Man Up to Stop the Violence

27 07 2010

“Africa’s Men Fight for Women’s Rights,” The Daily Beast, 24 July 2010.

A provocative campaign to convince men to fight violence against women kicked off in South Africa during the World Cup.

Lewis Kasindi Kilongo, 26, has always believed that women are equal to men. At home in South Kivu, a war-torn province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, that makes him a rare breed. “My friends in different villages consider women an object of pleasure,” he said. “Many guys think they can’t marry a really educated woman because it will be like having two men in the house. It’s a fear for them. They just want someone they can control.”

Kilongo is a rare male voice in the movement to halt his home country’s mass rape epidemic, and one of 85 youth delegates who traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa this month for Man Up, a one-week conference intended to get men and boys involved in women’s rights activism.

Jimmie Briggs, an American journalist, founded Man Up after writing Innocents Lost, a book about the child soldiers forced to fight and rape in the wars of Central Africa. Briggs was burnt out as a reporter, depressed by endless tales of sexual violence. “I did not see men standing up on this issue in a real way—and not just standing up on this issue, but standing alongside women on this issue,” he said. “We needed to create something to bridge that gap.”

Man Up, though, was by no means the most obvious way to combat problems like rape, female genital mutilation, and women’s political disenfranchisement. Even the group’s name itself is controversial, knowingly embracing a phrase that has often played to sexist stereotypes about men being tougher, stronger, braver, and more independent than their sisters, mothers, daughters, or female partners.

But Man Up also takes advantage of a traditional male bias toward protecting the vulnerable; in places like Congo, those same sisters, mothers, and daughters are potential victims who could be saved from trauma if men simply chose not to rape. Briggs, who brought his own mother and daughter to the conference, believes he can reclaim “man up,” borrowing a term used in the African American community to signal male responsibility and transforming it into a worldwide movement.

“The men in this effort are men who are aware of their responsibilities to their families and to themselves,” he explained, “who are comfortable using their strength in a non-traditional way—not for sexual conquest or physical overpowering, but to be leaders and advocates for nonviolence.”

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Categories : Africa, Culture, Education, Women

How Africa Won the World Cup

13 07 2010

“How Africa Won the World Cup,” The Washington Post, 11 July 2010.

South Africa’s successful World Cup came not on the field, but in our minds.

JOHANNESBURG — The first African World Cup didn’t belong to Africa, at least not on the soccer field. Of the six African nations that made it to the quadrennial tournament, five fell early — to indiscipline, tough competitors and heartbreaking missed opportunities. The plucky and focused Black Stars from Ghana were a bright spot for the continent, but when Sunday’s final is over, the new FIFA champion will not be African.

Still, winning games isn’t everything. For one month of one South African winter, the tournament brought an international celebration to a continent more widely known for malnourished bodies, grandstanding leaders and the ravages of AIDS. Rather than indigence, the world saw balls sailing into the net, crisp tackles, sweat. Ten gleaming stadiums and the collective warmth of 50 million South Africans offered thousands of football pilgrims the time of their lives.

In a year that marks five decades of independence for 17 African countries, from Somalia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the cup doubled as an anniversary party. “Just the fact that African teams can compete, defeat and be defeated on the world’s stage is wonderful,” Carmen Arendse, a South African psychologist, said while watching Ghana’s quarterfinal match against Uruguay.

There’s an earlier sentiment that still rings true, as well. In a 1960 speech, Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese prime minister, made a remark that fits the occasion: “We are going to show the world what the black man can do when he works in freedom.”

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Categories : Africa, Culture, History

Let Africa Have the iPhone

3 07 2010

“An African iPhone? There’s No App For That,” Foreign Policy, 24 June 2010.

Why Steve Jobs should let Africans buy his new toy.

When I touched down in Lagos, Nigeria, this week, the first thing I did was buy a cell phone. The city’s Saka Tinubu district hosts dozens of mobile vendors arrayed in small shops, piled high with all the major brands: Nokia, Motorola, Samsung. Among them is Belle-Vista Phone Warehouse, which styles itself as a “Blackberry Outlet.” Young professionals stopped by after working hours to scoop up the Storm, the Curve, and other popular smartphones nestled in the display cases. Apple’s iPhone — ubiquitous in American cities, and about to become more so with the release of the product’s much-anticipated version 4 today — was nowhere to be seen.

The best-kept secret about Africa in the last decade is the continent’s rapid and creative adoption of modern technology. African countries have for the most part leapfrogged the technologies of the late 20th century to adopt those of the early 21st en masse. There are now 10 times as many cell phones as land lines in sub-Saharan Africa, and since 2004, the region’s year-over-year growth has been the highest in the world. When Nokia’s billionth handset was sold in 2000, it was in Nigeria.

Africa is a multimillion-dollar mobile market, and plenty of the major technology companies, Western and otherwise, are there already. Multinational telecoms like MTN, Safaricom, and Zain are competing to cover a continent of 500 million mobile consumers, improving connectivity and dropping prices. Low-tech Chinese imports and no-contract, prepaid plans have made the technology easily accessible; Belle-Vista alone sells 500 phones a month. Nokia, which established its first African research center in Nairobi in 2008, has just unveiled a telephone that will allow consumers used to toggling between two or three devices to use multiple SIM cards in the same phone. BlackBerry has likewise responded to explosive demand by opening an office in Nigeria this year. Google, whose Android operating system is the strongest competitor to the iPhone, has had a presence on the continent since 2007 and now operates in 45 African countries, hiring and training African developers to convert its well-known suite of Web applications (Maps, News, Finance) for local use — often over mobile devices.

These companies and their technologies are opening a line into the flattening world we’ve heard so much about, creating markets, enabling information access, and building relationships in ways that have changed poor countries from the bottom up. But it’s hardly philanthropic work — market leader Nokia’s regional revenues were 1 billion euros in 2009, and Research In Motion, named Fortune‘s fastest-growing global firm in 2010, sold 1 million BlackBerries last year in South Africa alone.

So where is Apple?

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Categories : Africa, Culture

Colonial Politics at the World Cup

18 06 2010

“At the World Cup, the Empire Strikes Back,” The Atlantic, 15 June 2010.

The soccer tournament pits colonizers versus the colonized.

In July 1978, an obscure Nigerian literary magazine called Third World First published a posthumous essay from South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. In it, Biko rejects the “lie” of black inferiority reinforced by 19th and 20th century colonialism. “To make the lie live even longer, blacks have to be denied any chance of accidentally proving their equality with white men,” he notes.

For 70 years, the FIFA World Cup has helped dismantle the lie Biko spent his life fighting to disprove. The arrival of the 2010 tournament in his home country will be no different. As football is sport, parity is not guaranteed. But the quadrennial competition creates rare opportunities for once-colonized nations to challenge the great powers of the last century. No matter how bloody or complex the history, the World Cup gives the empire the chance to strike back.

Saturday’s matchup between the United States and England, for instance, generated white-hot interest in both the old and new world. Americans on the ground in Rustenburg waved flags with the original Tea Party slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Martin Longren of the British embassy in Washington sent the U.S. a biting email establishing the terms of a bilateral wager. “You should know that the Ambassador takes his steak like American soccer victories—somewhat rare,” he cabled. One stateside commentator referred to the match as “1776 2.0.”

Despite the agreeably Atlanticist final tally, citizens of both countries relished the 96-minute match all the more for its historic symmetries. And while the World Cup always produces oddball pairings (North Korea, meet Brazil!), the unique legacy of post-colonialism—reparations, whitewashing, the flow of migrants, outright war—creates the highest drama in all of sport.

This year’s postcolonial matchups include the U.S. versus the UK, Portugal versus Brazil, and Spain versus almost everybody else. These showdowns are not as common as you might imagine, though in recent years Senegal has defeated France, Portugal has drubbed Angola, and England has drawn Nigeria in the tournament’s group stage. (France and Algeria seem destined never to meet.)

Of course, the on-pitch retread of geopolitics is not limited to colonial ties—East and West Germany were strategically kept from sparring during the Cold War, and longstanding tensions in the Middle East compel Israel to play with European teams. But the most contentious rivalries have evolved from the European scramble for blood and treasure abroad. When Honduras meets Spain on Monday, it will be in the hope of recreating its joyous 1982 World Cup debut, when striker Hector Zelaya schooled the Spanish team on its home turf. It will also be a reckoning for the exploitative silver mining that gilded the Spanish crown. Likewise, former Spanish colonies Chile and Argentina are in it for the trophy, but fans will enjoy a rematch of the 19th century wars of independence that cost thousands of lives.

The beauty of the World Cup is that it promises not reparations, but a literally level playing field. Rather predictably, Angola fell to slave-trading Portugal in its first World Cup appearance. But a battle of sweat, grit and gentle jersey-tugging is preferable to a bloody civil war. And at times, the turnabout is delicious: The 2002 World Cup began with Senegal’s dashing triumph over the defending champions and former rulers from France—a revival of the pride the insurgent Cameroon brought to the continent in 1990. But on Friday, Portugal will face likely defeat against the dominant Brazilian squad whose forbears spent nearly 400 years under Lisbon’s thumb.

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, Culture, History, Politics, Race

Al Gore and the Oil Spill

18 06 2010

“Al Gore’s Oil Spill Silence,” The Daily Beast, 14 June 2010.

Is the famous environmental activist putting the Gulf crisis to waste?

In the spring of 1989, weeks after the catastrophic sinking of an Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, then-Senator Albert Gore, Jr. was leading the outcry against the company responsible for the second-worst oil spill in United States history. From his position on the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Gore demanded to know if Exxon was “stonewalling” the cleanup efforts. A flustered Coast Guard commandant, Paul Yost, told Congress that Exxon was doing “the most that can be done.”

In the years after the disaster, Gore has become synonymous with environmental action. In an advertisement for his 2000 campaign for president, Gore explicitly called for a ban on offshore drilling: “For me, this issue is not only an economic issue and a health issue, it is also a moral issue,” he said. “I think we have an obligation to do right by the environment.”

The spring of 2010 has brought an oil spill already several times larger than Exxon-Valdez, featuring the same cycle of catastrophe, recriminations, and pledges to do better. But 56 days after oil began flooding the Gulf of Mexico, Gore—whose Academy Award and Nobel Prize have made him the most influential environmental activist in the country—has been largely silent during the worst environmental catastrophe in memory.

His nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection has emailed supporters that “the only way to end catastrophic oil spills like Deepwater is to end our dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.” But the climate crusader has not engaged with either the White House, the Department of the Interior, or the EPA. His most notable public statement has come in a short article for The New Republic’s website comparing the oil gusher to CO2 emissions. When President Barack Obama, who has pledged to move climate legislation forward this summer, convened a group of business leaders and energy experts in the Roosevelt Room of the White House last week, Gore was nowhere to be seen.

Friends and foes alike are noticing his absence.

“Al Gore has been keeping his head down now for some time, partly because of the scandals over climate science, partly because people revealed his financial incentive in passing climate legislation,” says Kenneth Green, an environmental policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “He seems to have decided to take his money and hit the door.”

Says Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on Gore’s energy team in Clinton’s administration: “I don’t know why he hasn’t been more visible on this. Vice President Gore has a lot on his plate… He’s been trying to move the focus from threats to solutions.”

But, Hendricks adds, the crisis is an ideal opportunity to enact solutions to the problems that have become Gore’s life’s work. “The real security comes from guaranteeing that this will never happen again, by absolutely committing to a low-carbon path forward,” he says. “If the oil spill continues and a robust case is not made for climate legislation, it will be a missed opportunity.”

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Categories : America, Energy, Green, Politics, Science

“The Female Obama”

14 06 2010

“The Female Obama,” The Daily Beast, 9 June 2010.

San Francisco DA Kamala Harris tries to break California’s last glass ceiling.

This year’s “Super Tuesday” of primary elections across the country featured plenty of women to watch: Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln fought off a tough challenge from fellow Democrat Bill Halter; Nikki Haley, the Indian-American conservative battling allegations of “inappropriate sexual contact” will face a runoff for governor in South Carolina; and in California, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Hewlett Packard executive Carly Fiorina emerged victorious after expensive, blistering primary campaigns.

But maybe the most interesting woman to watch is Kamala Devi Harris, the district attorney for San Francisco, whose Democratic primary win puts her on course to become the first African-American and Asian-American woman elected attorney general in California. Born to one of the first black economics professors at Stanford University and an Indian physician at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of America, she has already made history. Now, Harris’ challenge is to break through one of the last glass ceilings in California.

The state has always been hospitable to women candidates—as both senators and the speaker of the House can attest. But there has never been a female attorney general—no less one with as exotic a background as Harris’. Sound familiar? Gwen Ifill, author of The Breakthrough, spotlighting a new class of African-American politicians, summed it up for David Letterman: “They call her the female Barack Obama.”

The 46-year-old Harris, who shares Obama’s greyhound physique and progressive politics, has long been one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party. Jonathan Parker, political director of Emily’s List, calls her “a superstar for the future.” And like Obama, she represents a new generation of public servants who easily cross lines of race and culture. Her varied endorsements—from Tyra Banks to the League of Conservation Voters—tell the tale. And she’s run a thoroughly modern campaign: When her chief opponent, former Facebook security officer Chris Kelly, attacked her record on crime on YouTube, she fired back using widespread complaints about Facebook’s privacy policies.

Sheathed in a black wool suit and several strands of pearls, Harris weighed the notion of making history in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington earlier this spring. “As with anything there are advantages and disadvantages,” she said. “But I’ll tell you the advantages certainly stand out to me.” When Harris marched in a parade for Martin Luther King Day, an African-American man broke through the crowd with his three children, crying, “Look, that’s our DA.” Likewise, her campaign kickoff was packed with young women proud that one of them was making change. “I was raised to be an independent woman,” she continued, “not the victim of anything.”

Like the technocrat-in-chief, Harris believes in “smart government.” When she saw the statistics connecting violent crime, high school dropouts and elementary school truancy in San Francisco, she decided to begin prosecuting the parents of kids skipping class—an approach that reduced truancy rates by 23 percent. Harris’ “back on track” pilot program, which has cut recidivism among drug offenders by supporting them in job training and education, has been embraced by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a model for California. The career prosecutor likens campaigning to the courtroom. “Running for office is similar to being a trial lawyer in a very long trial,” she says. “It requires adrenaline and stamina; it requires being in shape mentally and emotionally. It’s a marathon.”

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Categories : America, Politics, Race, Women

The Young and the Restless

6 06 2010

“Obama’s Youth Brigade Burns Out,” The Daily Beast, 3 June 2010.

Obama’s twentysomethings leave the nest.

Joe Boswell quit his job at Camp David. But first, he played a tennis match with Michelle Obama. Her second chief of staff, Susan Sher, is an avid tennis fan, and Boswell, her assistant, was game for a doubles match. After a straight-sets victory, he leveled with the first lady of the United States. “I was tired of going through the motions,” he remembers. “She told me to go out and save the world and come back.”

Today, Boswell isn’t so sure he’s coming back. The 25-year-old Dartmouth graduate served as one of a “dirty dozen” of young campaign fixers who roamed the country for President Barack Obama’s campaign. Yet, less than a year into the Obama administration, “I was bored,” he says. “I like to execute things; I like to get people empowered,” he adds. Despite helping to plant the first lady’s famous White House kitchen garden and holding playdates with the Obama daughters, “I knew it was time to go when I was falling asleep at meetings,” he said.

Boswell is not the only one looking for a change of scenery. Former Michigan field director Elizabeth Wilkins left her position at the Domestic Policy Council last week to attend Yale Law School. Longtime press assistant Priya Singh departed the beehive of the communications shop a month earlier to work with Ambassador Susan Rice at the United Nations. Her move came on the heels of the departure of Rice’s previous assistant—a young Harvard graduate more interested in journalism. Elizabeth Bafford, a key aide to budget director Peter Orszag, will attend Duke’s Fuqua School of Business this fall. Jake Levine, special assistant to climate adviser Carol Browner, is revisiting his decision to defer law school for the campaign life. His housemate, Eric Lesser, right-hand man to senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, is reportedly more interested in national-security issues. Yohannes Abraham left a job working under legislative affairs chief Phil Schiliro in order to become the national political director for Organizing for America.

The 18-month itch hits every administration—and some of these folks are heading for new jobs with their belief in Obama intact. But others are clearly suffering from “change” fatigue. And this presidency was supposed to be different. The young people working in the White House are supposed to be the truest of true believers. Countless postmortems attribute the Democratic Party’s 2008 success to a unique surge in “Barack the Vote” enthusiasm among 18- to 34-year olds. Many of these folks followed their political hero from the fields of Iowa into the White House—hoping to translate their dreams into policy, and build satisfying careers in the process.

A recent New York Times Magazine article focused on White House “twentysomethings” like Lesser, Levine, Jon Favreau, Reggie Love, and Samantha Tubman—and what they’re learning on the job. But as the campaign juggernaut settles into the grind of governing, many junior staff across the administration are heading for the exits, burned out and tired of life in the Obama bubble.

“Everyone, for better or worse, gets that it’s a special place to be,” says a former campaign staffer who worked in two federal agencies in Washington before leaving the government in March. “But the challenge is: What does it mean to ‘make it’”? One young graduate who left a plum job at the White House for more policy-related work at a federal agency explained the choice: “I can’t have the same job on my résumé for two and a half years. If I was going to stay, I needed to grow, and so I had to move.”

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Categories : America, Culture, Politics

Meet Obama’s Karl Rove

6 06 2010

“Meet Obama’s Karl Rove,” The Daily Beast, 12 May 2010.

Heading into November midterms, the White House turns to political fixer Patrick Gaspard.

The anti-incumbent wave in American politics has made looking for votes this fall like looking for water in the Arizona desert. The word from voters in Utah—where Republican Senator Bob Bennett lost his bid for renomination, and West Virginia, where on Tuesday Democratic House member Alan Mollohan was bounced after 30 years of service—has bathed the capital in a mood of grim resignation about the electoral fights ahead. In Manhattan Thursday, President Barack Obama will hold a glitzy pep rally of sorts for Democrats trying to weather the storm. Those anxious about their chances this fall should keep their eyes backstage, where the publicity-shy Patrick Gaspard, the veteran New York organizer and political director for the White House, will be pondering which races are worth the fight.

In West Virginia, Mollohan got virtually no assistance from the executive branch or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for his bid (“The races will be won and lost campaign by campaign,” says the White House). Senator Arlen Specter, the Democratic convert in deep trouble in his Pennsylvania primary next week, merited a brief solidarity television ad with Obama, and no more.

But Gaspard, a “smooth operator,” according to one DNC political organizer, is not shy about wading into a fight. In 2009, he famously leaned on New York Governor David Paterson to abandon plans to run for election this fall, imparting word in no uncertain terms that the White House had lost confidence in his ability to win. Paterson rebuffed him, only to be forced to drop his campaign amid a hail of negative publicity in February. (There are no hard feelings, a close friend of the governor told The Daily Beast.)

Just before Election Day 2009, Republican Dede Scozzafava, trailing in the polls in a three-way special election campaign in New York’s 23rd District, dropped out—frustrated over the national GOP support that flowed to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Democrat Bill Owens was adrift in the polls. Gaspard phoned Scozzafava—and within 24 hours, she endorsed the Democrat. Gaspard “was terrific,” says Dan Cantor, executive director of New York’s progressive Working Families Party, who has known Gaspard for many years. “And we won.”

Heading into November, Gaspard will oversee where and how the administration throws its weight around. Naturally, the Obama White House is not lacking in political opinions. David Axelrod, the lugubrious keeper of the Obama message, David Plouffe, the baby-faced campaign manager turned voice of Organizing for America, and Rahm Emanuel, who perfected his belligerence as 2006 chairman of the DCCC, all have outsize political footprints. The president himself told Gaspard during campaign season: “I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Nevertheless, Gaspard, who holds the job occupied most recently by Karl Rove, is one of the most powerful men in American politics. His team, along with deputy chief of staff Jim Messina and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, handles most of the incoming pleas from the numerous candidates and constituencies in search of political TLC. “He builds relationships; he puts out fires; he identifies fires when they’re about to start; he’s a sounding board for the president whenever something is happening,” says the DNC organizer, who has worked with Gaspard on events and messaging. “And he’s just never rattled.”

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Categories : America, Politics

Security on the Menu for Mexico’s State Visit

6 06 2010

“The Salahis Are Not Invited,” The Daily Beast, 17 May 2010

Mexican President Felipe Calderon pays a visit to the White House.

These are jittery times in Washington. President Felipe Calderon of Mexico arrives for a visit with President Barack Obama on the heels of a catastrophic oil spill, primary upsets for Democratic candidates, and just as rhetoric surrounding illegal immigration into the American Southwest has reached the screaming point. Given the White House’s new focus on immigration reform, its second official state dinner will be more concerned with security than the last—not just at the White House gates, but at the border that joins Mexico and the United States.

Tensions will be running high, but at least the two leaders will be toasting one another as friends. Obama held a private meeting with Calderon even before his 2009 inauguration, visited Mexico last April and August, and has bumped elbows with Calderon nearly once a month, at events from the Summit of the Americas to the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh. First lady Michelle Obama likewise hit it off with Calderon’s wife Margarita Zavala during her April trip to Mexico City—her first solo voyage since moving to Washington. “She is smart. She is tough. She is passionate. And she is my friend,” Obama said last month. “And I told her to prepare to have fun.”

The one person who won’t be having fun is Julianna Smoot, the new White House social secretary. The 200-person dinner in the East Room, catered by Chicago celebrity chef Rick Bayless, promises to be just as lavish as the first dinner in November. But after the embarrassing security breach that stole headlines from Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and led to the departure of Smoot’s predecessor, Desiree Rogers, most people at the White House have decided this time around will be more business than pleasure.

Rather than showing off the White House china being used for the dinner, the East Wing has scheduled an event with Michelle Obama and Zavala at a local high school. The latest iteration of the first lady’s “Let’s Move!” anti-obesity initiative is perhaps more appropriate for the high-powered lawyers (Zavala, who uses her maiden name, served in Mexico’s Congress from 2003-2006) with young children and strong opinions on public policy.

Calderon will appear with Obama in advance of the dinner Wednesday and then address a joint session of Congress on Thursday. He is expected to reinforce a message of mutual cooperation with the Obama administration, “from Honduras to Haiti to Iran,” according to a senior administration official, and stress development in Mexico as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration to the U.S. “One in 10 Mexicans live abroad because they haven’t found opportunity at home,” says Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Acknowledging this fact “would be a major step to shift the debate.”

Calderon is also expected to offer a strong critique of the Arizona law permitting police to question the immigration status of residents, which Mexicans believe is discriminatory and American progressives have taken to calling “Juan Crow.” “The Arizona law is what happens when Congress and the president don’t do their job on comprehensive reform,” says Martine Apodaca of the National Immigration Forum. “We’ve seen half-hearted measures and rudderless leadership.”

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Categories : Abroad, America, Politics

Nigeria’s Accidental President Promises Reform

25 05 2010

“Nigeria’s Accidental President Promises Reform,” The Root, 14 April 2010.

Goodluck Jonathan takes on entrenched powers in a bid to break his nation’s addiction to oil.

Goodluck Ebele Jonathan–the acting president of Nigeria–needs an introduction. After a political drama that makes President Barack Obama’s scuffles with centrist senators seem boring by comparison, Jonathan has emerged on top. Nigeria’s elected president, Umar Yar’Adua, fell ill. Then he disappeared to Saudi Arabia for two months. Soon, his wife, Tarai Yar’Adua, began stage managing on her husband’s behalf, refusing to relinquish power. Eventually, the Nigerian courts had enough–voting to give Jonathan one year (elections will be held in early 2011) of control over an unruly democracy of 150 million that is currently the third largest source of U.S. crude oil and petroleum.

“We must hit the ground running,” Jonathan said when handed over the reins on Feb. 9. He defied early expectations of weakness by dissolving his predecessor’s cabinet and appointing new ministers from the ruling People’s Democratic Party at key agencies. But his legacy in Nigeria will hinge on his response to the new world order on energy.

Jonathan made his first trip to Washington this week as head of state for Obama’s international nuclear security summit, where 47 countries made pledges to decrease the likelihood of loose nuclear material getting into the hands of terrorists. It’s part of Obama’s executive commitment to nuclear disarmament and a continuation of a treaty with Russia he signed in Prague last week.

A Key Strategic Partner in Africa

The nuclear summit is also one indication of Nigeria’s strategic importance to the United States, which continues to grow in the 21st century. Of course, other than providing America with $26 billion worth of petroleum every year, Nigeria has the largest military in the African Union, is an active member of the United Nations, and has led peacekeeping missions on the continent and around the world. It chairs the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the West African regional economic bloc, and it is Africa’s largest recipient of American private investment. And the December arrest of a Nigerian national with alleged connections to a terror networks in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula made the nation’s long-standing ethnic and religious conflicts, as well as security protocols, of keen interest to the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton underscored this heightened attention when she and Nigerian foreign minister Yayale Ahmed signed a framework establishing a binational commission to fight corruption and promote development in Nigeria. “We hope it will support the aspirations of the Nigerian people for a peaceful, prosperous, stable, democratic future,” Clinton said when signing the accord. Jonathan’s meeting with Obama at the White House was equally polite, both countries acknowledging the “importance” of the other. But one subject was conspicuously absent: oil.

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Categories : Abroad, Africa, Energy, History, Politics

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