JOHANNESBURG, June 30: Pointing to Africa’s crippling lack of electrical power, President Barack Obama is due to announce today a 7 billion dollars initiative over five years to double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We see this as the next phase in our development strategy and a real focal point in the president’s agenda going forward,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters traveling with the president.
Obama is midway through a three-country tour of Africa and is due to give what aides bill as his fullest description of his vision for the US relationship with the continent today.
The president has chosen historically resonant locations for the address, and is due to speak at the University of Cape Town after touring the prison on Robben Island. Robert F Kennedy’s 1966 speech at the university linked the struggles against apartheid and the US civil rights movement and was seen as giving encouragement to the movement, while Robben Island is where anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 of his 27 years in jail.
The president will cite South Africa’s long struggle to defeat apartheid and the US civil rights movement’s success in overcoming racial inequality as models of movements that brought about change in the face of daunting obstacles, aides said. He will call on young Africans to summon similar energy to complete the work of those movements and to firmly establish economic growth, democratic government, and stable societies across the continent.
SIGNATURE PROGRAM
Obama has been faulted for lacking a grand program to benefit Africa like the HIV/AIDS initiative launched by President George W. Bush or the broad reductions of trade barriers achieved by President Bill Clinton.
(agencies)
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