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White House taps nominees for major Africa posts

May 11, 2018

[caption id="attachment_47550" align="alignleft" width="1000"]Illinois state Sen. Kyle McCarter was picked as ambassador to Kenya. | Seth Perlman/AP Illinois state Sen. Kyle McCarter was picked as ambassador to Kenya. | Seth Perlman/AP[/caption] The White House sent several State Department and diplomatic nominations to the Senate on Thursday, including two prominent Africa positions that were sitting unfilled.
Tibor Nagy, recently a vice provost at Texas Tech University and former ambassador to Ethiopia and Guinea, was tapped to be assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Illinois state Sen. Kyle McCarter was picked as ambassador to Kenya.
The announcement came the same day that the Pentagon released a summary of its final U.S. Africa Command report on an October ambush in Niger that killed four U.S. troops and others. The Trump administration has come under fire for what critics called a lack of diplomatic engagement with Africa. Major countries like South Africa and Tanzania remain without an American emissary. President Donald Trump provoked an uproar in January when he reportedly called African and other nations “shithole” places. And the rising threat of terror groups in West Africa, along with ongoing conflicts in South Sudan and Somalia, has sparked calls for the U.S. to do more. The White House was reported to have selected J. Peter Pham for the assistant secretary post last year, but Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) reportedly threatened to scuttle that choice over a Western Sahara disagreement.

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