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Rebranding Africa
By BONO
First published in
NYTimes, July 7, 2009
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana;
Africans will be welcoming the first African-American
president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal
weight on both sides of the hyphen.
And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited
Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I
come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very,
very good.)
But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling
part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all
about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it
for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased
down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight
about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its
recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the
country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest
confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about
Africa. Ghana confounds them.
Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian
way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a
country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that
spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is
what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and
blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and
you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister
for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as
the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles,
the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred ... too cool, I
guess.
Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going
about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of
America, meet the new face of Africa.
Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power
changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming
stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip
even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago.
Though it has been a little battered by the global economic
meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t
normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times
headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.
So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady
progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a
shot at getting there by 2015.
No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in
Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the
problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities
of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the
biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African
middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and
hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.
I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency.
And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa
a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of
human capital is not something we can accept as normal.
But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one
chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for
investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t
eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and
Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build
roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the
point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals
and home-grown income.
President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t
come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you
fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian
anti-corruption official has said.
From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the
bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s
not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work
of the American government’s Millennium Challenge
Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t
put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly
go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is
one. There’s a growing number of others..
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