How the United States Propelled Tyranny in Africa
by James Bovard

U.S. foreign aid is a Tyrant Entitlement Program.  Phony piety has long been one of America’s top political exports. President Barack Obama, in a 2015 speech to the African Union, the organization of the African heads of state, derided nations that institute “democracy in name, but not in substance.” But Obama’s finger wagging could not expunge how the U.S. government had long propped up Africa’s most oppressive governments.

In the 1990s, Africa saw a surge of democracies in areas that for centuries had known little except kings, tyrants, or colonial conquerors. While democracy is often touted as the best way to strengthen civic bonds, representative government has too often been a horror show in Africa.

Bad luck for albinos

Prior to a 2008 election in Cote d’Ivorie, a spokesman for the Ivorian police warned that “the organs of children will be particularly in demand” for human sacrifices. A news analysis explained that child abduction “may worsen in the run up to presidential elections later this year as political hopefuls use traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances.” Uganda saw a surge in “good luck” child mutilation and murder prior to its 2016 election. A Suffolk University Law Review article explained that “where more than six million [Ugandans] believe in witchcraft, it is not uncommon for political leaders to turn to the practice [including child sacrifice] to win political office.”

The chief of Uganda’s Anti-Human Sacrifice and Trafficking Task Force observed: “We even suspect that senior politicians, senior civil servants who have that belief, who believe in witchcraft and go to that level of sacrifice to maintain their jobs or get work.” In 2015, a United Nations human-rights expert denounced attacks on albinos in six nations due to “an apparent increase in demand for body parts of persons with albinism … in the run up to elections.” Tanzania’s Deputy Home Affairs Minister Pereira Silima announced in 2015: “I want to assure my fellow politicians that there won’t be any parliamentary seat that will be won as a result of using albino body parts.”

While elections sometimes spur child sacrifice, voting has repeatedly spurred far worse carnage in Africa in “winner trample all” elections. American Enterprise Institute African expert Mauro de Lorenzo observed: “Look carefully at what happened in Rwanda, Zaire, and Burundi, 1990 to 1994. In each case, the rapid imposition, from outside, of the structures and mechanisms of multiparty democracy leads directly to the unprecedented cataclysm that subsequently engulfed each place.”

Political clashes in Rwanda paved the way to a genocide that killed 800,000 people. A 1993 election in Burundi helped spur the slaughter of 25,000 people. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Joshua Kurlantzick observed that “Africa is now paralyzed by the rise of a new, but not necessarily better, form of government — failed democracy…. In these countries, elections have become referenda on tribal or religious identity, solidifying antagonisms between groups…. Too often, it is entrenching old hatreds, and leaving in power leaders who can claim they were elected while tearing apart civil society.”

Kenya was practically torn asunder after former President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner in a close 2007 election marked by pervasive fraud. Police gunned down hundreds of protesters, and more than 30 women and children were burned to death after a church was ignited by rioters. More than 1,300 people were killed in violence between that nation’s 43 tribes, and another half million fled for their lives. As another presidential election neared in mid-2017, Kenya’s National Security Council warned of the emergence of “political goons and militias” who would cause trouble before and after the voting.

Many African politicians have converted one-time victories at the polls into “president for life” status. The Washington Post noted in 2015: “Within the past few months, the presidents of Burundi, Congo and the Congo Republic have either scrapped their constitutional term limits or indicated their plans to stay in office through what critics call irregularities…. In countries such as Sudan, Uganda, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso, leaders have remained in power for decades, often by jailing their opponents or rigging elections.” Political power is enticing in many nations because rulers exempt themselves from any laws. “Many public officials in Africa seek re-election because holding office gives them access to the state’s coffers, as well as immunity from prosecution,” according to a 2009 Council on Foreign Relations report.

Darling Rwanda dictator

Paul Kagamea, who has ruled Rwanda since 1994, epitomizes the perversion of African democracy. Rwandans voted in 2015 on whether to change the constitution to permit him to continue reigning until 2034. Prior to that referendum, Rwandan lawmakers toured the nation to consult with millions of their countrymen. They filed a formal report declaring that only ten people in the nation of 11 million opposed permitting Kagamea to serve additional terms in office. One commentator on a Kenyan news website asked whether “those ten people are still alive.” Ninety-eight percent of voters endorsed extending his power — perhaps in part because voters had to mark their ballots with thumbprints. Kalisa Mbanda, head of the national electoral commission, hailed the vote: “We have seen the will of the people.”

Kagamea won in part because his regime openly murders his opponents and totally intimidates the populace. Rwanda illustrates how “political correctness” can beget tyranny. A 2009 bill — called “the divisionist law” — criminalizes “the use of any speech, written statement, or action that divides people, that is likely to spark conflicts among people, or that causes an uprising which might degenerate into strife among people based on discrimination.” Rwandans can also be prosecuted at “laughing at one’s misfortune” and “boasting.” Johnnie Carson, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, commented in 2015: “It has been largely an authoritarian government at the top, with Kagamea going after his political enemies and adversaries with a very iron fist.”

Kagamea was the “darling dictator of the day,” according to the New York Times — even though his armies have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Rwanda and in neighboring countries, according to a United Nations report that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice sought to suppress in 2010. “Foreign governments, notably the United States, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, are lining up at Kagamea’s door with praise, and money, desperate for a foreign aid success story after 50 barren years in Africa,” noted author Anjan Sundaram, who spent five years reporting from Rwanda and neighboring countries. Actually, foreign assistance worsens Rwandans’ oppression. As the Guardian noted, “Donors invest in a parliamentary radio station, equip the electoral body with technology, train a media council and then entrust such projects to the government, ensuring they are used to tighten its grip.”

Unfortunately, the Rwandan radio debacle is typical of how foreign aid empowers oppressors. The U.S. State Department ignores a federal law requiring it to conduct background checks on police trainees to ensure that it does not teach new tricks to individuals with atrocities on their resume. A Rand Corporation report concluded that police-training programs “can have a negative effect on democratic development by strengthening a state’s capacity for repression.” Professor Martha Huggins, in a study on political policing, concluded that “the more foreign police aid given [by the U.S. government], the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their governments become.”

Ethiopia: Vote or die

In 2005, Ethiopia held parliamentary elections that were touted as a landmark in the democratization of that nation. However, when early results showed that the opposition won most of the seats, the government engaged in massive fraud to alter the results. When citizens protested, the military gunned down hundreds of people in the streets and arrested 30,000 people, including opposition leaders and troublesome journalists. Ethiopia’s Information Minister, Bereket Simon, warned: “Anyone who incites violence, other than those elected, will have to face the law.” Government officials apparently had a divinely granted monopoly right to incite violence. A judge, part of a panel that investigated the carnage, concluded that the killings were a “massacre” — and then fled for his life after voicing that opinion. U.S. aid sharply increased afterwards.

In 2010 parliamentary elections, the ruling party won 99.6 percent of all seats. A White House press statement listed the ways that Ethiopia’s ruling party swindled voters and concluded with a hollow promise: “We will work diligently with Ethiopia to ensure that strengthened democratic institutions and open political dialogue become a reality for the Ethiopian people.”

“Working diligently” to advance democracy did not include complaining about how U.S. aid helped subjugate the Ethiopian people. The regime has a simple recipe for democracy: Those who vote wrong do not eat. Government officials pick and choose who receives food donated by foreigners. A BBC investigation “found villages where whole communities are starving, having allegedly been denied basic food, seed and fertilizer for failing to support Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.” The U.S. government was aware that its aid was being abused but muzzled itself to avoid offending the Ethiopian regime. A confidential 2009 message from the U.S. embassy to Washington noted, “Efforts to monitor food distribution are aimed at making sure vulnerable people are fed and cannot be expanded to include investigation of political pressures applied to those people without jeopardizing that primary mission.”

Regardless of its abuses, the Ethiopian government continued receiving more U.S. aid than any other sub-Saharan African government. Shortly before another round of voting in 2015, Wendy Sherman, one of the top officials in the U.S. State Department, proclaimed in Addis Ababa that “Ethiopia is a democracy that is moving forward in an election that we expect to be free, fair and credible.” Her comment outraged human-rights organizations and American editorial writers. At that point, Ethiopia was one of the most repressive nations in the world as far as expelling or imprisoning journalists, bloggers, and activists. The government won 100 percent of the parliamentary seats this time — in large part because it effectively outlawed other parties, supplemented by occasional killings of opposition leaders. After the voting finished, the State Department announced that it “commends the people of Ethiopia for their civic participation” but lamented that U.S. diplomats were prohibited from observing the electoral process. The press release also noted that “the imprisonment and intimidation of journalists … are inconsistent with democratic processes and norms.”

Regardless of those blemishes, Obama announced that Ethiopia’s “elections put forward a democratically elected government” when he visited Addis Ababa two months later. A “senior administration official” offered a weaselly defense of Obama to Politico: “Saying the government was democratically elected, the official said, was not the same as saying that the government was elected by a process that was fully free, fair and democratic…. Had the president been asked was this a perfectly free, fair and democratic election, the answer would have been, ‘Absolutely not.’” But Obama included no qualifications when he blessed the Ethiopian regime — which endlessly repeated his “democratically elected” seal of approval.

Foreign aid liberates rulers from giving a damn about their own people. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, wrote: “A constant stream of free money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power.” The government can use the cash to buy influence, bribe opponents, or otherwise quell discontent. This is especially unfortunate since many nations are ruled by kleptocracies — governments of thieves.

Unfortunately, politicians like Obama are still hailed for having good intentions toward Africa —regardless of the wreckage they spawned. Foreign aid is virtue signaling with other people’s money. Africa shows that foreign aid has been used as a political weapon of mass destruction, and foreign aid will continue to be toxic as long as politicians are politicians.

James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.