Inside Biden-Harris White House and Africa: Officials off to DR Congo to strengthen ties, as coups multiply amid rising rights abuses and corruption

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Here are our top stories today: Top Biden officials are traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to strengthen ties with another African nation, even as the administration is raising concerns over the military takeover in Burkina Faso earlier this week.

United States Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh will travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo along with National Security Council Senior Director for Africa Dana Banks and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Amy Holman.

“The trip underscores the Biden Administration’s commitment to partnering with African nations to solve global challenges and advance shared interests,” U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said in a statement on Wednesday.

As you can see time is running out. With less than three years left and the Ethiopian and Sudanese crises consuming the first year of the Biden administration, the new government is trying to expand cooperation with Africa.

DRC is where President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo lives. He is the current chairperson of the African Union and the best way to rally African nations is to use regional bodies, which is what the administration is trying to do.

But, but, but, human rights organizations are sounding the alarm about abuses in Egypt, Cameroon and other countries.

For instance, Human Rights Watch is outraged that Egyptian authorities are deporting Eritreans seeking asylum, including children, without assessing their asylum claims or other protection needs, while Amnesty International said on January 24 that more than a hundred people from Cameroon’s Anglophone regions and its main political opposition party, arrested over the past five years for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly, are still languishing in jail, where some have been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment.

As those human rights abuses expand and corruption escalates, we are seeing coups across the continent. Transparency International corruption index released this week shows that 44 out 49 countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region scored less than 50 over 100.

Democracy is not delivering results to Africans, corruption is expanding, human rights abuses are skyrocketing, and as a result, when there are coups, sometimes with help from foreign nations, the people celebrate as it happened in Burkina Faso this week. The question is what will the international community do? How will the African Union, the European Union, the United States and other global players react? Do they even understand that it's all about poverty, human rights abuses, corruption, hunger and malicious forces? And those are the questions that we have today.

Simon Ateba, Publisher and White House Correspondent for Today News Africa in Washington.