Sixteen years ago, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, where she demonstrated an inverse relationship between receipt of government-to-government aid and economic growth and prosperity. Government-to-government aid, she said, fuels corruption, encourages inflation, increases recipient nations’ debt load, kills exports, causes civil unrest, frustrates entrepreneurship, and disenfranchises citizens.
Moyo’s better idea was freer trade (European agricultural subsidies were shutting out African exports), foreign direct investment, and the infusion of private capital. The primary need across Africa was job creation. Echoing Moyo, Independent Institute President David J. Theroux told Investor’s Business Daily that “where governments dominate, society enterprising individuals typically are stifled. Their talents and energies are misdirected into political patronage.”
Much more recently, Magatte Wade, in the foreword to her book, The Heart of a Cheetah, said the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey inspired her with his statement that the hope for a prosperous African future requires that young Africans seek their wealth in the private sector – shunning government service (echoing Moyo and Theroux). Wade wrote that African “cheetahs” must overcome the world’s most laborious and most corrupt regulatory bureaucracies – bureaucracies that frustrate economic development that does not benefit government leaders.
Wade argues that Africa has remained poor (while Far Eastern and Middle Eastern nations have prospered) not because of past colonization but because market economics is frustrated by “laws that make it possible to do business in Africa are literally among the worst in the world. The infrastructure is a mess; the regulations are absurd; and the bureaucracy is overwhelming.”
To many Africans, European- and American-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are part of the problem, even though they purport to be necessary drivers of the solution. In 2023, South African mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantasha called on NGOs that were being used to block oil and gas exploration to reveal their funding sources. He asserted that NGOs and their financiers “have a mandate from the West to stop development in South Africa.”
In a recent article for the London-based Centre for African Conflict and Development (CACD), Oladele Oluwaseun Taiwo, a Nigerian intern, wrote that Africa’s reliance on U.S. foreign aid has left many as mere extensions of donor priorities rather than as autonomous organizations rooted in local needs. Western aid often prioritizes Western expertise and management, leaving African partners as implementers rather than leaders. This, she says, has entrenched a form of neocolonialism where foreign experts even claim authorship of strategies Africans devised.
Another new report, from NGO Monitor, said that the work of a narrowly controlled group of NGOs exerting outside influence on the activities of Western companies in Africa played a major role in today’s dominance of China and Russia in critical mineral markets, which has led to great risks to global supply chains and Western security interests. The report pointed to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and a few others as skewing Africa’s priorities toward external agendas rather than local needs. (Sound familiar?)
NGO Monitor legal advisor Anne Herzberg said, “The West risks becoming dependent on China and Russia for commercial and defense supply chains because they have ceded their influence in Africa’s extractive mining industry in the name of human rights and environmental protection.” President Trump was hampered in his first term, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, because his administration lacked “a strategy for the continent’s looming geopolitical and national security challenges.”
Four years later, the new Trump administration has crafted a strategy to combat the fact that China and Russia had ignored Western efforts to stifle traditional industries like oil and gas and mining (and demand that Africa focus on climate change), allowing them to become much more intertwined both economically and politically with many African governments.
Step one was to intervene in a 30-year conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. President Trump signed a major minerals agreement with both nations as part of a broader U.S.-mediated ceasefire under which the DRC offered the U.S. access to its cobalt reserves “in an effort to ensure peace and stability in the country.”
One observer said that President Felix Tshisekedi’s strategy was designed to help the Trump administration achieve two significant objectives for U.S. foreign policy – securing access to critical minerals and curtailing China’s expansion within the mineral supply chain. The DRC leader may have also wanted to deflect attention from the use of child labor in cobalt mining.
This past week, President Trump hosted leaders of five other African countries — Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal – all of which are rich in mineral resources. “We’re shifting from aid [the dismantled USAID, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was a conduit for funding NGOs that worked against African priorities] to trade.” Trump boasted that “we’re working tirelessly to forge new economic opportunities involving both the United States and many African nations. There’s great economic potential in Africa, like few other places.”
Trump’s move dovetails with an increased commitment by African entrepreneurs to regain control of the continent’s mineral resources. Four years ago, Africa Energy Chamber executive director NJ Ayuk announced Africa Energy Week as an alternative to the London-led Africa Oil Week. He billed the inaugural event (now in its fourth year) as a major confrontation between “cancel fossil fuels” and “protect our oil and gas industry.”
This fall will mark the inaugural Africa Mining Week, whose focus will be on the theme, “From Extraction to Beneficiation: Unlocking Africa’s Mineral Wealth.” This Africa-led event will convene global investors, policymakers, and industry leaders to explore opportunities in Africa’s midstream and downstream sectors, featuring panel discussions, project showcases, and high-level deal signings.
The event, sponsored by the Africa-focused global investment platform Energy Capital & Power, will highlight initiatives aimed at enhancing Africa’s mineral value chains and promoting local processing to drive economic growth. The sponsors are seeking to foster cross-sector synergies and showcase Africa’s energy and mining potential while positioning Africa as a premier investment destination for capital, technology, and project developers – under Africa’s terms.
In their coverage of President Trump’s meeting with the five African leaders, The New York Times, PBS, and NPR all focused on the “horrors” from ending the corruption-plagued USAID, ignoring the possibility that finally African NGOs may be able to set their own priorities and raise their own funds independently of neocolonialist directives.
The BBC, by contrast, reported that Senegal President Bassirou Diomaye Faye invited American investors to participate in his nation’s plans to build a “tech city” in Dakar and that Gabon President Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema highlighted his country’s rare-earth minerals and other resources. Gabonese NGO leader Nicaise Mouloumbi observed that Trump’s focus on Africa means the U.S. intends to be a serious competitor with China and Russia – to the horror of the anti-development NGOs that have long dominated the West’s approach to Africa.
The U.S. today lags far behind China in asserting influence in Africa, and Gabonese President Nguema admitted that, while “our country is free, open to one and all,” if you Americans fail to come and invest, “other countries might come instead of you.”
That was a challenge – one that President Trump is likely to take very seriously.
This piece originally appeared at CFact.org and has been republished here with permission.
