JOHANNESBURG: President George W Bush arrives in Africa armed with his Millennium Challenge Account carrot of $10 billion over three years to alleviate poverty, his $15 billion pledge over five years to fight HIV/Aids and the US’s Africa Growth and Opportunities Act (Agoa), which allows African exporters of garments and textiles duty-free access to US markets.

Underpinning this apparent largesse, however, is his uncompromising stick to drop developing countries from his list of military beneficiaries if they do not grant immunity to US military personnel when they are called to defend themselves against “crimes against humanity” by the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

His route takes him to Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and finally Nigeria.

According a South African financial daily, Business report, Alec Erwin, South Africa’s minister of trade and industry, explains that his government and the Bush administration will discuss their trade relationships and problems arising from the US’s continued insistence and commitment to providing agricultural subsidies to its farmers.

But Kevin Watkins, Oxfam’s head of research, pointedly quotes Mali’s President Amadou Toumani Toure in his critique of Bush’s African safari: “Rich country subsidies are killing African agriculture.”

Agoa is a double-edged sword. Watkin’s refers to it as an insidious instrument: “Improved market access is conditional on African governments reciprocating American generosity by opening their markets to US investors, enforcing US intellectual property claims, and lowering trade barriers for US goods. This is unequal trade at its most insidious.”

While the South African government is upbeat about Bush’s visit, storm clouds have been gathering over the southern African nation over the past few days. Bush just simply does not go down well with South Africa’s black population. Not only was he and his father, the former US president George Bush, sanctions busters when the country was still under the jackboot of apartheid prior to 1994 — when it held its first democratic elections — but successive Republican governments have consistently supported terrorist groups like Unita, whose leader was the deceased Jonas Savimbi, in Angola and the pro-American Renamo in Mozambique.

Bush is expected to preach the values of open markets and fairness in trade when he meets the South African government and its head, President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday in the country ‘s administrative capital, Pretoria.

Mbeki is a former member of the South African Communist Party, which will be leading, together with the Anti-War Coalition and other civil society groups, nationwide protests to demonstrate to Bush what South Africans think of his “warmongering”. According to the SACP’s general secretary, Dr Blade Nzimande, the US president must be allowed to come to the African continent to see for himself what local people think about his foreign policies, his bullying tactics and his less-than-sophisticated efforts to make the world submit to his control.

Bush knows that the South Africa-Nigeria axis holds the key for effective intervention in Africa. These two countries are the economic powerhouses and the key to tip the scales in his favour. For him to engineer reforms on governance in Zimbabwe, in Liberia or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Bush administration has to cajole President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the South African president into accepting that ideology cannot drive Africa’s relationship with the United States.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.