Rare Visit Underscores Tangles in Obama's Ties to Africa

Rare Visit Underscores Tangles in Obama’s Ties to Africa

President Obama arrived at the Presidential Palace in Dakar, Senegal, on Thursday.

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, NICHOLAS KULISH and LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: June 26, 2013

DAKAR, Senegal — As a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama told a packed auditorium in Kenya’s capital, “I want you all to know that as your ally, your friend and your brother, I will be there in every way I can.”

 But he will not be there. President Obama, who Wednesday began his second trip to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, will skip his father’s homeland once again, a reflection of the many challenges that his administration has faced in trying to make a lasting imprint across the continent.

 Despite decades of American investment to promote stability in the volatile region of East Africa, Kenya just elected a president indicted by the International Criminal Court, accused of bankrolling death squads driven by ethnic rivalry. It was the outcome that Washington had desperately tried to avoid, and Mr. Obama’s advisers determined that a photo op of the American president shaking hands with a man awaiting trial was not one they needed.

 “It just wasn’t the best time for the president to travel to Kenya at this point,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

 For Africans across the continent, the election of an African-American president signaled a transformative moment in their relationship with the United States, one that would usher in a special understanding of their hopes and needs.

 But Mr. Obama’s own aspirations for changing Africa have been strained by security threats that have been mounting across vast stretches of its territory, by the spotty human rights records of nations that the United States has worked with to contain them — and by the president’s notable absences from the continent where his father was born.

 His two immediate predecessors in the White House made big gambles and left large legacies on the continent, but Mr. Obama has struggled to gain much traction on his stated aims in Africa: consolidating democracy, protecting women’s rights and reducing hunger. Some wonder whether this trip may be his best opportunity.

 “This is the last chance for the administration to salvage an Africa legacy,” said Todd Moss, a senior fellow of the Center for Global Development, a research group in Washington. “But it is very late in the day.”

 Mr. Obama’s only previous visit to sub-Saharan Africa as president was a brief stop in Ghana in 2009, despite the heightened economic and strategic stakes at play on the continent, home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies and some of its most vexing security problems.

 China’s top leaders, by contrast, have busily traveled to dozens of African countries in recent years, investing billions of dollars in natural resources, building infrastructure on a vast scale and giving rise to criticism that the United States is ceding a rising region.

 LOTS MORE HERE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/world/africa/rare-visit-underscores-tangles-in-obamas-ties-to-africa.html?ref=africa