Tough Talk

President Obama got lots of attention last month for his drop-in visit to Ghana after the G20 meeting in Italy, where he blasted African leaders for misruling the continent and condemning its people to poverty and backwardness. "Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty," said Obama. "No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end."

They were fine words. But not much else. Obama didn't single out any particular leader for criticism, and he gave the speech in Ghana, one of Africa's handful of functional democracies. In her own trip to Africa this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit bright spots like South Africa, Cape Verde, and Liberia. But she also has a perfect opportunity to name and shame the continent's worst leaders. There's only one problem: she's going to blow it.

Despite the rhetoric and Obama's enormous popularity on the continent, the new administration hasn't yet shown it has the stomach to stand up to Africa's strongmen. As David Shinn, a longtime U.S. diplomat in Africa pointed out in an interview with McClatchy's, Clinton looks set to play the "good cop" and smooth any feathers Obama may have ruffled in Ghana.

It's easy to convey inadvertent legitimacy to Clinton's interlocutors this week, because her star power (and that of her boss) will envelop them in a cloak international respectability, photo-ops, happy talk about trade agreements, and new dollops of aid for agriculture. No matter what's on Clinton's actual agenda, she's going to wind up rewarding the same figures Obama implicitly rebuked in Ghana.

She chose to open her seven-nation trip in Kenya, a nice plum for President Mwai Kibaki, who clung tenaciously to power despite losing the country's 2007 presidential election. Clinton had some tough, and overdue, words for Kibaki and his rival, Raila Odinga, over their failure to implement key provisions of a 2008 agreement that ended post-election bloodshed, such as the establishment of a special tribunal to investigate those responsible for the violence. But it seems unlikely she'll push for sanctions like travel bans on those responsible, including people close to the Kenyan government.

Later, she'll visit oil-rich Nigeria, where President Umaru Yar'Adua took power in a 2007 election so ugly it made Iran's recent poll look like a New Hampshire town meeting. Yar'Adua claimed victory in that poll with 70 percent of the vote, though he was helped, according to the International Crisis Group, by a "staggering scale" of false results procured by the country's security services and an electoral commission "that became an accessory to active rigging." More than 200 people died during the campaign and voting. Nigeria is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, and it has the continent's strongest army. But corruption, ethnic tension, and political violence could yet lead to its collapse as a functioning state. The U.S. should strongly push—shove is more like it—Yar'Adua to conduct a better poll in 2011, and it should send a clear message that it won't look the other way, as the Bush administration did two years ago.

But Yar'Adua is a veritable Nelson Mandela compared with the Democratic Republic of Congo's Joseph Kabila, who Clinton is also due to meet. Kabila has done virtually nothing to hold accountable members of his armed forces accused of raping and executing civilians in the country's festering civil war. Just last year, his own presidential guard murdered a top opposition leader in Kinshasa.