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After years of neglect by successive US presidents, Africans doubt that Joe Biden’s electoral victory last week, celebrated globally, will bring miracles to the world’s poorest continent.
While the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) of South Africa called the defeat of incumbent President Donald Trump a “relief,” other responses have been more cautious.
“We celebrate the fact that we won’t have to see him undermine democratic institutions … for another four years,” said the Foundation, which is named after South Africa’s first black president.
“Now begins the arduous task for the United States of undoing the Trump administration’s deepening of racism, xenophobia and aphrophobia,” he added.
Trump, still president until January, did not make a good impression on Africans during his tenure.
Less than a year after taking office, he infamously praised the health system of “Nambia” – mispronounces Namibia – in a speech at the United Nations.
Months later he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shitty countries” during a closed-door meeting at the White House, sparking global outrage.
Many were unhappy with Trump’s “barely respectful attitude” and restrictive immigration policies, said Dakar analyst Ousmane Sene, head of the West African Research Center.
“During these four years (Trump) has fueled disenchantment and indifference,” he told AFP. “It is evident from the African media’s lack of interest in the United States at that time.”
Read also: Who are the contenders for Biden’s cabinet?
Biden has pledged to reverse many of the Trump administration’s immigration reforms that have tightened restrictions on asylum seekers and refugees.
Under Trump, the United States focused primarily on counter-terrorism and domestic aid programs. Politics, diplomacy and economic reforms were pushed aside.
“Four years lost,” said Senegalese political analyst Rene Lake, during which international relations were dominated by trade with China.
In Africa, Washington has simply finalized pre-established security deals with Ghana, Niger and Senegal.
US troops also provided “life support” to French forces in the troubled Sahel region, noted American studies professor Pape Malick Ba at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Senegal.
According to Ba, Trump never established a “specific strategy” towards Africa, making him less popular than his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
“(Trump) has never set foot on the continent,” he added, recalling that the president had even fired former secretary of state Rex Tillerson on his first trip to Africa in 2018.
For the economic powerhouse of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, US policy under Trump was “inert, ineffective and lacking a moral compass,” analysts Judd Devermont and Matthew Page wrote in a joint column.
A “chaotic” example of this, the American couple said, was the failure of the United States to intervene during widespread demonstrations against police brutality and bad governance last month.
Biden reacted in front of the State Department after security forces fired live bullets at a crowd of unarmed protesters in the Nigerian megalopolis of Lagos, killing 12 people according to Amnesty International.
“This illustrates how Washington’s approach to Nigeria has become out of touch and numb,” Page told AFP.
Also Read: Nine Things the Biden Administration Could Quickly Do on the Environment
A Biden administration is likely to exert more pressure on the Nigerian government to address human rights abuses, Nigerian geopolitical think tank SBM Intelligence said in a report.
But a former Nigerian ambassador to the United States, George Obiozor, said major changes are unlikely.
Speaking to Nigerian news channel Arise TV, Obiozor noted that US-Africa ties did not progress much under Obama – the first black American president – on whom Africans had placed high hopes.
“Expectations of an improvement in relations between Africa and the United States after Joe Biden’s victory … will amount to disillusionment and disappointment,” Obiozor predicted.
Analyst Lake, however, said Biden is still keen to re-engage the US with the rest of the world.
“We can imagine it will be some kind of Obama’s third term,” Lake told Senegalese media.
Biden is expected to ease diplomatic tensions, repair barriers with the World Health Organization, and rejoin the Paris climate agreement, from which the United States withdrew this year.
Trump meanwhile refuses to concede and prepares to challenge the vote count in court.
His whims are not the best example for young African democracies, some sarcastic commentators noted, evoking the new status of the United States’ banana republic.
Trump’s attitude risks encouraging reluctant African leaders to “play by the rules of democracy,” worried Chadian human rights activist Jean Bosco Manga.
“As Nelson Mandela often said, a good leader knows when to step down,” the NMF said.
“It is not too late for Trump to embrace dignity, for himself and for others.”
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