Fuck Off, George W. Bush

South Africa Does Not Want You Here

Butcher of Baghdad scouts military bases on African soil



Airforce One hits the tarmac at Waterkloof airbase next Tuesday, the first pulpit on United States President George Bush's evangelical five-stop African junket — his second trip to the continent, his first to South Africa. Bush will also visit Senegal, Nigeria, Botswana and Uganda. ... Strategically, Nigeria and Senegal are vital for future US oil supplies; South Africa's support is crucial because she's a regional power and an influential developing world country, while both Uganda and Botswana are paeons to the US free market agenda. ...

Accompanied by his Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush will be hard-pressed to show his good works in South Africa. ... He comes to a country where one of the world's greatest statesmen, Nelson Mandela, called him "a man who cannot think properly" and where the country took a firm and vociferous stand against him on the war on Iraq. And once he gets his voice heard above the roar and the din, his spin-doctors will have their work cut out overcoming the distrust and scepticism that Africans — and South Africans in particular — have developed towards his administration. To many on the continent and in the pro-Africa lobby in the West, Bush is the Great Deceiver: adept at repackaging old promises and dazzling his critics with new pledges to be delivered on future dates.

Besides South Africa, protests are also planned in Dakar, and the union movement in Nigeria will link its crippling strike against the oil sector to Bush's visit. Bush's strategic agenda is two-fold: political and economic interest. Politically, this is a visit to shore up support for his "war on terror". ... Against massive public opposition, both South Africa and Kenya are putting the finishing touches to domestic anti-terror laws. ... The decision by the US this week to tie military aid to 19 African countries, including South Africa, to support for its plans to dilute the influence of the International Criminal Court is likely to harden attitudes. This short-sighted decision could have implications for the US's ramped-up military activities in Africa. ... Troop deployment is often congruent with oil exploration — the US sees West Africa as a vital future supplier of oil.

Bush's increasingly unilateralist foreign policy agenda is alienating the "world's only superpower" across the globe, and here. His is an unwilling empire and, as next week's protests and meetings are likely to show, as they do in Iraq's nascent guerrilla war, national sovereignty and multilateralism are vital in a globalised era. The US decision to downgrade its representation to the World Conference against Racism in 2001; its walkout from negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court; its hardline and uncooperative stance at the World Summit; and, finally, the war on Iraq have cooled relations, at points to near icy, between it and South Africa. ...

While Bush will stress the absolutes of US compassion, research shows that in each area he will highlight, economic support is in fact very limited and always places US business and national interests first. ... [T]he US has also hamstrung efforts at the World Trade Organisation to make it easier for developing countries to import or manufacture cheap generic drugs; and this week it appointed a big pharmaceutical industry businessman, Randy Tobias, former CEO of Eli-lilly to head the Bush Aids programme. Aids activists fear this will sound the death knell for efforts to manufacture and distribute cheaper non-patent Aids drugs — essential in the global battle. ...

The third leg of its "compassionate conservatism" is the African Growth and Opportunity Act [Agoa], which allows preferential market access to 38 African countries. ... Because benefits are only granted to countries that completely open their markets, local producers can lose out. In Lesotho, where clothing exports grew to $130-million from a zero-base, almost seven in 10 new enterprises are Taiwanese owned with suspect labour practices and poor working conditions, a troubling norm, according to trade unions who conducted a two-year study into Agoa. ...

South Africa is readying to roll out the red carpet for Bush ... But as Airforce One takes off next Friday, Bush is likely to go home with another message: the age of empire is over and Africa has her own priests. more...

Bush's No-Mercy Mission

Like the world's oldest profession, the Republican administration of United States President George W Bush has interests, rather than principles. It would be a mistake to take Bush's "compassionate agenda" seriously. His whistle-stop tour of five African countries, including South Africa, must be seen for what it is — hard-eyed self-service posing as a mercy mission. African leaders should approach it in the same self-interested spirit. Bush's primary concerns, as they were before the invasion of Iraq, are domestic security, the advancement of corporate America and the securing of strategic assets, mainly oil. more...

Bush Plans Bases to Gird Africa

As George Bush prepares to leave for a whistle-stop tour of Africa, it has been revealed that he has ordered the US military to plan for a massive expansion of its presence on the continent. more...

Ah, what the hell. I told you so.