INTRODUCTION

Since its origin as the cradle of mankind, Africa’s history has gone through several epochs. The ancient Egyptian civilization of mainly African origin built the great pyramids, invented writing in 3250 BC as the second civilization to do so – after Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq region) in 3400 – 3100 BC but before China around 1250 BC – and invented mathematics 4,000 years ago. Then there were the pre-transatlantic slave trade great kingdoms of ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai. Up to this point, Africa’s history was one of relative greatness, innovation and self- reliance.

But from the transatlantic slave trade onwards, the continent came under foreign domination, firstly by European colonial powers. The continent went on to achieve post- colonial political independence but quickly became client states of the Great Powers during the Cold War. An era of military rule followed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s up until the end of the Cold War. This epoch was followed by the United States dominated unipolar world and the return of democracy in African countries in response to pressures external to the continent. As from the early 2000s, the rise of China created a multipolar world, again with African countries as pawns in a struggle for ascendancy between China and the West.

In the post-colonial period of political freedom from colonial rule, African countries did not focus, like post-colonial Asia did, on achieving economic transformation and thus economic freedom. Rather, against the backdrop of state-led command economies, they were lured into complacency by two main errors. The first was an extreme reliance on the export of raw natural resources and agricultural commodities. The second was a reliance on foreign aid as a model of development.

Both of these economic mistakes were a strategic extension of colonialism, but the now politically free African countries did not realize it. Foreign aid took various forms – bilateral aid (direct funding to support the budgets of African countries, financing for specific projects, and technical advisory support for economic and social policy); multilateral aid (mostly financial and technical support from donor countries through organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations; Official Development Assistance (ODA) made up of grants, concessional loans and debt relief; and humanitarian aid – financial and in-kind support for humanitarian and emergency disasters such as famines, hunger and natural disasters, and health pandemics. It should also be emphasized that there is a direct link between the “development” aid system and African countries’ high levels of external indebtedness – often to the same donor countries, plus China. The latter, however, has focused far more not on aid in the traditional sense in its relationship with African countries, but rather on commercially oriented relationships in trade, infrastructure deals and straightforward financial lending.

Aid – and the dependency it engendered – became a bad habit. It prevented African countries from developing efficient taxation systems that would generate adequate domestic revenues. It reduced investments in healthcare systems by African governments for their populations because this responsibility had become “outsourced” to foreign aid funding that focused not on building integrated health systems, but on specific health pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Aid blinded African governments to the need to focus single-mindedly on developing scientific innovation and value-added manufacturing economies.
These elements form the basis of real economic development, but were neglected. Africa became an official ward of the ‘‘international community’’. An aid-industrial complex of businesses, profits and jobs in developed countries was created in the 1960s from ‘‘aiding’’ Africa to achieve development. The perfectly contradictory phrase ‘‘international development’’ became accepted as conventional wisdom, and a staple of academic curricula of that title sprouted in western-world universities.

Africa’s agency was systematically destroyed. Even the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was built and donated to the continent’s countries by a foreign power. Sure enough, the building was later discovered to have been thoroughly bugged! In addition, globalization 3 | Page
rose over the past three decades with Africa as a market but not a factory. And ‘‘Africa Summits’’ hosted by competing global powers, with African heads of state and government received collectively in western and Asian capitals and financing packages to the continent were announced with pomp and pageantry, were normalized.

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY 2.0

It is a supreme irony that a ray of hope for ending Africa’s long ingrained culture of dependency on foreign powers for ‘‘development” assistance should be an earthquake of disruptive proportions in the form of the election of Donald J. Trump to a second, non-consecutive term in office as President of the United States effective 20 January 2025.

To understand the full implications of Trump 2.0 and the rise of right-wing populism in the U.S. and several European countries including Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, it is necessary to understand the world through the conceptual prism of the English School theory of international relations, championed by the late Australian scholar Hedley Bull in his influential book The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics in 1977.

In summary, the English School theory divides international history and relations between countries into three epochs of ‘‘order’’ or fundamental underpinnings in the modern state system. The first is the international system, in which states (countries in more modern usage) were completely independent and autonomous but related to others via the traditional methods of trade, diplomatic envoys and war. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which created territorial sovereignty as a norm in international relations, was the anchor for this version of order in world politics.

The second epoch is that of the international society, in which states retained territorial sovereignty but nevertheless collaborated actively on the basis of agreed norms, all while competing for power and influence in a controlled ‘‘anarchy’’. This became increasingly the case as the world opened up to the establishment of international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union in the late 19th century and distances between states became closer, birthing globalization. The Cold War was a classic expression of the operation of the international society.

With the Cold War ending in 1989 as the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, communism crumbled, and a new reality of a unipolar world set in, a third epoch known as the cosmopolitan world society or the international community came into view. This order attempted to subordinate sovereignty to international norms that emphasized the rights of individuals over the power and independence of the state within its own territory – an attempt at ‘‘global’’ governance. It was accompanied by the rise of globalization — the fast flow of ideas, trade, technology and culture worldwide that created an appearance of a ‘‘borderless’’ world.
But the rise of globalization and that of a cosmopolitan world society in which we all were to become – automatically and normatively – our brother’s keepers was always overrated. It was also fraught with double standards – ‘‘the international community’’ could not successfully prevent the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or the several other devastating conflicts in various parts of the world since then, including in Sudan. The hardy nature of sovereignty eventually reasserted itself through the rise of populist movements and political parties in the industrialized world. These movements emphasized domestic sovereignty and national autonomy over the liberal, “global” international order.

Trump 2.0 is a product of these contending forces in international relations and their intersection with domestic politics, going back decades to the America First movement. In truth, it marks a full-blown return to the anarchical international society and the retreat of both globalization and the so-called international community. Trump is disrupting the liberal international order that was anchored by the U.S both as global policeman and ‘‘development aid’’ provider – in the latter case alongside European countries.

The liberal international order promoted ‘‘globalist’’ approaches and challenged sovereignty, sovereign legitimacy, and home-grown solutions to national challenges. Trump has restored the primacy and legitimacy of (populist) domestic politics in international relations. He has dramatically slashed U.S foreign defense and foreign aid commitments and entanglements with Europe and Africa.

The primary reasons for this tectonic policy shift are to appeal to his political base at home, and at once weaken his political opponents on the left of the American political spectrum. This goal is to be achieved by exposing the “waste” inherent in these programs and the savings to the American tax-payer that accrue from shuttering them, as well as the ideologically disagreeable nature of some of the programs funded.

IMPACT ON AFRICA

President Trump’s disbandment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a hardy staple of U.S. foreign policy since it was founded in 1961 and the dominant channel of U.S. engagement with Africa, hit the continent like a ton of bricks. This single action and its immediate consequences has forced Africa countries to confront seemingly existential questions about their path to development, and the continent’s relevance in the world. It is my position that this is a much-needed wake-up call for Africa – a crisis that the continent must not waste.

USAID allocated a total of $12 billion to African countries in 2023 – mostly for healthcare, food assistance and security programs. Ethiopia was the biggest recipient of the U.S. funding, with a $1 billion allocation to the country from USAID in 2023. Health care funding in African countries has been the most affected. In 2023, Tanzania received $513 million for health programs. It should be noted that all African countries, except Eritrea, accepted foreign aid from the U.S. in 2023. Other major recipients of USAID health sector funding in the continent:

Nigeria: $512 million
South Africa: $481 million
Uganda: $436 million
Mozambique: $392 million
Kenya: $377 million
Zambia: $371 million
DRC: 258 million 6 | Page
Ethiopia: 258 million
Malawi: $239 million

Source: ForeignAssistance.gov

The impact of the Trump aid cuts is, and will be, devastating. It has been estimated that they will push nearly six million more Africans into extreme poverty in 2026.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR AFRICA

Despite the seemingly catastrophic impact of the U.S. aid cuts, I argue that Africa lost far more than if ever gained from so-called development aid. Our continent should take this international political earthquake as an opportunity to create a paradigm shift that will lead to the real development of African countries. The emotional appeal of short-term projections of lives and jobs that will be lost in Africa owing to the drastic reduction of foreign aid should not befuddle rational thinking. The arguments I set out below, I believe, far outweigh sentimentalism.

First, the phrase ‘‘international development’’ is oxymoronic. Development cannot be transplanted via international assistance. It must be homegrown, evolving from within each society. This is primarily because development begins in the mind, and is driven by a philosophical worldview that projects a country’s national ambitions that are anchored by a value system. This is a process that takes place over time, and must be pursued with consistency and focus, backed by strong leadership and competent governance. Most African countries have lacked these essential ingredients for development. Moreover, there is no example of any developed country that achieved that revered status by virtue of foreign aid.

Second, aid is not essential. But African countries were led to believe – and deceived themselves by believing – that it is a necessary path to development. African countries came to believe this because aid, especially when in the form of grants or low-interest loans, appears to be ‘‘free’’. It takes a lot of self-awareness to reject assistance that ostensibly costs nothing.

But the costs of aid have been huge. Quite apart from the lost income and lost jobs from potentially sustainable industries that foreign aid crowds out, there is the fundamentally crippling psychological effect – the death of self – respect and mutual respect in relations between recipient and donor countries. Foreign aid also suffocates initiative and self-reliance. A country that relies on organized handouts can scarcely be said to be truly independent.

African countries have, tragically, lacked a full appreciation of the psychology and political economy of aid because of an absence of real national worldviews. Aid created mental laziness in many parts of the continent, leaving many Africans with the illusion that they really do need foreign assistance.

In his notable 1998 essay in The National Interest, Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean intellectual, diplomat, and Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy asked a provocative question with the title “Can Asians Think?” Looking at the whole foreign aid scenario, one is tempted to ask the same question of Africa and Africans. Admittedly sensitive, this author being African, asserts, as Mahbubani asserted by virtue of being Asian, his right to ask the question of Africa.
Some might argue: what about the Marshall Plan after World War II? Let us quickly strike down that “example”: the Marshall Plan was not aid, in the form in which it has been undertaken in Africa. It was reconstruction assistance to already developed and developing European countries whose infrastructure had been destroyed by war. It also included something that has not been part of “aid” to Africa – capital to start or restart businesses.

Third, aid is not the kindness of strangers. Foreign aid is a tool for the projection of worldviews. It facilitates soft power, domination and influence by donors over recipients. Donors provide ‘‘aid’’ mainly to promote certain geopolitical and economic interests. These interests aim to influence the domestic policies of recipient countries for the donor’s commercial or other strategic benefit, to obtain diplomatic support in international diplomatic forums, and to spread pet ideologies.

Most foreign aid comes with strings, written or unwritten, attached. It is no accident that the aid arena is populated by consultants from donor countries, or that commercial companies from donor countries dominate the procurement supply chain for much of what is supplied by aid money. Put simply, foreign aid is a business model for many development aid institutions – the reason they exist and stay profitable or gainfully employed. It is precisely because aid is a channel for winning global influence, not necessarily for the ‘‘development’’ of recipients, that some developing nations such as Brazil, China and India quit receiving aid decades ago and increasingly became donors themselves. All countries with a worldview – a global strategic intent – want to acquire influence over countries that have none.

Fourth, foreign aid has not worked, and is not working, in achieving its presumed goal of development. This is because it has failed to address the real factors that drive economic development. These include massive investments in education to provide skilled manpower that can drive a country’s future growth, access to finance, jump-starting wealth creation through private enterprises, and the mass production of the outcomes of scientific innovation. African countries need to unlock wealth creation in their domains, not focus on small visions such as ‘‘poverty reduction.’’

Fifth, foreign aid has spawned vast amounts of corruption in African countries, largely because it creates perverse incentives. The scale of funds misappropriated in many African countries, not just via foreign aid projects but in areas such as natural resources and through the (mis)management of fiscal resources such as national and sub-national budgets, make the sums these countries receive in “aid” seem puny. This again makes the case that aid is not essential. It is a construct that was contrived for less than benign purposes.

Moreover, performance accountability in foreign aid operations, with very few exceptions in Africa such as Rwanda, is often weak. Even so, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame publicly supported Trump’s aid cuts despite his own country being affected, and the Rwandan government has taken additional steps to raise domestic revenue to help replace aid cuts. Nigeria appropriated $200 million in domestic health funding in its 2025 budget to partially plug the gaping hole in canceled USAID healthcare funding. That a country with an economy of Nigeria’s size should have ever needed “aid” when, in the 1970s, awash with oil wealth, the country was a donor to several countries and international institutions, is a statement in and of itself about Africa’s recent trajectory.

The truth, from all the evidence, is that the path to Africa’s development cannot run through aid, but must run away from aid. Aid abstinence is a huge opportunity for Africa, and is exactly what the continent needs in order to sit up.

OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF TRUMP 2.0

Another important implication of the Trump – driven New World Order of isolationist instincts for Africa’s development relates to the conventional wisdom about democracy as a system of government. It is evident that, today, populism in the United States is at least challenging — if not yet disrupting — several tenets of the western liberal democracy that was sold to African countries after the Cold War as a path to development.

This has implications for Africa’s development path. Several voices in the continent have recently questioned the utility and relevance of western liberal democracy for Africa. With the exception of a few African countries such as Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, Mauritius, Kenya and South Africa, western-style liberal democracy has not thrived in the past three decades since the end of the Cold War, much less delivered prosperity. Much of what is described as ‘‘democracy’’ in Africa are in reality, anocracies that combine features of democracy and autocracy, and in some cases plutocracy. In many cases, real requirements for democracy such as educated electorates that can make informed choices, and strong, independent judiciaries and other institutions such as unbiased electoral umpires, do not exist.

If America, which once lectured African countries on the virtues of democracy and made the latter a condition for development aid, is now in a challenged relationship with the very idea itself, what is Africa to make of this? The truth, if it must be said, is that development depends far more on effective governance than on labels or forms of governance. Asia’s development trajectory offers some lessons here.

Africa needs homegrown models and thinking about development – both political and economic. Regarding economic development, the continent needs stronger and more effective developmental states that deploy competent governance to create enabling environments for private sector-led inclusive growth.

In the political sphere, countries that aspire to embrace or continue western-style liberal democracy should certainly do so. However, they ought to do it well, meeting the minimum benchmarks for a real democracy.
But it would not be out of order as well to look at, or adapt, democracy to home-grown models of political organization. After all, even western liberal democracy takes different forms in different countries – U.S. (the electoral college), UK, France, Japan, Switzerland (pure democracy; rotational presidency).

Yet other implications of the Trump presidency for Africa include the question of whether or how China and other powers such as Russia will, most likely, seek to fill in the void that will be left by the withdrawal of American foreign aid to Africa. My advice to African countries: don’t even think about it. For the truth is that all Great Powers are in the same business – that of power projection and the advancement of their strategic national interest, often at the expense of those of weaker countries. When it comes to “development aid”, it is, sadly, mostly a zero-sum game in reality.

ASIAN LESSONS

Can Africa be the next Asia? Asia offers several lessons for Africa. Some can be replicated. Others are not necessarily transplantable. The most important Asian lesson for Africa’s growth path is the lesson of possibilities. Asian countries, most of which were once colonies of empires just like African ones, have been able to make quantum deals of development in the past 50 years. Singapore moved from a GDP per capita of $1,000 to $25,000 within a generation. The most important reason for this was a determination to succeed and not to allow history – in particular colonialism – to become an excuse. The influence of Japan’s emergence after World War II as a global economic power was also significant as a “role model” aspirational factor.

This suggests that the mindset factor, anchored by determined and focused leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew and others, played a key role in the Asian growth phenomenon. Confucianism as a value system – a key plank of the worldview in many Asian countries — was a major influence in this context. Confucianism emphasizes obligations over rights, and the community over the individual. Western worldviews flow in the opposite direction. The importance of such philosophical foundations lies not so much in what the worldview is, but rather in its binding influence as a motivator of productivity. Confucianism had the same effect in Asia as the Protestant ethic of hard work had on the evolution of Western capitalism and productivity three centuries ago. Africa must reach into its own traditional systems and their values to drive development.

Asia has little or no natural resources – yet, it has risen rapidly. Africa has a large chunk of the world’s strategic minerals and yet has not been able to shake off poverty and underdevelopment. The key difference in Asian countries was the value placed on massive investments in education and skills acquisition, and the deployment of these skills in a shift from agrarian economies to manufacturing and export – led ones. While it has been argued that Africa’s future lies more in digital services than in manufacturing, it remains the case that skilled youthful populations matter. This was the secret, in particular, behind the rise of China. Even Africa’s agriculture must be made more productive. Increased labor productivity and investments in value-chains of agri-business are needed in African countries. This can only happen with better agricultural technologies.

Closely related to the matter of investments in education and skills is the question of population. Asia’s economic transformation was accompanied by marked reduction in population growth. This enabled the quality and impact of the investments in a skilled, educated workforce to rise, instead of being cancelled out by rapid population growth and then struggling to catch up with the latter.

Regrettably, African countries are not focused on the need to control population growth, which outpaces economic growth in most of the continent. Instead, we are regaled with the conventional wisdom that our continent’s population will double by mid-century, and that this means Africa is the Next Big Thing.

I am not persuaded by this popular notion, just as I disagreed with the faddish notion of “Africa Rising” in Emerging Africa, a book I published a decade ago – and, unhappily, was proved right by the state of the continent a decade on. Without controlling population growth and combining this with massive investments in education as Asia did, Africa is more likely to have a youth bulge and social crises in the next quarter-century than an economic boom.

It is instructive as well, especially in relation to our topic today, that a Rising Asia of economic giants was not produced through any reliance on foreign aid, but by competent economic planning and execution, and societal discipline.

CONCLUSION

I argued a decade ago in Emerging Africa that foreign aid was already in decline, had no sustainable future, and that African countries ought to wean themselves off aid dependency with a 10-year sunset policy on receiving foreign development assistance. If there was any offtake on this advice, it must have been an invisible one.

Today, as Africa ponders its development trajectory in a Trumpian new world order, forced to begin a search for self- reliance by a Trump – imposed aid drought, the continent must look more inward rather than outward. Africa can only compete outwardly by reorganizing inwardly. Development is, first of all, about identity. Africa’s own identities, cultures, worldviews, and narratives must be awakened – and adapted to modernity where necessary.

Massive investments in education and skills for Africa’s youth, figuring out how to improve access to finance — not first pursuing financialization without underlying productivity as is the case today — are the concrete steps Africa needs to take in a march to development. Alongside, a strategic focus in public policy on science, technology and innovation – in which African countries have potential competitive advantage – is the path to a productive and prosperous future for the continent.

Developing competent governance and effective public policy in Africa requires a focus on governance education. This is the purpose of the African School of Governance (ASG) – to train current and future generations of Africa’s leaders with the mindsets, knowledge and skills to tackle Africa’s challenges and opportunities in the 21st century.

The strategic partnership between the ASG and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, which we formalized in a signing event earlier today, is a step in this direction. ASG intends to achieve for Africa what LKYSPP has done for Asia. This is why the ASG’s visionary Co-Founders H.E Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, and H.E Hailemariam Desalegn, former Prime Minister of Ethiopia, chose LKYSPP as our founding strategic academic partner. The exemplary impact of Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore, in the words of the title of his much-read book, From Third World to First, has been a key source of inspiration.

To conclude, then, what does Donald Trump mean for Africa? There are two alternative answers. The first is: Nothing. Africa is nobody’s real estate except that of Africans, and the continent should take care of itself. The second answer is: Everything. Because Trump may have, paradoxically, set Africa free to truly think for itself, and to organize itself for real development. Painful as it is and will be for a while, it might be appropriate to say (doubtless controversially!): Thank you, Mr. Trump.