Four days into the new Administration, President George W. Bush in effect declared war on Africa and Africans (though the corporate media failed to notice). Bush's very first foreign policy action was to defund international public health and family planning services by withdrawing US money from providers who also offer reproductive health education and abortion services using money from other sources. Bush's next action was to place under review an executive order signed by President Clinton that supports African countries' right to import or produce generic versions of HIV/AIDS medications that are still under US patent. The reversal of this order--done in the name of American pharmaceutical companies--would be the moral equivalent of imposing the death penalty on 25 million Africans.

These actions constitute an assault on Africans' health at a time when the continent faces the world's greatest health crisis, and they suggest a return to the blatantly anti-African policies of the Reagan era, which were characterized by a fabricated perception of Africa as a social welfare case. During the campaign, Bush and his advisers repeatedly stressed that Africa did not fit into the strategic interests of America, and Bush said during the debates that Africa was not a priority. (He did, however, announce his qualified support for debt relief for poor countries.)

Vice President Cheney's perspective on Africa is epitomized by his support for keeping Nelson Mandela in prison and his opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa while he was a member of Congress. More recently, as CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company, he was complicit in lining the pockets of the dictatorship of the late Gen. Sani Abacha in Nigeria. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was, until this year, a director of Chevron, another oil company that buttressed military rule in Nigeria and even hired the regime's soldiers, who fired on unarmed protesters at the sites of its operations. (A Chevron oil tanker bears her name!) With Bush himself coming from the oil industry, as do so many in his Cabinet, oil is likely to top the list of US interests in Africa as defined by the Bush "oiligarchy."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.