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(White House Photo: Chuck Kennedy)
Tanzania was U.S. President Barak Obama’s last stop on his three-nation African stops which also took him to Senegal and South Africa.
During his visit, he met with Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, addressed business leaders at the Corporate Council on Africa, gave a press conference with President Kikwte, and joined former U.S. President George W. Bush in a low-key ceremony in which they lay a wreath in commemoration of those who lost their lives in the 1998 Al Qaeda bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam .
Some media reports suggested that the meaning of the trip was that the U.S. was playing “catch up,” i.e., trying to make up for lost time. On the surface this appeared to be true. In March this year, newly-elected Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tanzania as his second overseas trip as president. The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the purpose of Xi’s visit was to consolidate traditional friendship, chart the course for future cooperation and promote common development. Since 2009, China has been Tanzania’s largest trading partner and second largest source of investment. As for traditional friendship China-Tanzania ties date all the way back to 1955 at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia where China was represented by then Premier Zhou Enlai. (And Zhou visited Tanzania a year after the country became Independent.) Moreover, China has been instrumental over the years in building infrastructure in Tanzania and during Xi’s trip in March 2013, offered loans amounting to USD$20 billion for development, mainly in the area of power generation.
Just three months later, in July 2013, President Obama arrived in Tanzania with a battalion of business executives and with trade as a key issue. At a joint press conference with the Tanzanian president, he gave a nod to America’s own long-standing relations with the country by noting the 50th anniversary of the visit of the founder of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere to the Kennedy White House, and acknowledging Tanzania as being one of the first countries to welcome the U.S. Peace Corps.
In a generally under-reported speech to The Corporate Council on Africa on July 1, 2013, Obama outlined a bold and far-reaching plan, not just for Tanzania, but for the region itself. In what might have been described as a toned-down campaign speech, he outlined a vision for Africa that focused on the transition from a relationship of aid to one of trade. During the speech he announced several proposals including a program to aid intra-African trade, the expansion of the Young African Leaders Program, and a previously-introduced Power Africa Plan to bring electricity to the southern part of the continent. He also zeroed-in on the concerns of the business community, particularly red-tape that hampers business and investment, and long time- frames for urgently-needed projects. He promised a whole new approach to relations, one that would empower Africa’s rising middle class. The speech was pure Barack Obama, featuring a mastery of detail, humor, and an inspiring vision for the future that was easy to buy in to.
When he ran for election in his first term in 2008, his critics made light of Obama’s experience as a “community organizer,” but on July 1, 2013, this experience seemed to serve him well. It was as if he was there to organize a continent-size community.