Do more for Africa, Obama told

By Basiru ADAM

Although Ghana and Tanzania are on their way to benefitting from Compact II of the United States’ Millennium Challenge Account under Barack Obama’s watch, the Pan African Business Forum says the American president should step out of the shadows of his predecessors and do more for the continent to which he traces his roots.

The forum, a conglomeration of statesmen, entrepreneurs and professions from across Africa, told journalists in Accra that Obama’s predecessors, in the persons of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, oversaw the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the Millennium Challenge Compact respectively, “both of which have contributed immensely to the creation of wealth and the improvement in the living standards of the African continent.”

Whilst congratulating Obama for his re-election, the President of the forum, Prince Prosper Ladislas Agbesi, called on him to draw up “a special agenda” for American assistance to Africa.

“We hope, indeed expect, that President Obama, himself of African extraction, will commit to designing and driving an even more impactful development assistance programme, through which America can propel Africa’s economy.

“This, we believe, would be a most profound and lasting legacy of President Obama when the history of the African renaissance within the global community is eventually written.”

But the call comes at a time when Obama’s troubles back home do not seem to be easing as the US struggles with attempts to bring down deficits and stabilise its national debt.

After negotiating an uneasy curve out of the so-called fiscal cliff, the country is weighing up the certainty of steep spending cuts to complement tax increases that were agreed in the fiscal cliff deal.
In May 2000, President Bill Clinton initially signed the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which provided trade preferences for quota and duty-free entry into the United States for certain goods from developing countries, including Ghana.

AGOA expanded market access for textile and apparel goods into the United States for eligible countries, though many other goods are also included. This resulted in the growth of an apparel industry in some African countries, and created jobs.

Then at the Inter-American Development Bank meeting on March 14, 2002, President George W. Bush called for a new compact for development which led to the establishment, by the American Congress, in 2004 of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a bilateral United States foreign aid agency.

In the first year of the compact, 17 countries were made eligible for an MCC grant, including Ghana, which received some US$547 million.

After a “judicious” use of the package, only four countries globally, including Ghana, are said to be in line to benefit from a second compact.

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