Dianda Isomora shouted “Africa is not for sale” into a megaphone outside the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington as President Barack Obama touted $33 billion in U.S. investments for the continent.

Isomora, an activist who said he was jailed for his work in the west African nation of Burkina Faso, said he believes Obama should have focused on discussing human rights with the more than 40 heads of state including Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea who attended the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, rather than promoting investment. The leaders listened to Coca Cola Co. Chief Executive Officer Muhtar Kent and General Electric Co. CEO Jeff Immelt talk about technology, education and infrastructure.

“They’re not talking human rights, they’re talking money,” Isomora said Aug. 5 as he took part in a demonstration outside the hotel, one of the venues used during the three-day summit that ended yesterday. “The U.S. is just trying to get a slice of Africa without caring about the people,” he said, wearing a white t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Obama stop supporting dictators in Africa.”

Obama, at the summit’s closing news conference, said that for countries not performing optimally with regard to the full array of human rights “we can be effective by working with them on certain areas and criticizing them and trying to elicit improvements in other areas.”

“Even among countries that generally have strong human rights records, there are areas where there are problems,” Obama said. “That’s true of the United States, by the way.”

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said some of the African governments at the event have suppressed civil rights and opposition groups as their leaders seek to extend their stay in power.

“Of the 53 hours of official meetings scheduled for the summit, only two are dedicated to the critical issue of governance,” Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote in an opinion piece on CNN’s website. “That is scant treatment for what is perhaps the greatest impediment to security and economic growth in Africa.”

Leaving some controversial leaders off the list wasn’t enough to signal disapproval, Bob Collymore, the chief executive officer of Safaricom Ltd., East Africa’s biggest mobile phone company, said in an interview Aug. 5. Obama didn’t invite Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who has been in power for more than 30 years after winning two elections whose credibility was questioned by observers.“

Forget about Robert Mugabe for a second, everyone knows he’s a pariah,” Collymore said. “What’s happening in Uganda, what’s happening in Rwanda, what’s happening in all those other countries. It’s kind of hypocritical.”

Opposition politicians in Rwanda have been killed and imprisoned while in Uganda lawmakers have tried to increase prison sentences for homosexuals.

Kagame said Rwanda plans to sell a second Eurobond, a signal that investors believe Rwanda respects human rights, 20 years after 800,000 people, mainly of Kagame’s Tutsi ethnic group, were killed in a genocide.

“The markets are never wrong,” Kagame said in an interview in Washington Aug. 5. “Look at the situation in Rwanda, where we have been 20 years ago and where we are now. It’s short of miraculous. It can’t be just because we are violating human rights. It’s because actually we value and respect human rights.”

Amnesty International said earlier this week it obtained video footage, images and testimonies of war crimes committed by Nigerian forces and Islamist insurgents. The “gruesome” evidence includes images of detainees whose throats were cut and their bodies “dumped in mass graves by men who appear to be members of the Nigerian military,” it said. Nigeria’s military said it’s checking on the authenticity of the material.

Police in the Democratic Republic of Congo arrested opposition lawmaker Jean-Bertrand Ewanga for making offensive comments about President Joseph Kabila, who was meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug 5.

Obama on Aug. 5 told the African leaders and U.S. business people that capital and development programs were not the only important developments on the continent.

“Rule of law, regulatory reform, good governance — those things matter even more, because people should be able to start a business and ship their goods without having to pay a bribe or hire somebody’s cousin,” Obama said.

The U.S. should focus its attention on countries like Ghana, where peaceful transitions have underpinned economic growth, Jeffrey Smith, a human rights activist at the Washington-based Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said by phone yesterday.

Ghana has experienced three democratic changes of government in elections held since 2001.

“Those are the leaders we should be doing business with and not the tyrants of the past,” he said. “The administration misses the mark insofar that human rights and good governance underpin things like economic growth and trade.”