It’s a bit what I predicted when he came to power. I was expecting Trump to be only caring about big countries that match the U.S., to a certain extent. He won’t take into account the Central African Republic, for instance, or Benin, or a small country like Togo – unless you have a story where you’re going to have a China naval base being built in Togo, or something like that. If you don’t have a geopolitical angle to it, I don’t think small countries will matter to the Trump administration.
The language coming out of the White House is about closing AFRICOM to put it under EUROCOM, but at the same time maintaining a strong connection with the DRC, having those minerals in discussion; saying that we are still committed to the Lobito Corridor [a U.S.-backed infrastructure project connecting Angola’s Atlantic port to the DRC] with $500 million; that we are looking into building the peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda, because you have that minerals component; that we’re still looking into how to build a security partnership with Kenya – and when we see Kenya going with China, we’re kind of mad about it. We still want to be engaged more with South Africa, receiving President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House, but at the same time, having all this white genocide, even though [white Afrikaners] denied it.
It shows you that few countries will matter. But most African countries won’t really fit that much into the Trump administration.
The label of “transactional” gets attached to the Trump foreign policy: we do deals. You mentioned the DRC and critical minerals, but you’ve seen other African countries throw out potential deals to entice the White House. Are there any African countries doing it right? And by right, I mean, they’re not just trying to appease Trump, but they’re actually getting something out of a partnership with the U.S. administration?
The “getting right” is really depending on which perspective you’re looking into.
If you’re talking about from a security-regime perspective, the DRC will tell you, “yeah, we’re getting this thing right because we are able to negotiate with Trump to get the political clout and leverage.” But is it useful to the DRC as a country? We would say, no, because the context is completely different. From [the DRC’s] own regime survival it’s going to tell you: I’m doing the right thing. But it’s much more complicated.
Some countries like Angola will tell you, you know what? We haven’t been really quote, unquote “sucking up” to the Trump administration because our Lobito Corridor project was there before the Trump administration – the Americans they just joined us because they wanted to fund the consortium that’s going to refurbish the railway. In a sense, Angola is the only country where Trump can say, “you know what, we are doing something great in Africa, we are putting millions in infrastructure, the U.S. is present, trying to counter China, in African infrastructure.” Even though it’s really not the case, the U.S. can still use the Lobito Corridor story as a part of the narrative.
I guess that’s the tricky knot of the whole thing. Across Trump’s foreign policy there is a sense that this is just a raw exercise of American power.
Without talking about the values of anything – more like we can put that on the table and this is it. We don’t really try to soften anything.
In your conversations, what is your sense of how African governments are viewing the Trump administration’s transactional approach?
When you talk with different stakeholders, different diplomats on the continent, they are aware of the limitation of fully embracing that kind of raw display of power, in a sense, where it means that we don’t care about you. It’s a take it or leave it. We’re not going to try to sugarcoat, we’re going to not try to please you, to convince you, we’re just going to come in and say: we’re the U.S. You’re going to do this for us. Either you say yes, or you say no.
I have in mind [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, when he talks about immigration visas, it’s the same tone, in a sense, like, “we don’t care.” We’re not going to try to please you, either you take it, or you leave it. Many are worried because it means that you don’t really have space for negotiation. You don’t really have space for trying to persuade, for conversations. Power talks, and when you know that there is this imbalance in power, it’s becoming just more difficult for you to manage.
The immigration point is interesting because the Trump administration put so many African countries under its travel ban. Beyond that, there are stories like the members of the women’s Senegalese basketball team being denied visas to the U.S. How do you think African countries view the immigration piece?
It’s being received with [worry]. You don’t really have leverage against the U.S. You only have the power of the narrative to complain, but because of the narrative, you’re afraid if I say the wrong thing – because we have the feeling we are dealing with someone’s ego here – if I say something that hurts his ego, he may do something even worse against my country.
And you still have to wait to see if [the Trump administration] is going to confirm the second list. If they confirm the second list, basically you’re going to have a full third of African countries who cannot travel to the U.S. anymore.
Getting back to the DRC, how do you put the DRC on [the potential second travel ban list], knowing that, at the same time, you’re negotiating a mineral deal with the DRC? How are you going to balance all of that? How are you going to explain to DRC officials that we are going to put your countrymen on this list, they’re not going to come to the U.S., yet you’re going to sign?
That takes us to the question that you asked about raw power. Because it is raw power. The U.S. can tell you: we don’t care. We don’t give a damn. We believe that you are a danger to our country. We don’t want your people to come here, but yet we’re going to sign with you. Either you sign with us for you to have the regime security that you are hoping for. Or you don’t sign. Either way, your people are still not going to the U.S. It really leaves you with limited space to engage diplomatically. That’s the limitation of all of those raw-power approaches.
What about the fallout from the cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, including the end of USAID?
In a sense, foreign aid has empowered bad governance because of the relief it provides, because of the buffer role it plays between people’s frustration and leadership by providing the public goods and services that the government is failing to provide. They’re not really creating incentive for leaders in those countries to say, “you know, we need to step up our game. We need to provide more good governance, we need to provide more public goods because why do I care? You are there.”
I remember someone was telling me a story coming from Uganda, where [Uganda President] Yoweri Museveni was having a meeting with, I think, some representatives from Germany quite some time ago. They were telling him: now, it’s time for you to step up, to put money into education and public services and health services. And [Museveni] told them: Why am I going to do that? You guys do everything without me. You don’t ask for me to put $12 million into building a hospital somewhere in rural Uganda, or training doctors. You do all of that. You have similar cases in many African countries, where many felt we don’t need to put money in all those social services because foreign aid has been there to do that for us.
Now that foreign aid is retrenching, and the withdrawal of USAID – for which you can see the impact, where many projects have been closed off, and many people have been laid off. Let’s face it, USAID was seeding a lot of NGOs in Africa, in governance, in health governance, in women and gender rights, all of those small NGOs that were running programs in rural places have been closed off, and there’s no money coming from other organizations either. Because of USAID, other organizations as well, have been trying to move away from that space.
I don’t think many fully comprehend to what extent the closing of the USAID, the stoppage of all the funding coming from other organizations, will have an impact. We’re going to have to wait maybe another three, four months, maybe a year, from now for countries to really start to feel the direct impact of no school opening, no doctors being trained or not, the medicine missing in the hospitals, that people are going to realize, wow, it is gone. And what does it mean for us?
Have any governments begun to take over some of this aid infrastructure?
It’s still mostly in limbo right now. In some countries, some officials are trying to negotiate a new approach, trying to, for example, to get China to finance certain projects, which is basically quite difficult at this point for many of them. We are still not really grasping how deep we are in this future, how difficult it’s going to be for us.
You mentioned that some countries may be seeking financing from China. In the U.S., many critics of aid cuts have argued this will create an opening for China. Is China stepping up – and if not, why not?
In the context where you will not see money coming from the U.S. or other donors, seeing billions coming from China, you’re going to perceive it as China stepping in – like, wow, China is there!
But China has been there for quite some time. They are going to become much more visible now than before because when you had one country, like the DRC receiving $1 billion from USAID, when you don’t have that $1 billion and you have, you know, $200 million coming from China for different projects, you’re going to see and feel that.
So far, China hasn’t shown any kind of sign of increasing the money allocated for Africa in terms of aid. It’s not likely to happen. But they’re going to ramp up the narrative. Small things are going to be really highlighted, so you’re going to have the impression that China is stepping up. Because USAID is not there, they just have more space for narrative.
In the U.S., proponents of a stronger relationship with Africa, who don’t want to go all-in on the pure Trumpian raw power, but also see the drawbacks in foreign aid, are trying to figure out a new way to engage with the continent. I think competition with China is also a factor here. But if you were advising the U.S. administration, how do you think it should think about its relationship to Africa?
My advice would be not to go one-to-one against China in Africa. It’s not going to work. The two countries have different profiles, different strengths and different weaknesses.
Unfortunately, the simple fact that the U.S. is withdrawing USAID, they’re basically weakening the main tool of strength they had over other countries in Africa. Now they want to reinvent themselves: but the question is, do you have the same tools? Do you have the same ability to be able to engage to the same level with China? Because under the aid approach, you could still say, China is lending billions of dollars to Africa, but us, we are providing billions of dollars in terms of relief, in terms of aid, we are actually saving lives, and we’re not putting debt on those countries. Now you cut that off.
Especially now, China itself is thinking of a new approach on how to deal economically, and from a trade perspective with African countries. I’m really not sure what the U.S. can do in terms of tools or policies at their disposal. The DFC [Development Finance Corporation, basically, America’s development bank] can be a useful tool. They can start with small projects. They’re going to have to really use the U.S. Export-Import Bank [an independent federal agency that helps finance the U.S. export of goods and services] to be that development bank. The question is, does the U.S. have the tools or political mechanism to allow the U.S. Ex-Im bank to behave like China’s Ex-Im Bank?
You mentioned that China is rethinking its approach to Africa. I recently saw that China is talking about lifting tariffs on African countries, which is quite the contrast. What, exactly, is China rethinking?
China is not removing tariffs, China said it’s considering removing them under certain conditions, and there is one condition China mentioned: the negotiation and signing of a new China-Africa Economic Partnership for Shared Development, something that China mentioned last year in the FOCAC [Forum on China-Africa Cooperation]. It’s something that many people didn’t pay attention to. But China is really looking into modeling a new approach in its relationship with Africa.
What is that new approach?
Let me read you the FOCAC, because the text is really important. It was released in September last year, they reiterated recently in Changsha:
“China is ready to negotiate and sign the framework agreement of China-Africa Economic Partnership for Shared Development with interested African countries, work for more flexible and practical trade and investment liberalization arrangements, and seize the initiative by opening itself wider to African countries, so as to provide long-term, stable and predictable institutional safeguard for economic and trade cooperation between China and Africa. China will open its market wider to the least developed countries including those in Africa and encourage Chinese businesses to increase their direct investment in Africa.”
The portion I just read is the crux of where China is going. China is talking about long-term, stable, predictable safeguards. You have language similar to what we’ve seen when the European Union was signing the EU-ACP agreement [the EU’s scheme for trade and development with Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific] with African countries. That would create a framework where [China and Africa] can talk trade, can talk investment, can talk all of that within its institutional framework. That’s going to allow us to have predictability. This is where China wants to go with Africa, and I think that people should be paying more attention to that than the fact that they’re going to remove the tariff barriers. They’re going to remove [tariffs] if those kinds of agreements are signed, which is going to change the dynamic between China and Africa.
How?
We’re going to have to see what China wants to bring to the table. But I’m expecting China to want to be more entrenched into the African economy. That entrenchment creates an interdependency in terms of political and economic interest, in a way that China is becoming so entrenched within the African economy, trade, and development, that Africa will not have any other choice than to always align with China on international matters. It’s not because you are forced to support China, but because it just makes sense for you. China is your partner. China is the one helping with all of that.
You have the political agenda. You also have the economic agenda, because Africa is negotiating the ACFTA, the African Continental Free Trade Area so if it comes to work, you can imagine that China is going to have a large market – 1.3 billion consumers. I’m going to export my goods to South Africa in the same way I get to do in Nigeria, with the same price, with nothing changing. I can get access to all of the African markets.
And because China is ready to remove direct barriers for African products under the World Trade Organization, African countries would have to put measures on the table allowing China to get a certain advantage of free access to the African market as well, which now can impact African local industries that are trying to compete with China. You do have all those elements that can really play into Beijing’s mind on how and why we want to approach Africa in that way.
At Salzburg, we discussed how Africa could become a geopolitical heavyweight. How do you see Africa fulfilling that role now – and maybe in the next few years from now?
My concern is that we are not ready, and we are not moving fast enough to understand how the world is changing. We’re not giving ourselves the necessary tools to be able to manage the new world that we are moving into right now. Even when Trump leaves power in 2028, the reality is, he is already shaping U.S. foreign policy in a way that’s not going to be the way it used to be.
Are African countries ready to manage that? That’s difficult. China, for example, is also changing its approach to Africa. Not a single African country has responded to China’s offer. China made it twice, but no African has responded to that – maybe because they’re not paying attention, or maybe because it was buried in a long document that many are not reading. But this is where China is going. We are not working in a way for us to be ready to tackle those challenges.
I was still waiting for the G-20 [South Africa is hosting the G-20 this year, the first time the summit will take place in Africa]. The G-20 is maybe a space for [African leaders] to be able to move certain agenda.
I see some countries aligning with the one or the other side because of political or regime survival, among other reasons. I see some other countries still managing to say: you know what? We’re in the middle. And I see some countries just being left alone, just because they’re not that big, they do not represent any kind of importance. They don’t have big leverages. So those countries can be left alone to be able to navigate through the intricacy and the complexity of the international system, by saying that, yeah, I’m friends with China, I’m friends with the US, with Israel, with friends with all of that, but for other countries it is going to be difficult, and overall, I’m not really optimistic on that. I don’t see us taking the necessary steps in terms of institutional reform, in terms of narrative, in terms of structure, at country level, or in the continental level, to address the challenges of the new world that we are moving into.
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