Vice President Kamala Harris landed in Ghana on Sunday morning as part of a seven-day mission to show the flag in the face of a full-court press by China to elbow the United States away from the resource-rich lands of Africa.
“We are looking forward to this trip as a further statement of the long and enduring very important relationship and friendship between the people of the United States and those who live on this continent,” Harris said.
What she didn’t mention is that the Biden Administration is scrambling after China stole a march on the U.S. and has been signing deals right and left on the continent. While Biden was tied up with the war in Ukraine.
Related: Privately, Biden Gripes About Harris Not ‘Rising to the Occasion’
Earlier this month, First Lady Jill Biden made a five-day trip to Namibia and Kenya. This was after China dropped 98% of tariffs on exports from Burundi, Ethiopia, and Niger. China has now allowed dozens of other African countries, including Uganda and Tanzania, to start exporting some of their products duty-free to China.
Ghana, for example, reached a $2 billion deal with a Chinese company to develop roads and other projects in return for access to a key mineral for producing aluminum. Harris arrives in the country bearing no such gifts.
The U.S. is one step behind, and Harris’s job is to make sure African governments don’t forget us.
Harris’s week-long trip includes stops in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, chosen because they are striving to maintain democracy in the face of economic pressures roiling the continent, White House officials said. Harris met with the leaders of all three countries during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December, and she sees the nine-day journey as an extension of those dialogues, the officials said.
“The message is the same that the president delivered when we had the African leaders summit here in December,” White House spokesman John Kirby said. “And that’s that Africa matters, the continent matters, and our relationships across the continent all matter. So this is very much about Africa — African leaders, African nations — and not about anybody else.”
“We have a saying in Swahili: ‘When the elephants fight, it’s always the grass that gets trampled.’ We don’t want to get trampled,” said Fatma Karume, a prominent attorney in Tanzania. “Tanzania needs to think about its own national security and its own national interest. It doesn’t bode well for Tanzania not to have China, Russia or the U.S. as a friend — we need to be friends with all of them.”
Africa believed the same thing during the cold war and got trampled anyway. Both Russia and the U.S. saw Africa as a cold war battleground and the results were brutally tragic. Not only did the two sides help civil wars along, but the conflict also stirred up ancient hatreds — tribal and otherwise — that resulted in the death of millions.
It should go without saying that Kamala Harris is the very last representative of the U.S. government who should have been charged with such an important mission. In fact, Biden should have gone himself if he really wanted to counter China’s influence.
But Biden is a weak old man who is unable to travel. And this is one mission that the president himself should have undertaken.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member