DAKAR: US President Barack Obama yesterday embarked on his first major tour of Africa that comes at a poignant moment, just as the world prepares to bid a reluctant farewell to Nelson Mandela.
The possibility that the critically ill anti-apartheid icon could fade away within days has sparked uncertainty about Obama’s itinerary, which is due to take him to Africa’s francophone west, democratic east and its southern tip.
Plans to visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania over the next week could be complicated, shifting the focus of a trip meant to ease the disappointment of Africans who saw expectations for Obama’s presidency fall short.
The White House has said that it will defer to Mandela’s family on whether the president would visit his ailing 94-year-old political hero in the Pretoria hospital where he has been for nearly three weeks. And it has refused to say exactly what contingency plans are in place for the week-long trip, designed to highlight Africa’s emerging economic potential and growing middle class, as well as youth and health programs.
South Africa’s foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said while Obama would have loved to see Mandela, a meeting with the former South African leader would be impossible. The men met in 2005, when the former South African president was in Washington, and Obama was a newly elected senator, and the two have spoken several times since by telephone.
But there has been no face-to-face meeting between the first black presidents of the United States and South Africa since Obama was elected in 2008.
The White House sees Obama’s visit as a chance to make up for lost time, as the president was unable to fit in a visit to Sub-Saharan Africa in his first term, apart from a brief stop in Ghana.
There has also been disappointment on the continent, after Obama’s 2008 election caused euphoria and an expectation that the son of a Kenyan would put Africa policy at the top of his agenda. US Africa policy has languished in recent years, with Obama battling an economic crisis, rebalancing US attention to a rising Asia, facing revolution in the Middle East and consumed by his legacy project of ending US wars abroad. US officials are aware that emerging economic opportunities and energy resources in Africa have attracted a clutch of interest from rising rivals.
Afp
