Célestin Monga is Cameroonian and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. A former vice president of the African Development Bank and economic adviser to the World Bank, he has spent much of his career working for international institutions. His publications include Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries, with Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin.
This decision is brutal and traumatic for millions of Africans whose lives depend on medicines funded by USAID [United States Agency for International Development], for children who only go to school thanks to these subsidies, and for women whose cause is defended by NGOs with US funds. The human consequences of the suspension upset me.
For all that, it's difficult for Africa to tell the US what to do with its taxpayers' money. President Donald Trump was elected, and he announced what he would do during his campaign. Instead, we should be looking for the culprits among African elites, who are satisfied with ongoing misery, 65 years after independence, and subcontract their responsibilities to foreign governments. So I'm not going to blame Mr. Trump. I'm Cameroonian, and what matters to me is what Africans do. Whining about aid is not a development strategy.
During his first term [2017-2021], Donald Trump made some unusual statements, to say the least [in January 2018, he called Haiti and African states "shithole countries" at a meeting on immigration]. He hasn't visited Africa, but he's never hidden what he thinks about it. African leaders cannot be surprised when he gets back in power and adopts such measures. Historians may find, a century from now, that Africans are grateful to Donald Trump for brutalizing their egos in this way, for shaking them up and saying openly what many are thinking in hushed tones.
We need to bring this debate back to its proper proportions. In 2023, Africa received less than $20 billion from the US, and less than $60 billion from all the countries improperly referred to as "donors." These are tiny sums for a continent of 1.4 billion inhabitants, which itself does not repatriate the bulk of its $610 billion in export earnings to rich countries. American support for Africa is five times less than the amount of illicit capital that leaves the continent every year, and what happens to it? So what we call official development assistance is nothing compared to the financial flows generated in Africa.
We need to get away from this semantic illusion: nobody helps anybody. In addition to transactions classified as "gifts," we need to measure what Western countries receive from Africa in various sectors, such as raw materials, for which they set the purchase price, the meager royalties they pay to governments, the currency they use to make payments, which they decide to depreciate at will... What the continent loses when it is forced to sell its products in dollars – making it dependent on fluctuations in the greenback – is far greater than what it receives in the form of "gifts." African decision-makers seem incapable of understanding these dynamics.
We must be wary of accounting illusions. First of all, 75% of education and health budgets are made up of salaries, which are paid not by donors but by governments. Secondly, most African countries have signed programs with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to benefit from its financing. But, the IMF makes its support conditional on budgetary criteria that leave little room for investment, even though the needs are considerable and only increasing due to strong demographic growth. And investment spending is arbitrarily curtailed and reduced to the bare minimum, in line with what foreign donors are willing to grant.
This situation is the result of an approach to accounting that is based on a narrow vision of economic policy, which boils down to balancing public accounts while people suffer. This is how we encourage a system of misery and charity. To the credit of international institutions, African countries propose very few credible strategies for transformation, and therefore very few programs likely to attract financing. They are satisfied with finding money every month to pay civil servants and the army, and fail to develop the economy that would enable them to broaden their tax base, generate budget revenues and free themselves from this exotic dictatorship based on pity imposed by Washington.
These institutions have been saying the same thing for over 60 years, and I'm in a good position to talk about it. For a long time, I held senior positions at the World Bank, where I battled against windmills. Sometimes at night, when I'm not sleeping, I enjoy rereading old reports written by the IMF on Cameroon or other countries over the last thirty years. They repeat the old liturgy of balanced public accounts - to no avail, since this rhetoric is based on nothing.
Ghana, regarded as one of the best-performing African countries, has signed 17 agreements with the IMF. By the end of 2022, it was defaulting. The Bretton Woods institutions were not designed to help African countries out of poverty. They are financial institutions. They sell money. And they can obtain resources at lower cost, which their shareholders, led by the US, allocate to developing countries. These decisions are essentially political. Worst of all, the programs financed also entail misguided development strategies and keep African states addicted to so-called "aid." Instead of wasting months, even years, negotiating small-scale budgetary support, or funding microscopic projects with no impact on the economy, African governments should be creating special economic zones and attracting domestic and foreign private capital to them, to kick-start industrialization and create jobs.
In reality, I believe that Westerners are working against their own best interests. What interest do American and European citizens have in seeing Africa eternally locked in poverty? Only a few dozen large companies or families in London, New York, Brussels or Paris stand to gain from the current situation. The industrialization of Africa would be of enormous benefit to the West, which would sell hundreds of billions of euros worth of equipment and technology there. The economic success of Senegal, Nigeria or Ethiopia would create millions of direct and indirect jobs in Africa, but also in France, the United Kingdom and Italy. China has perceived Africa's potential and is positioning itself as a partner that does not preach and offers win-win deals. One of the consequences of Donald Trump's decision will be to push African leaders to look even more to other horizons: China, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and others.
Kenya's president, William Ruto, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, and Senegal's prime minister, Ousmane Sonko, have all acknowledged the situation and believe that the time has come to start breaking free from this dependence. The African Union needs to get the heads of state together and start thinking afresh about what would be a pragmatic strategy for massively financing productive infrastructure and creating jobs on the continent. The priority should be access for African manufactured products to Western and Asian markets. This is far more important than aid. In September, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which allows 1,800 African products to enter the US tax-free, expires. What will Donald Trump do? Will he discontinue it? Will he threaten to exclude countries that don't comply with his injunctions, as he did during his first term? [In 2017, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda had tried to limit imports of second-hand clothing].
On the European side, climate blackmail must be stopped: The future regulation against deforestation will, among other things, severely penalize the cocoa sector in Côte d'Ivoire, the country closest to the West. How will Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa farmers live? The climate and the environment are very important issues, but we can't ask African farmers who aren't responsible for them to solve them. We can't force a country at this level of development to stop cutting down its trees, without offering something in return, such as a commitment to buy a substantial quantity of its manufactured exports every year.
Unfortunately, with the current elites on both sides, I doubt it. The leadership crisis is fatal. But the anger of Africa's youth is roaring. Even the devil will not be able to protect those who refuse to hear this anger.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.