President Obama’s trip to Ghana, less than six months since he took office, will mark the earliest African visit by a sitting United States president in history and, perhaps, it will signal that Africa will indeed be a higher priority for this administration than it has for those in the past.

Africa was one of the few places in the world that heaped praise on President George W. Bush, largely due to his $15 billion aid package for fighting HIV/AIDS there. Despite his aid plan’s penchant for ‘morality clauses’ that focused funding on abstinence programmes, Bush’s plan was a revelation for many of the millions of Africans living with the scourge of HIV/AIDS, helping to extend and improve the quality of life for many of them. While President Clinton’s mostly sad legacy in Africa included the botched military effort in Somalia in 1993 and ignoring the genocide in Rwanda a year later, African policy was one of the few areas in which President Bush seemed to make improvements over the previous administration.

But neither Clinton nor Bush, nor those who came before them, have done nearly enough to get at the root of much of sub-Saharan Africa’s real problems. All of the aid in the world, while necessary to stop the bleeding today, will not create lasting change. Genocide, civil war, disease, hunger, and poverty all have a long and notorious history in Africa and their pervasiveness on the continent is the result of a tangled web of reasons that dates back hundreds of years. But no matter how things got to where they are today there is only one way that lasting improvements can be made on the world’s poorest continent. Africa needs strong, selfless leaders who are willing to make sacrifices and hard choices for the benefit of their nation and its citizens. And in order for good leaders to succeed in Africa they need the strong and principled support of democratic nations everywhere.

In the past eighteen months elections that took place in both Kenya and Zimbabwe were widely viewed as shames and both resulted in major outbreaks of violence in their respective nations. The ‘unity governments’ that brought opposing political foes together for the sake of ending the violence in both countries have been largely ineffectual with the supposed co-leaders often acting independently of one another resulting in gridlock. This is no way to run a democracy and it certainly isn’t providing leadership to citizens who desperately need it.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country which in recent years has tried to “export” democracy at the barrel of a gun, largely remained on the sidelines on these and other blights on democracy in Africa. While there were strong words after these botched elections and even some diplomatic efforts, the words and the diplomacy were not strong enough. Little, in fact, has ever been done by the leader of the free world to prevent this cycle of corruption and bad governance from continuing indefinitely on much of the African continent.  African politicians steal elections because they know that they can do it with impunity. Endure a strongly-worded statement from Western leaders and perhaps a temporary reduction of aid and the corrupt African leader can stay in power indefinitely because, simply put, nobody really cares. This is unfortunate and wrong.

The Obama administration has made it clear that promoting and strengthening democratic institutions is one of its key objectives in Africa but talk is cheap. Administration after administration has talked about strengthening democracy in Africa.

It has become a trite, boilerplate statement. The time has come to turn these well-intentioned but tiresome words into actions.

President Obama’s rhetoric on Africa is strong but for the sake of the hundreds of millions of Africans held hostage by their inept and selfish leaders let us hope that Obama’s mantra of change extends to the African continent.     

Greg Houle is a freelance writer and the founder of AfricanUpdate.com