Before heading into 2025, Africa will have experienced several presidential, parliamentary, or local elections. United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Headed by Samantha Powers and with its annual $60 billion budget, states that its mission is to “invigorate” global democracies, enhance what the U.S. sees as human rights, and foster government policies that advance America’s public interest including delivering inclusive development.
However, what type of “democracy” is being fostered and at what cost?
In an analysis written in Review of African Political Economy (roape.net), writer and commentator Yusuf Serunkuma argues that “democracy” in Africa is not just a language growing out of colonial exploitation in practice but that it’s a new form of “exploitation.”
Serunkuma is a scholar based at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and author of the 2022 book, “Non-Essential Humans: Essays on Governance, Ruin and Survival in COVID-19 Uganda.”
In his analysis, he explains that the challenge today is to “understand the colonial nature of democracy—divide and rule, shameless free markets, foreign aid, and loans and media bombardment—and the myriad, so-called good-intentioned crusaders who promote it.”
According to the USAID website, U.S. global policy includes democracy and development as integrally linked. The agency’s website also states, “We know democracies are (a) more peaceful, experience higher economic growth and lower poverty rates, protect the environment, provide more clean water, have higher life expectancies, and see more equitable distribution of education.
By advancing democratic development across our foreign assistance, we are ensuring that growth and prosperity lift up everyone—not just the most favored or wealthy—while protecting human rights and dignity. That is why, USAID is promoting democratic societies as a central tenet of our global mission and leveraging all our resources and influence to support democratic progress.”
However, according to Dr. Ndongo Sylla of Senegal, what is not considered in the U.S. democracy model, is while electing one candidate over another generally, in many cases, these democracies at the same time experience a “low degree of monetary sovereignty.”
Dr. Sylla is head of research and policy for the Africa Region/International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS). At last year’s Washington, D.C. forum, hosted by OXFAM, Dr. Sylla explained that these democratic governments reflect “a lack of control over the countries real resources, often stolen (in tandem) by transnational corporations.
Leading sometimes to the need to issue debt in foreign currencies at high interest rates, and the pursuit of an economic model—extractive in nature—which further reinforces their need to hold U.S. dollars, given that the international payments system has hitherto been organized around the U.S. dollar.”
While discussing African leaders and their vision for the continent, Dr. Sylla told Africa Watch that it’s in a way “that the domination by the West or countries like China can easily exploit the continent and its resources.”
In an interview with The New Internationalist, Dr. Sylla explained that others, such as representatives in the Agency for the Promotion of Investment and Major Works, “are people who want to please the World Bank, the French or European development agencies … who want to be perceived as good managers.”
“I see this as a conflict of interest. Most of the people who serve as prime ministers or ministers of finance come from global financial circles—and they will never go against the interests of global finance,” he added.
The U.S. and Europe—with their long his-tory of human capital and mineral resource exploitation of Global South countries, in-cluding African democratic governments—are a case in point.
At the same OXFAM forum, Dr. Adriana Abdenur, the Special Advisor to Brazil President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, exposed rich countries like the U.S. for justifying the defending of archaic industrial policies. It is taking “us in two directions,” Dr. Abdenur said.
“For many countries, (including African) there’s the imposition from the outside of austerity (or structural adjustment programs) that creates many difficulties in terms of implementing social policies, but then there’s a partnership between this system and hyper-financialization (elaborate financial structures and human capital necessary to perpetuate them) approach. They work hand-in-hand.”
Then there is the case of the “crisis of sovereign debt,” Dr. Abdenur explained, as “a very clear example where countries get locked into the system, and they spend more on debt payment than on education and health.”
Adding to that, she said, is the fact there’s “a massive amount of the world’s population living in these countries, and they can’t dig themselves out of this hole.”
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