I have recently learned that when a United States of America agency funding an organisation tells it to stop working, it means exactly that. If the funding goes towards electricity or travel expenses, you are expected to turn off the lights and ground all the vehicles. I have a close friend in Kampala working at a John Hopkins University funded project who has been at home for close to a week now because of an executive order President Donald Trump signed last week.
Last week, on January 24th the US Department of State put a stop to almost all foreign aid while the new government initiates a review of these projects. This means most of the staff who where working on these projects are (at least for the duration of the review) effectively unemployed. The complication with this is that the majority of US funded projects in Africa are in the sectors of Public Health. Halting so many of these projects means that there will be real impact to the ordinary Ugandans and the shockwaves of these decisions will be felt throughout the health sector of the country.
It is estimated that the PEPFAR project alone impacts the lives of over 24 million people in the global south. This is not to mention the thousands of projects directly under USAID funding. This is perhaps the most brutal wake up call African governments could receive from the newly elected American president. This wake up call puts African nationals at a very important precipice of their development where they have to choose whether to keep relying on handouts and “Charity” from the west or pick themselves up by the bootstraps and develop their own capacity.
Indeed this decision has already been made for them because while the Makerere Infectious Diseases Initiative (IDI) in Kampala is drafting “stay at home” letters for its employees, the Chinese funded and built African Union Center for Disease Control(CDC) in Addis Ababa is operating smoothly. While many have in the past few years criticized African governments for taking Chinese loans calling these loans “exploitative”, history has proven that this is a sound economical structure for development because both parties emerge as partners in development with a win-win situation instead of recipients of charity. Partnership in development preserves mutual respect and accountability while charity keeps us in a perpetual circle of foreign influence because benevolence can always be retracted.
Interestingly the United States Mission in Uganda has for the past year used the tagline “real help not loans”. This is probably a subtle diplomatic jibe at the Chinese foreign policy structure that funnels a significant part of their development aid to Africans through infrastructure loans. However most of the loans provided by the People’s Republic of China are consensual loans which for he most part pay for themselves. For example road tolls are still being collected at the Entebbe expressway to cover the Chinese loan acquired to build the road after which all the money collected shall go towards national development.
In hindsight the real help(charity) as envisioned by the United States Mission in Uganda turns out to be an unsustainable development model because for the past 60 years it’s proven to be a panacea of the symptoms of underdevelopment without addressing the actual causes. This may explain why this year the mission changed it’s social media tagline to “Real Results, Real Impact” which is also a little ironic because one of the first impacts of the new administration was freezing funding of vital public healthcare and social welfare initiatives in the country.
But let us be honest, the real impact of this executive decision is the disruption of the flourishing NGO sector within Africa. African governments can; if they really want to, cover the deficit caused by lack of American funding for these vital healthcare projects. China has been showing them how to do this for decades now. The frontline victims of this freeze are the NGO workers like my friend who won’t be able to meet rent at the end of the month, or who’s children won’t be able to report to school at the start of the academic year because of salary delays for these three months and a possibility that their contracts won’t be renewed. The real victims are the government officers who won’t be going to the fancy capacity building workshops at the end of the month to sign for lucrative allowances.
This is definitely disruptive, especially to the fragile Ugandan middle class but definitely not disastrous and this is perhaps the best opportunity for African governments to realise that we are now living in a multipolar world and we need to get African solutions for African problems. Uganda was earlier on suspended from the AGOA initiative and the economy did not crumble. Key government figures have been sanctioned by the United States for decades but this has never truly affected government efficiency. President Trump has on a not so subtle way given African governments an opportunity to introspect on their national development and bilateral alliances and if we can use this period productively, Africa may emerge even stronger and more resilient from this aid freeze and the inevitable aid cuts even after the review period.
Shemei Ndawula is a Senior Research Fellow at Development Watch Centre.
