46 Middle East & Africa The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
21ministration. The only senior appointee
who has made waves in Africa is Mark
Green, the head of the us Agency for Inter-
national Development (usaid), who has
won plaudits across the political spectrum.
“He’s a star,” says a senior Democrat in-
volved in Africa.
The assistant secretary for Africa, Tibor
Nagy, a 70-year-old career diplomat
brought back from academia, has had to get
on with promoting American interests as
he sees best, so long as he does not clash
with the perceived views of Mr Trump or
Mr Pompeo. (It was apt that Rex Tillerson,
Mr Pompeo’s predecessor, was sacked
while in Kenya, on his only tour of Africa.)
In the past year the cautious but canny
Mr Nagy has made some moves. Ahead of
the more sceptical west Europeans, he has
embraced Félix Tshisekedi as the Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo’s president, de-
spite the blatantly rigged election that
brought him to power. America’s desire to
stop Congo falling into China’s lap
trumped any worries about democracy.
By contrast Mr Nagy went out of his way
to condemn President Paul Biya for his
harsh treatment of Anglophones in Camer-
oon, suspending it from the African
Growth and Opportunity Act, which gives
certain African countries easier access to
usmarkets. That was more of a finger-wag
than a slap; Cameroon’s trade with America
is tiny.
More recently he has entered the Suda-
nese imbroglio, hosting the new govern-
ment’s promising prime minister, Abdalla
Hamdok, in Washington, dangling the
prospect of Sudan’s removal from Ameri-
ca’s list of countries that sponsor terro-
rism. America has also sought to mediate
tensions over Ethiopia’s Grand Renais-
sance Dam, which enrages Egypt and wor-
ries Sudan since it will alter the down-
stream flow of the Nile.
But it is Mr Esper’s threat to withdraw
American troops from the Sahel that has
put a new spotlight on American policy in
Africa—or lack of it. In fact, America’s foot-
print in the Sahel (chiefly in Chad, Mali and
Niger) has been light, concerned mainly
with intelligence, logistics and drones,
alongside small units of special forces. Sev-
eral hundred American special-operations
forces have already been withdrawn from
the area. About 500 are still fighting jiha-
dists in Somalia.
Mr Trump’s lack of interest in Africa
may unwittingly have given professional
Africanists more scope, argues Jeffrey
Smith of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy
outfit in Washington. The congressional
subcommittee for Africa, which has re-
mained firmly bipartisan, has refused for
instance to accept the swingeing cuts in
spending on State Department or un pro-
grammes for Africa that the White House
has demanded. Some of America’s ambas-sadors on the ground—for instance, in
Zimbabwe, Zambia and Uganda—have
proved their mettle, robustly criticising
their host governments for violations of
democracy or human rights. “Ambassadors
are doing largely what they were doing be-
fore, but less comfortably, because they are
not sure of getting backup if they need it,”
says a veteran Africanist.
“You always need [political] air cover” if
you are to make a difference, says Chester
Crocker, the longest-serving assistant sec-
retary for Africa (1981-89). So far Mr Nagy’s
quiet diplomacy has kept the White House
off his back. But Washington’s Africa lobby
is glum. “The Africa Bureau has been evis-
cerated, morale is low, senior officers have
walked away,” laments Johnnie Carson, Mr
Obama’s first assistant secretary for Africa.“When [the administration] isn’t paying at-
tention, things roll backwards.” There is no
sense that Africa matters to America, ex-
cept as a place where China and Russia
must be confronted.
But how? Americans point to the endur-
ing success of aid schemes such as George
W. Bush’s big spending on aidstreatment
and prevention. Mr Trump’s Prosper Africa
initiative, intended to provide $60bn to en-
courage private investment, has yet to
make strides. American complaints about
China only irritate African governments
that accept Chinese largesse and retort that
America seems unwilling or unable to offer
viable alternatives. Mr Pompeo’s tour is un-
likely to herald a change of mood or policy.
Africans will continue to bemoan the
American president’s indifference. 7P
urveyors of ballotpapers, indelible
ink and polling booths will do well in
Africa this year. No fewer than 18 countries
are to hold general elections. Not all will be
free and fair, but in many the stakes are
high. In Ethiopia the popularity of Abiy Ah-
med, a reformist prime minister, will be
tested at the polls for the first time. Burkina
Faso, which is battling jihadists, will hold
only its second poll since Blaise Compaoré,
a long-serving dictator, was overthrown in- And in Ghana President Nana Akufo-
Addo faces a tight race for a second term.
Given the stakes, one might expect vot-
ers to turn out in droves. Yet in Africa fewer
tend to vote than elsewhere, even if the
election is not rigged. More surprisingly it
is the young, rich and urban who tend to
stay away from the polls. Why?
In the West the rich vote more than the
poor. But Kimuli Kasara of Columbia Uni-
versity and Pavithra Suryanarayan of Johns
Hopkins University, who surveyed voting
patterns in poor countries, many of them
in Africa, found that the poorest fifth of
citizens tended to vote more assiduously
than the richest fifth. One possible reason
for rich Africans’ lack of motivation to vote
is that no matter who wins, they are unlike-
ly to be taxed more. Rates may rise, but tax
collection is ineffective. In sub-Saharan Af-
rica tax revenue averages 17% of gdpcom-
pared with 34% in the oecd, a club of most-
ly rich countries.
Where people live ought to affect
whether they vote. Getting to the polling
booth can be a slog for people in the
sticks—only a third of rural Africans live
within two kilometres of a good road. Yet
despite this, rural Africans are more likely
to vote than city slickers, by 77% to 67%.
One reason is that ruling parties find it
easier to bribe or bully rural voters into
turning out. In Zimbabwe, where the oppo-
sition dominates the towns, rural folk are
often bludgeoned into attending rallies for
Zanu-pf, which has run the country since- Officials warn that villages which
vote the wrong way will be denied food aid.
Because rural voters are easier to corral,
constituencies are often gerrymandered so
that their votes count for more than urban
ones. For example, electoral districts in
Tanzania’s biggest city, Dar es Salaam, have
three times as many people on average as
those in the countryside.
Ruling parties find it easier to corral old, poor and rural votersVoting in AfricaWhy the young and rich vote less
Young and apathetic
Africans who voted in their most recent
national election, by age group, %Source: Afrobarometer 2016-20181008060
40200
36-45 46 -55 56+
Age, years18-25 26-35