Beitrag vom 28.07.2014

The White House

Remarks by the President in Town Hall with the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders
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… regardless of the resources a country possesses, regardless of how talented the people are, if you do not have a basic system of rule of law, of respect for civil rights and human rights, if you do not give people a credible, legitimate way to work through the political process to express their aspirations, if you don't respect basic freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, if there are not laws in place in which everybody is equal under the law so that there's not one set of rules for the well-connected and another set of rules for ordinary people, if you do not have an economic system that is transparent and accountable so that people trust that if they work hard they will be rewarded for their work and corruption is rooted out -- if you don't have those basic mechanisms, it is very rare for a country to succeed.

I will go further than that: That country will not succeed over the long term. It may succeed over the short term because it may have natural resources that it can extract, and it can generate enough money to then distribute and create patronage networks. But over time, that country will decline.

And if you look at examples around the world, you'll have a country like Singapore which has nothing -- it's a small, tiny, city-state with not a lot of -- it has no real natural resources, and yet it's taken off. And you have other countries, which I won't mention -- (laughter) -- that have incredible resources, but because there's not a basic system of rule of law that people have confidence in, it never takes off and businesses never take root.

And so what I would emphasize is governance as a starting point. It's not alone sufficient. You then also have to have over time infrastructure. And you also have to have an education system that's in place. And there are all kinds of other elements that are necessary. But if you don't have the basic premise that ordinary citizens can succeed based on their individual efforts, that they don't have to pay a bribe in order to start a business or even get a telephone, that they won't be shaken down when they're driving down the street because the police officers aren't getting paid enough, and this is the accepted way to supplement their income -- if you don't have those things in place, then over time there's no trust in the society. People don't have confidence that things are working the way that they should. And so then everybody starts trying to figure out, okay, what's my angle? How am I going to get my thing? And it creates a culture in which you can't really take off.

Look, you're never going to eliminate 100 percent of corruption. Here in the United States, occasionally we have to throw people in jail for taking money for contracts or having done favors for politicians. All that's true. But the difference here in the United States -- and it's true in many of the more developed, industrialized countries -- is that's more the aberration rather than the norm.

I mean, the truth is here in the United States, if you want to start a business, you go ahead and you file papers, you can incorporate. You might have to pay a fee of $50 or $100 or whatever it ends up being, and that's it. You've got your business. Now, the business might not be making any money at that point, you still got to do a whole bunch of stuff to succeed -- but the point is, is that basically rule of law is observed. That's the norm. That's what happens 95 percent of the time.

And that's I think where you have to start. And that's where young people I think have to have high expectations for their leadership. And don't be fooled by this notion that, well, we have a different way, an African way. Well, no. (Laughter.) The African way is not that you suddenly have a -- you've been in office and then, suddenly, you have a Swiss bank account of $2 billion. That's not the African way. (Applause.)

And part of rule of law, by the way, is also that leaders eventually give up power over time. It doesn't have to be the same way all the time. But if you have entrenched leadership forever, then what happens over time is it just -- you don't get new ideas and new blood. And it is inevitable I think sometimes that rule of law becomes less and less observed because people start being more concerned, about keeping their positions than doing the right thing.

Question:
Good morning, Mr. President. I'm from Botswana. I just wanted to find out how committed is the U.S. to assisting Africa in closing gender inequalities, which are contributing to gender-based violence, which it threatens the achievement of many Millennium Development goals, such as access to universal education, eradicating HIV and AIDS.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, listen, you will not find anybody more committed than I am to this issue, and let me tell you why.

First of all, I was mentioning earlier, if you look comparatively at countries around the world, what societies succeed, which ones don't, one of the single-best measures of whether a country succeeds or not is how it treats its women. (Applause.) And if you think about it, it makes sense, because, first of all, women are half your population. So if you have a team -- we just finished the World Cup, right -- if you have a soccer team -- what you all call a football team -- and you go out and the other side has a full team and you send out half your team, how are you going to do? You will not do as well.

If you are not empowering half of your population that means you have half as few possible scientists, half as few possible engineers. You are crippling your own development unnecessarily. So that's point number one.

Point number two is if you educate and empower and respect a mother, then you are educating the children, right? So with a man, you educate him, yeah, it's okay. (Laughter.) A woman, you educate her, and suddenly you've got an entire village, an entire region, an entire country suddenly is becoming educated.

So this is an absolute priority for us. And we'll be discussing this with the heads of state and government that we see next week. And we've seen some progress on some fronts, but this is where sometimes traditions can get in the way.

And as many of you know, my father was from Kenya, and -- (applause) -- that's the Kenyan contingent. (Laughter.) But I think what applies to Kenya is true and applies to many of the countries in Africa -- and this is not unique to Africa, we see this in other parts of the world -- some of the old ways of gender relations might have made sense in a particular setting. So in Kenya, for example, in the Luo tribe, polygamy existed. It was based on the idea that women had their own compounds, they had their own land, and so they were empowered in that area to be self-sufficient. And then urbanization happened; suddenly the men may be traveling to the city and suddenly there is another family in the city and the women who were left back in the villages may not be empowered in the same way. So what worked then might not work today -- in fact, does not work today. And if you seek to -- if you try to duplicate traditions that were based on an entirely different economy and an entirely different society and entirely different expectations, well, that's going to break down. It's not going to work.

So as a continent, you have to update and create new traditions. And that's where young people come in. You don't have to accept what's the old ways of doing things. You can respect the past and respect traditions while while recognizing they have to be adapted to a new age.

Now, I have to say there are some traditions that just have to be gotten rid of and there's no excuse for them. Female genital mutilation -- I'm sorry, I don't consider that a tradition worth hanging on to. (Applause.) I think that's a tradition that is barbaric and should be eliminated. Violence towards women -- I don't care for that tradition. I'm not interested in it. It needs to be eliminated. (Applause.)

So part of the task is to find what traditions are worth hanging on to and what traditions you got to get rid of. I mean, there was a tradition in medicine that if you were sick, they would bleed you. That's a bad tradition. And we discovered, let's try other things -- like medicine. (Laughter.) So we don't have to cling on to things that just don't work. And subjugating women does not work, and the society will fail as a consequence. (Applause.)

So everything we do, every program that we have -- any education program that we have, any health program that we have, any small business or economic development program that we have, we will write into it a gender equality component to it. This is not just going to be some side note. This will be part of everything that we do.
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Question:

Mzuri sana. (Applause.) Asante sana (Swahili.

Africa is losing her people to starvation and diseases, which are otherwise curable. And this is largely because our governments are establishing very huge debts to the G8 countries. As a global leader in the family of nations, when will the U.S. lead the other G8 countries in forgiving Africa these debts so that our governments can be in a position to deliver and provide essential services, like social, health care, and the infrastructural development services to our people? (Applause.) Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Well, let me make a couple of points on this. First of all, I think it's important to recognize on issues of health the significant progress that has been made -- because I think sometimes we are so properly focused on the challenges that we forget to remind ourselves how far we've come. And when you know how far you've come, it gives you confidence about how much further you can go.

So over the last 20 years, HIV occurrence has been cut in half in Africa -- half. Tuberculosis and malaria deaths have been reduced by 40 percent and 30 percent respectively; 50 percent fewer women die giving birth; 50 million children's lives have been spared. And most importantly, now what we're doing is not just providing assistance through programs like PEPFAR, but we're also empowering governments themselves to begin to set up public health infrastructure and networks, and training nurses and clinicians and specialists so that it becomes self-sufficient. So we're making progress.

Now, I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had around debt forgiveness. And in meetings with what now is the G7, I just want to let you know -- (laughter) -- but that's a whole other topic that -- (laughter) -- we don't want to get too far afield -- I think there's genuine openness to how can we help make sure that countries are not saddled with debts that may have been squandered by past leaders, but now hamstrung countries -- are making countries unable to get out from under the yoke of those debts.

The only thing I will do, though, is I will challenge the notion that the primary reason that there's been a failure of service delivery is because of onerous debt imposed by the West. Let me say something that may be somewhat controversial. And I'm older than all of you -- that I know. (Laughter.) By definition, if you're my age you're not supposed to be in this program. (Laughter.) You lied about your age. (Laughter.) When I was a college student, issues of dependency and terms of trade and the legacy of colonialism, those were all topics of great, fervent discussion. And there is no doubt that, dating back to the colonial era, you can trace many of the problems that have plagued the continent -- whether it's how lines were drawn without regard to natural boundaries and tribal and ethnic relationships; whether you look at all the resources that were extracted and the wealth that was extracted without any real return to the nature of trade as it developed in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, so that value was never actually produced in country, but was sent somewhere else. There are all kinds of legitimate arguments you can look at in terms of history that impeded African development.

But at some point, we have to stop looking somewhere else for solutions, and you have to start looking for solutions, internally. And as powerful as history is and you need to know that history, at some point, you have to look to the future and say, okay, we didn't get a good deal then, but let's make sure that we're not making excuses for not going forward.

And the truth is, is that there's not a single country in Africa -- and by the way, this is true for the United States as well -- that with the resources it had could not be doing better. So there are a lot of countries that are generating a lot of wealth. I'm not going to name any, but you can guess. This is a well-educated crowd. There are a lot of countries that are generating a lot of income, have a lot of natural resources, but aren't putting that money back into villages to educate children. There are a lot of countries where the leaders have a lot of resources, but the money is not going back to provide health clinics for young mothers.

So, yes, I think it's important for Western countries and advanced countries to look at past practices -- if loans have been made to countries that weren't put into productive enterprises by those leaders at that time, those leaders may be long gone but countries are still unable to dig themselves out from under those debts -- can we strategically in pin-point fashion find ways to assist and provide some relief. That's a legitimate discussion. But do not think that that is the main impediment at this point to why we have not seen greater progress in many countries, because there's enough resources there in-country, even if debts are being serviced, to do better than we're doing in many cases.
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