. response to both the economic opportunities and the security threats should be the same: build closer partnerships with African allies.

But the recent record of American engagement has been shamefully inadequate. Both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush nudged U.S. policy in the right direction. President Clinton understood that Africa was changing and championed greater trade. President Bush launched a game-changing AIDS effort that has saved the lives of some seven million Africans. He also attacked malaria and created the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an agency to help spur economic growth in well-governed poor countries.

Much of that momentum was lost during President Obama's first term. A handful of ill-conceived White House initiatives to address environmental and health issues were quietly abandoned. Finger wagging admonishment from American officials — like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2009 "tough love" tour — stood in stark contrast to Asian and European visitors who came bearing business deals. The message of Washington's indifference was received loud-and-clear in African capitals.

The August summit is the last chance to turn things around for this administration. Power Africa — a promising new U.S. effort to help boost electricity in six African nations announced by President Obama last summer — is a positive example of the new kind of partnership that can bring together public expertise with private capital and move beyond the tired old aid model. It's also exactly the kind of engagement that Africans are seeking from America, and thus can help build stronger alliances to tackle our mutual challenges.

Beyond 2016, the U.S. will clearly need to modernize its economic and security toolbox. We have agencies to support expanded trade and investment, like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank, but they were built for the global economy of the 1970s and remain strangled by obsolete rules and products.

Our military cooperation also requires rethinking. To avoid intervening directly in the far corners of the globe, we have no choice but to build robust security partnerships in places such as Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Ethiopia and Kenya. Our traditional model of pro forma diplomatic engagement combined with counterterrorism training-and-equipment has simply not worked well enough. The serial failure of our political and security efforts in Mali are a sign we need a new more aggressive and more nuanced approach.

Even as our government is lagging, Africa is moving ahead. A few retrograde dictators remain (Zimbabwe, Eritrea, and Equatorial Guinea come to mind), yet most African leaders are putting their countries on the long path to security and prosperity.

Americans understand that. The lands that once evoked images of famine and chaos are giving way to upward mobility and innovation. Memories of LiveAid and Black Hawk Down are being replaced in the popular mind by the films of Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong'o and the award-winning books of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Africa, in short, is going mainstream.

The African continent is now more important to the United States than ever before. It's in our own national interest that U.S. foreign policy catch up.

Todd Moss, a former senior State Department official, is senior fellow atThe Center for Global Development. His novel,The Golden Hour, about an American diplomat in Mali will be released Sept 4.

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