President Barack Obama Administration Tackling Wide Range of African Issues - Johnnie Carson

fter a slow start on Africa, the Obama administration is picking up the pace. President Barack Obama will make his first stopover in a sub-Saharan African country next week when he and First Lady Michelle Obama visit Ghana. (Egypt was included in a presidential trip last month.)

In early August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to take part in the 8th Annual African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Forum in Nairobi, Kenya and visit several other countries on the continent.

Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew is currently on a multi-country African journey. The administration's point person for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson, who has been on the job since May 7, says the Obama team is now fully engaged on a range of issues.

In this first AllAfrica interview with the assistant secretary, we explore some of the challenges for United States policies towards Africa. An upcoming conversation will discuss other challenges, other countries - and the progress and potential of Africa in this decade.

What do you see as the role of foreign assistance, and what is the status of USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)?

USAID has suffered a number of serious reversals over the last decade.

Their staff has been greatly reduced; their efficiency has been eroded; and their expertise has been lost. I think there should be more aid personnel in the field - personnel who are experts in their fields, whether it be agronomy, public health, micro financing, micro enterprise, or working closely with people to ensure that programs are carried out effectively.

I think MCC plays an important role and is a new instrument. But I also argue that MCC growth and continued progress should not be at the expense of having a private aid operation. We have lost ground with AID, and I think it needs to be recovered. Both of these play critical roles: MCC in providing capital over long periods of time to help in infrastructure development [while] AID works effectively in areas of education and agriculture and public health. They should continue to do that work as efficiently as possible - getting more money directly to people.

How do you respond to critics, like Dambisa Moyo, who argues in her book Dead Aid that aid has had a negative impact on Africa's development?

All aid is not effective, and not all aid has been used well. There is too much overhead in aid, too many middlemen, too many contractors, too many people making money off of development assistance. We have to find a way to eliminate that and to ensure that a larger percentage of aid dollars gets to people in critical areas. Dambisa Moyo's voice is an important new one in this discussion, which has been going on for a long time.

I fundamentally believe that aid is important. It plays a key role in assisting African nations to move forward. There is no question that aid that gets down to the grass roots - that is used to deal with issues of public health, to fight HIV/Aids, to assist people in dealing with malaria or schistosomiasis; that helps to build capacity - can be a critical and valuable element in our assistance policy.

Corruption is an issue closely tied to the effectiveness of development assistance. What can the United States do to help eradicate corruption and promote transparency?

Corruption undermines the ability of governments to deliver services, and it siphons off resources into private pockets. We have to make it a topic of conversation with government officials. We have to work with civil society to give them the courage to speak out about it. We have to work with the local media so that they will expose it. We have to work with prosecutors so that they have the courage to prosecute and with judges to have the conviction to convict.

And if we see mega-corruption going on and individuals who are profiting from it, and we have evidence that they are not being prosecuted, we should look at new methods to identify and to stigmatize and to punish, to the extent that we can, those individuals who are engaged in corruption.

Where do you see governments tackling corruption in a serious way?

I think that there are some countries that are exemplars and will remain exemplars. The government of Botswana does an excellent job. Mauritius does an excellent job. The Tanzania government does an excellent job. I recall that within the last year a senior government official in Tanzania was removed from office because of serious allegations of corruption.

Let's talk about Somalia. Why has the administration decided to engage in a new way with the Transitional Federal Government, including the supply of arms and ammunition?

The instability that has prevailed in Somalia for the last 20 years has become a cancer. We now have a war-torn society where probably 60 to 70 percent of the people are dependent upon food aid from the outside - just to stay alive. We see the population of Mogadishu having declined by some two-thirds as a result of the fighting in and around the city, and we see unemployment among youth at astronomical levels. Southern Somalia is a humanitarian problem of enormous proportions.

But it's not just Somalia itself. The cancer has started to metastasize, spreading across the border into Kenya. Today the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya has some 270,000 refugees. That camp, which was established about a decade and a half ago, was built to handle 90,000.

It is estimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that some six to seven thousand Somalis are crossing the border into northeast Kenya every day. Eastleigh, a suburb in the northern part of Nairobi, [has become] the largest Somali city. There is enormous pressure on the Kenyan government to handle the refugees and provide the infrastructure needed to cater to them.

Moreover, the problem of Somalia has contributed to the tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is clear that the Eritrean government is supporting the al-Shabaab militia. It is not because they are in support of Islamist or extremist [elements]. They are doing this largely as a way to undermine and to pressure the Ethiopian government.

So we have both refugees and political tensions, but - even more than that - Somalia has become an international problem that has metastasized internationally in the form of piracy on the high seas. The lack of a central government and the lack of a police force, military, judiciary or any kind of criminal justice system has allowed for impunity.

Equally, the absence of any economy and the devastation of the formal sector and the informal sector have resulted in Somalis becoming desperate.

How effective are arms going to be in addressing that issue? Kenyans are worried that the arms going to Somalia will end up being used in Kenya to terrorize local people. Why military as opposed to development aid, and what about political engagement?

We have tried to make it very, very clear that diplomacy is primary and that support for stability inside of Somalia is what we are doing. We support the 'Djibouti process', which helped to create the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and we support the TFG, the government of Sheikh Sharif. The Djibouti process has been endorsed by Kenya, and by the AU [African Union].

We have actively sought to engage the Eritreans to encourage them not to support al-Shabaab, not to send money or ammunition to al-Shabaab, not to allow their country to be a conduit for resources to al-Shabaab. We have encouraged them not to allow foreign fighters to pass through their country. All of these things are on the diplomatic side.

And these are also things that the IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a grouping of seven East African nations] and the AU support. You may recall that two weeks ago the IGAD and the AU said they felt that Eritrea was playing a spoilers role [and called for] an arms embargo, a blockade of southern ports and a no-fly zone [in Somalia].