America Votes: What It Means for Africa
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Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Welcome to the show and to the third installment of our election series, America Votes, What It Means for the World. Today, we're focusing on Africa.

Now, before you even think it, yes, Africa isn't a country. It's a giant continent encompassing a range of different languages and cultures and histories. But part of what we're doing this week is to look at how the two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, agree and disagree on policies toward various parts of the world. We've looked at the Middle East, we've looked at Europe, and today we want to focus on Africa.

Which brings me to one sad fact. The last US president to visit Africa anywhere on the continent was Barack Obama in 2015. Trump did not go. Biden was hoping to go last month to Angola, but he canceled his trip because of Hurricane Milton.

Would a President Harris give Africa a bit more attention? Would Trump in the second term? Is Africa even an area of importance for the United States? Or does it show up mostly when it's an arena for competition with China?

Well, I have two excellent guests with me today. Martin Kimani is the former Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations. He now runs the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. And Zaina Busman is the inaugural director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She previously worked at the World Bank.

Remember, we've still got that special discount going. Go to foreignpolicy.com/subscribe, type in the code FP100 at checkout and get $100 off your first year of the magazine. That is FP100, no spaces. The offer is lasting for just this week. Don't miss out. Okay, let's dive in. Martin Zeneb, welcome to FP Live. Thank you. Good to be here.

Martin, so I'm going to come to you first. You are no longer a diplomat, so I know you will be frank. You heard me say it the last time an American president visited Africa was 2015. Where does Africa figure on America's list of foreign policy priorities? Well, I happen to have had the privilege of being a Kenyan public servant when President Obama came to visit.

And in fact, the job of scripting some of our remarks and engagement through the day fell to me. And so I very much recall having to really closely examine what President Obama was coming to Nairobi to try and achieve.

And even then, that was a time when he was driving power Africa. He was trying to engage throughout the continent. He went to Addis Ababa. He had, as you can recall, visited Cairo to speak about a new deal between the United States and Africa. And that was a really substantive visit. That has not happened since then.

And it's broadly, I think, reflective of the fact that Africa continues to not be a high priority for the United States. Now, rhetorically, that's not the case. The Biden administration, more than any previous administration I can remember, I can recall for a long time, has rhetorically really spoken up the importance of Africa. Cabinet secretaries have traversed the continent from top to bottom.

But when you look at the actual partnerships that the United States and African countries have been able to develop through this presidency, they're only modest results for that. My country, Kenya, has been, I think, at the forefront of US attention, and certainly significant efforts have been made, but still Africa compared to other parts of the world is still a

pretty low priority for this administration. - Danab, I'm wondering if you agree with that assessment, low priority for the Biden administration, but also can you put that in context? Has it always been the case?

Sure, I think I would really like to echo Martin's points that Africa, for a variety of reasons, has just not been at the kind of top of the ranking of priorities for the US. I mean, one is also geographical, right? You know, the distance between North America and the African continent just being one. Whereas when you look at the relationship between Africa and Europe, just because they are neighboring continents, it's slightly different.

I think another one being that economically going by whether it's trade numbers or foreign direct investments, you have all of those happening with Africa. There's trade between the US and the African continent, different countries, but there are also foreign direct investment flows to the continent, particularly in the oil and gas industry, but also in other sectors.

But this really cannot be compared with financial flows between the US and Europe or between the US and a couple of Asian countries and economies. So there's also kind of that hard reality. And to be honest, this has basically always been the case.

for a very, very long time. This is not to say that individual African countries or individual sectors and industries at various points in time historically had not been important. You know, there's now all of this discussion around, for example, sourcing cobalt or critical minerals from the African continent, but this is not necessarily a new phenomenon.

Some of the uranium used in the first bomb was kind of sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo back in the 1940s, for example. So this has kind of always been the case, but there are different variations, I would say, depending on the sector, depending on the country itself.

Martin, I want to look back a little bit. I feel like the continent of Africa often remembers President George W. Bush quite fondly for a variety of reasons. You mentioned Obama already, but how would you compare the Trump years, for example, with the Biden years, if we use the Biden years as a proxy for what potential Harris years could look like?

Ravi, I think there's been a significant change in American engagement, but that may reflect the general shift in how much more difficult it is to govern today than it was 15, 20 years ago. I think fundamentally American politics has changed during that time, and not just changed towards Africa, it's just changed period.

You've gone from George Bush presiding over United States that was the unquestioned unipolar power globally that saw itself as indispensable and in many ways was indispensable for both good and bad to a much more contested global order and much greater difficulty holding together coalitions here in the United States. So under these conditions, I think

engaging Africa with the domestic politics of the United States has proven harder and harder to do. So George Bush will be remembered as the person who enabled PEPFAR and he can credibly say that PEPFAR has saved millions of lives.

after over a decade of the denial of the impact of HIV/AIDS on people. And so George Bush has a proud record and very few of us can forget the pictures of his visits to Africa, the sort of engagement and sense of partnership that he seemed to so effortlessly sort of reflect. But that was a different United States. After that,

The sort of unfettered American power fell away and having Africa as a higher priority in the context of changing American politics has just not been able to keep up. So I would imagine that if George W. Bush was in power today in the White House, I don't think he'd be that different from the present occupant of the White House.

You ignored Trump there, Martin. Just to put you on the spot, how would Trump fare in these comparisons? I mean, he did, after all, call African countries asshole countries, didn't bother to visit. How is he seen across the continent?

If you look at the African polls of whoever occupies the White House, they're always very high. For whatever reason, Africans tend to poll very positively for whoever is in the White House. And Trump was by no means an unpopular figure in Africa. And I don't think he's an unpopular figure in Africa today. He made this very unfortunate, actually scandalous remark.

And there was a lot of pushback. His reaction and his administration's reaction was basically that they were not that interested in Africa as a whole. They had other priorities, the Abrahamic Accords, and the few African countries like Morocco or Sudan that could play into the Abrahamic Accords received attention and support from them. But they also wanted to have one or two countries that they could engage with.

so that they're not accused of totally thinking that this was an asshole continent. And one of them was Kenya, where President Trump's administration put a free trade agreement on the table. That was going to be the first free trade agreement south of the Sahara. There's one in Morocco. I think Tunisia. I don't know if Zainab can correct me if I'm wrong. And

And that was an ambitious effort to bring that agreement to life. And during negotiations, Secretary Mnuchin at the time, very unofficially, you know, actually in just a conversation, told us, look, if we don't come back to office, if we lose this election, you should not think that this free trade agreement is going to go forward. The Democrats are going to pull it back.

And the Kenyan side didn't think so. But indeed, the moment the Biden administration came in, they pulled back the free trade agreement. So Trump, in his own way, had his own attempts at outreach, especially with, I think, Kenya and one or two other countries. But he did not have an Africa strategy other than a strategy of denying Chinese access to African influence.

Zainab, I'm wondering if you can build on that and also cast forward in terms of the future. We just heard a little bit about Trump in his first term. What would a potential Trump 2.0 term look like for Africa? And how might that contrast with a potential Harris presidency? Sure.

I think starting with the first term of Trump, 2016 to 2020, and the approach to Africa or engagement and the maybe lack of engagement or disengagement, I would say that while at one level, the level of whether it's rhetoric, whether it's the level of articulating a vision for engaging with a continent or a level of articulating a clear strategy for engaging with a continent,

That was not very clear, to say the least. There probably wasn't that much of a coherent strategy. And when you talk to some of the people in the administration at the time, right now, they would say to you that there was actually some thinking that was being done. But I think that thinking was obstructed by the actual strategy.

mechanics of how the administration itself functioned. And we saw that, you know, played out also in domestic policy here in the US where things, a lot of things were very haphazard. And the idea right now is that in a second Trump term,

There would be more clarity of vision and depending on what document you consult or who you're talking to, there are elements of a clear vision that are being articulated right now because the idea is that mistakes of the first administration or the first term should be avoided. And I think that also applies to Africa policy.

So to be more specific here, I mean, under the Trump first term, they did articulate a Prosper Africa strategy. Well, not a strategy, a Prosper Africa initiative.

This was announced, I think, by the then National Security Advisor John Bolton. And it was basically an initiative that was meant to be very commercial in nature, encompassing trade and investment initiatives expressly to counter China and Russia and other adversaries on the continent.

that initiative is still being implemented right now. In a sense, it's been fleshed out by the Biden administration. They've been able to come up with a couple of investment deals on the continent and they're very active right now. So I think, yes, one could say that I'm

Maybe there was no clear strategy in the first term, but there were actually some initiatives that towards the end, or maybe midway and towards the end of the administration that started to come through despite all of the, you know, haphazardness of how policy was done and implemented at the time.

So then this brings me to the second part of your question, starting to forecast as to what would a Trump second term look like for the African continent. It's quite difficult to do that. But if we are going to go by whether it's documents like Project 2025, and there are actually significant and sizable sections on African international development documents.

or going by what individuals who are currently in the Trump orbit, and there are advisers, there are people already who are doing some serious thinking on Africa, are saying, I think a couple of things, and maybe we can flesh them out during the course of the conversation. I think the first is that that approach of countering China and Russia and other adversaries on the continent is very much going to continue.

But what is also very interesting is I don't think that approach is going to be that framing is going to be that much different from what we're seeing with the Biden administration right now, even if they do not explicitly articulate that they are trying to compete with China. That is not often mentioned in public statements, but that is often part of the calculus.

So that objective of countering adversaries and competitors on the continent is very much going to continue. Executive tools...

entities, government agencies, I think will be deployed on that front. So we have to also remember that it was during the Trump first term that an entity like the Development Finance Corporation was enacted. The bill, at least for its creation, was enacted in law and it kind of came to be and it still exists. So entities like the DFC, I think are going to be even more explicitly deployed towards that objective.

Maybe a third thing I would mention, because there are so many things here to talk about in terms of what we could potentially see with a Trump administration, is that it's also been made very clear that engagement with Africa and indeed a lot of countries in the global south,

would be more commercially oriented and very much focused on, maybe you could say a little bit more transactional, making it clear what would be the benefit for the US as well as maybe some benefits for those countries. So whether it's a trade relationship, Martin mentioned the idea of a free trade agreement that was initially on the table with respect to Kenya, that might actually come back on the table

with some other countries, maybe the relationship might be a little bit more tenuous. And I think about South Africa here in particular, that indeed South Africa, it might even get kicked out of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. There's certainly that momentum building there.

So overall, I think the relationship with Africa is going to be viewed through that lens of, you know, we're only going to focus on maybe business, trade, commerce, and in a way that benefits the US and counters China and Russia and others.

but also in a way that is less focused on, you know, some of the kind of governance and democracy promotion initiatives that has been clearly articulated in the Mandate for Leadership Project 2025 document. So I'm going to stop there. There are a couple of things that I'm sure we can... Yeah, let me pick up on the democracy angle. Martin, if I can come to you with that. It strikes me that

since President Biden's inauguration in 2021, there have been six successful coup d'etats across Africa. And Trump is, in the United States at least, seen as a leader who has challenged democracy, particularly through the January 6th insurrection and his refusal to admit defeat.

in the 2020 election. How do you think that plays out across a continent like Africa? And I asked this question, you know, while thinking about a recent survey by Afrobarometer, which found that more than half of Africans are willing to accept a military takeover if elected leaders abuse power for their own ends. Yeah, thank you, Ravi. Look, we...

We need to see Africa's relationship with the United States to be beyond American domestic dynamics. So the various, the sense of outrage and triumph, or whatever it is that Americans feel about January 6th is important, but that cannot be the entire frame that the African relationship is seen from. And so when it comes to democracy promotion,

It's important that we, I think, look back at the Trump years and truly see what they meant for Africa and what they could mean in the future. One is that Trump is fundamentally disruptive political figure.

He represents a large group of Americans who feel that their institutions and their leaders, broadly speaking, are not representing their interests. They could be wrong, but that's what fuels his political power and his political popularity, whether that succeeds or not and however it plays out.

a lot of Africans are also ready for disruptions of their own politics. So in some strange way, Trump's disruptive politics dovetail really well with the need to disrupt the traditional American relationship with Africa. So there was a when President Trump met President Kenyatta,

The first question he asks him right after the courtesies is, how come you're not doing business with American companies? It was a very Trump question. And President Kenyatta turned around and said, we haven't refused to do business with America, but you're a businessman. Can you do business if there's no one across the table to do business with you? And Trump was like, you're right.

You're right, we're not there. And if we're not there, we can't do business. And then right after that meeting is when Zainab referred to it, the bringing together of these different American government funds. This actually started under the Trump administration trying to bring them together to have greater effect. Now they didn't do a lot that was practical, but that was a Trump initiative.

Secondly, even beyond the coup d'etat characters is the role of evangelical Christianity in politics and the fact that so much of Trump's support comes from the evangelical communities in the United States that have a deep

deeply committed and passionate relationship with him, seeing him as sort of a carrier of a greater message, maybe even a transcendent religious message. A lot of these groups have deep linkages with African religious and Christian communities, and they exist in the same information bubbles.

So a lot of times I'll hear an evangelical African interpreting American politics in very American terms when it comes to who's the enemy, who's the friend, what's the threat. And so I think if Trump wins, I don't think Project 2025 is going to necessarily be the only thing on the table. There are going to be different forms of

alliances, echoes and echo chambers that are going to have unexpected impact on this relationship and a disruptive impact. And the disruption could be negative, but at the same time, the traditional relationship between the United States and Africa is not something to hark back to. The status quo is deeply damaged and damaging. It needs disruption.

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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For

$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Zainab, as often happens in these discussions, we end up talking about Trump more than the alternative. And I want to ask you about Harris specifically. What do we know about how she views foreign policy towards Africa? And is there any daylight that you have seen between hers and the Biden foreign policy?

With respect to Harris and Africa, I think there's a little that we know and there's a lot that we don't know. So what do we know? Last year in 2023, she did visit Africa. She visited a number of countries. I think there was Ghana, Zambia, maybe one or two other countries.

During that visit, there was an emphasis on initiatives around women's economic empowerment. There was emphasis on initiatives around digital technologies. What we also perhaps are a little unclear about right now, and I think maybe the Harris team, they're also working on it in a sense is,

What are the elements of the current Biden approach to Africa where we're going to see continuities? Should Kamala Harris be elected as president? The Biden administration did announce an Africa strategy back in September 2022. Will there be a continuation of that strategy or will she take a very different approach? We're not really sure.

I think there are also areas where we could be fairly certain that we're going to see continuities, right? So I think about an area like the energy transition, climate policy,

And what we're hearing from her so far is that she's going to continue with the approach of trying to kind of pursue some kind of agenda around the phase out of fossil fuels, at least internationally, maybe not domestically. Whereas we know that the Trump camp and therefore a Trump second term is going to take a very, very different approach.

And on that point alone, you can see where the response from African countries could end up becoming very unexpected.

The fossil fuel rich countries that have also been clearly stating that they should have a right to exploit their natural resources for their own development and to be able to use those resources to invest in the clean energy transition. You could see how they might not completely align with that approach that a president Kamala Harris would take, whereas there could be a little bit more alignment with a Trump administration just on that particular issue.

Another area that I would like to emphasize upon would be trade, trade policy. I mean, trade policy is becoming very important globally, U.S. global trade relations, but also with Africa. As you know, the African Growth and Opportunity Act is one of the

cornerstones of US economic engagement with the African continent. It's a preferential trade program that provides duty-free access to the US market for eligible African countries. I think there are about 32 eligible countries right now across a range of product lines, about 1800 products. The program is set to expire in September of 2025.

For the past year and a half or so, there have been a lot of conversations and discussions here in Washington, DC elsewhere around the future of AGOA. In fact, the expectation was that by now AGOA should have been reauthorized, but it hasn't been reauthorized. It looks very unlikely to be reauthorized in the lame duck session of the US Congress after the election.

And this is partly because some of the bipartisanship around AGOA is starting to fracture, as is the bipartisanship that traditionally existed around U.S. engagement with Africa. That is starting to fracture a little bit, but I think it's still more commonplace.

comprehensive compared to other areas of US foreign policy. So I'm going into all of this detail to say that I think also with AGOA, because one of the things right now is that certain elements of the US government, particularly USTR, they would like to include more conditions around labor standards, environmental standards,

and it could be the case that Harris administration kind of continues with this line of thinking and I think that could make the discussions around the future of AGOA even I think less certain because obviously the other side of the aisle have a very very different view on the incorporation of these labour and environmental standards with respect to AGOA so I think there's going to be a little bit

less certainty around that trade relationship because there probably are elements of the current administration's thinking that we will carry on into a Kamala Harris presidency. So maybe those are a few things. Yeah.

We really need, I hope Vice President Harris goes, she's relatively, she's not articulated herself. And I hope when she does, she really moves us out of Africa serving as a sort of testing ground for democratic party pieties, right? So we deserve more than that. We deserve real substantive strategic engagement. AGOA,

I'm a fan of AGOA because it's there, it's useful, it's important, it's done a lot of good. But we need to get beyond AGOA. We cannot have a trade arrangement that can be sort of withdrawn willy-nilly

at the drop of a hat because of political instability. God forbid you're trying to build serious industry to feed AGOA, and then you go wrong, you run the wrong path with the United States, and it's withdrawn. Or AGOA becomes, okay, you can export AGOA, but you have to do it with this sort of environmental standards, which maybe the United States itself is not pursuing.

We have to get to a more serious stage of treating Africa as a group of countries that deserve hard-headed commercial thinking. Now, that could easily come across as transactional,

But, you know, the transformative effort of transforming Africa is so piecemeal, it's so tactical, it's so short-sighted that I would prefer a transactional approach that is commercial. So let's go beyond AGOA. That's what I meant. If Harris is only going to sustain...

how the United States has been engaging with Africa, it's not going to be good enough. At least President Biden attempted, I think, in a very visionary way to see how to link American government efforts with the African diaspora here in the United States.

and how that diaspora relates to their countries back home, including the African-American diaspora. So there are some great efforts that Biden has made that haven't been implemented, but have a lot of potential for transformation. So my hope in answering your question and adding on Zainab's viewpoint is that

Harris needs to take those best elements from the Biden strategy and needs to combine it more with a sort of Trumpian strategy

business more than aid strategy. And that needs to manifest itself in the energy space. We cannot have a situation where gas is being flared. You cannot get the financing to actually turn it into energy. So it's polluting you and your people have no power while everyone is expanding their use of fossil fuels. That's simply not good enough.

And Martin, we haven't had a chance yet to talk about conflict, but you know, my mind immediately goes to Sudan, which is going through an awful civil war where so many people have died.

And how do you think the United States, under the Biden administration, but potentially under a Trump or a Harris administration, how do you think it has done and how could it do? I'm guessing across Africa, there are comparisons that get made as well with how the United States engages with conflicts in Europe, in the Middle East, and contrast that with Africa.

Well, I think the Sudan should be understood long before we start grappling with the emergency. We should understand that Sudan is a country that young Sudanese tried to transform. Young Sudanese came out to reject dictatorship.

to reject authoritarian government and to seek civilian democratic government. And then it went wrong. And so the reset we're looking for in Sudan is a reset back to giving those young people an opportunity to realize their dream of a civilian government. Having said that,

The Sudan war and the Sudan crisis is extremely difficult for any country. So it's not just that somebody in the White House can sort of just say, let's end it and it ends tomorrow.

But what it reflects is that there are countries in the Gulf that have become more assertive, whose strategies and interests have reached deeper and deeper into Africa. And a lot of that has happened in a vacuum of American inattention. So today, the United States is simply not giving the same priority in settling this catastrophe in Sudan as it's giving its equities in the Gulf.

And those equities in the Gulf are running directly counter to it acting strongly in Sudan. So we've moved to a situation where the African Union, African institutions are at the sidelines, the United States in some ways in the sidelines as well, and the Gulf holds pride of place in how to actually mediate our way out of this conflict. And I think that may be a picture of things to come.

unless President Harris or President Trump come in with a really different strategy, which right now I don't see. Perhaps Zainab has a clearer idea than I do. Zainab, any last thoughts from you on if you had advice to give the next American president on how to rethink Africa policy, what is the one area you'd ask them to focus on?

I would focus on just having a very good and comprehensive and up-to-date trade relationship with the continent because we just know that historically throughout human history

Having a good trade relationship that is mutually beneficial has a cascading impact on so many other aspects of international relations. It helps the different parties with their own economic growth and development and jobs creation and then fosters greater harmony between the two.

I do want to emphasize also on something and perhaps echo a point that Martin made earlier, and perhaps this is specifically for Kamala Harris, if she gets elected. I think the danger that I see right now is increasingly the Trump team is seen as a party of business for Africa, for a lot of African countries, actually. They feel that they can do more things

business, commercial, trade, other aspects of like economic engagement more directly and more easily with Trump than with Biden and now perhaps with Kamala. And I think that this is something that I hope, you know, they can also take into account because

Because oftentimes the perception is that there's so much emphasis on democracy promotion and governance and human rights, and those are actually and absolutely very, very important.

But countries also want to do business. At the end of the day, America is the world's largest market economy. You know, during the UN General Assembly and with the upcoming IMF World Bank meetings, a lot of countries come here trying to do like business roundtables and things like that, because this is an important thing that the US can offer, whether it's capital or technology, etc.

if perceptions start to develop that a certain party is just like less amenable to creating that

environment and that mechanism where you can have that kind of business and commercial relationship, while the other party is seen to be more amenable to that, despite the fact that the rhetoric and the language might not be as favorable and as friendly, then it's really something for that other party to really think about carefully. So that would be kind of my parting words here.

Fascinating. What I'm hearing from you both, I think, is you want the White House to treat Africa more like the way it treats India, which is to look at strategic interests and not focus so much on democracy and human rights. Sainabh Usman, Martin Kimani, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.

And that was Martin Kimani, formerly Kenya's ambassador to the UN and now executive director of NYU's Center on International Cooperation, and Zainab Usman, inaugural director of Carnegie Endowment's Africa program.

Thanks for listening to our third episode of our special election series, America Votes, What It Means for the World. We've now looked at Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, or EMEA, as corporate folks like to say. We've still got two more to go. Come back tomorrow for a look at Latin America, and then on Friday, we'll focus on Asia. As always, if you have guest suggestions, feedback, ideas...

We love hearing from you. Contact us at live at foreignpolicy.com. And one more time, the code FP100. You know you want a subscription. This is a great time to do it. When you check out, use the code FP100 for $100 off your first annual payment. That's on foreignpolicy.com slash subscribe.

FPLive the podcast is produced by Rosie Chulin and the executive producer of FPLive is Dana Schoen. I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.

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