For decades, sub -Saharan Africa has been a unique focus on American foreign aid. Epirus received more than $ 8 billion a year, money used to supply hungry children, offer life to save life, and provide humanitarian aid of war.
In a few short weeks, President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk born in South Africa have burned much of this project on the ground, swearing to completely intensify the US service for international development.
“Close it down!” Mr Trump wrote on social media on Friday, accusing the organization of indefinite corruption and fraud.
A federal judge on Friday stopped, for the time being, some elements of Mr Trump’s attempt to close the organization. But the speed and shock of administration actions have already led to confusion, fear and even paranoia in USAID offices across Africa, a leading recipient of services. Workers were launched or pushed massively.
As Fallout’s real scale comes to the fore, African governments wonder how to cover holes that have remained in vital services, such as health care and education, that they were funded by the United States until the last few weeks. The help groups and the United Nations bodies that supply starvation or home refugees have seen their budgets reduce half or worse.
So far, the highest price is paid by ordinary Africans, millions of which are based on American aid for their survival. But the consequences also resonate in a helping area that, for better or worse, has been a pillar of Western commitment with Africa for over six decades. With the collapse of USAID, this whole model is shaken badly.
“This is dramatic and consequent and it is difficult to imagine it,” said Murithi Mutiga, Africa’s program director at the International Crisis Group. Mr Mutiga described the collapse of the organization as “part of the classroom after the Cold War”.
“Once upon a time, the West’s superiority was considered” in Africa, he said. “No more.”
Experts say that the sudden overthrow of the organization will cost many lives by creating huge gaps in public services, especially in healthcare, where USAID has spilled much of its resources.
Only in Kenya, at least 40,000 healthcare workers will lose their jobs, USAID officials say. On Friday, several United Nations organizations dependent on US funding began to swell part of their staff. The United States also provides most of the funding for two major refugee camps in northern Kenya, which host 700,000 people from at least 19 countries.
The Ethiopian Ministry of Health shot 5,000 health professionals who had been recruited with US funding, according to an official notification received by the New York Times.
“We are in disbelief,” said Medhanye Alem of the Center for torture victims, facing survivors of trauma -related conflict in nine centers in northern Ethiopia, all closed.
Of over 10,000 USAID employees worldwide, only 300 will remain under changes that are transferred to staff on Thursday night. Only 12 will remain in Africa.
The most pressing challenge for many governments is not to replace members of the US staff or money, but to save US health systems that are collapsing on the ground, said Ken Opalo, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington.
Kenya, for example, has enough medicines to cure HIV for more than a year, Mr Opalo said. “But nurses and doctors for their treatment let them go and the clinics are closed.”
The broader economic disorders are also likely in some of the most fragile countries in the world.
US aid represents 15 % of economic production in South Sudan, 6 % in Somalia and 4 % in the Central African Republic, said Charlie Robertson, an economist specializing in Africa. “We could see governance effectively stop in some countries unless others accelerate to replace the hole left by the US,” he said.
Whether USAID is really dead can still be determined by Congress and US courts, where supporters have filed a number of legal challenges. But Trump’s administration seems determined to move faster than its challengers.
As Mr Musk and his team have identified the organization’s operations in Washington, closing its headquarters and dismissing or suspending 94 percent of its staff, huge helping machinery in Africa has stopped.
At large hubs in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, US aid officials were shocked to find themselves as “criminals” by Mr Musk, then ordered to return to the United States, according to eight USAid employees or contractors. under the state of anonymity for the fear of retaliation.
On Friday, Trump’s administration gave all USAID staff members 30 days to pack their bags and come home, causing turbulence among families now facing the prospect of taking children out of school in a short period of time . If the federal court now revises that the directive does not overturn it, few will have jobs to return.
Several USAID officials noted that Google’s artificial intelligence system had recently been activated in their internal communication systems and that the internal video calls on the Google platform were suddenly set for automatically recorded.
A Google spokesman said Gemini was released on January 15 for all business users, who can leave the feature.
Other USAID officials said they were worried that Mr Musk’s team could use AI to attend talks to disagreement or extract excerpts of talks that could be armed to defame the organization.
The Agency’s colleagues have turned into signaling, a encrypted messaging application, this week to share the information informally. People are driven by fear, one of them said.
In private, even USAid officials agree that the Agency needs a revision. In interviews, many have recognized the need to rationalize its bureaucracy and even challenged a system of help that is largely based on US contractors and encouraging a devastating culture of dependency on African governments.
The announcements by Marco Rubio, the Foreign Minister and the USAID chief that food and the rescue of life will be exempt from administration cuts were initially greeting by employees. But officials said, it turned out that it was largely a Miraz. Despite the promise of exemptions, many have found impossible to acquire one.
Worst of all, many said, were the wide sides delivered by Mr Musk and the White House depicting the Agency as a ruthless, criminal agency organized by Spendthrift officials who seek their personal agendas. Such attacks were false and deeply harmful to Americans who tried to relieve human pain around the world, many people said.
In Nairobi, where USAID has about 250 Kenya and 50 members of the US staff, several Kenyans spoke to a tense town hall this week.
They were worried that the debate in the White House of extensive corruption inside the organization could cause other Kenyans to believe that they too had benefited from fraud, said an employee who attended the meeting.
As the Americans present at the Town Hall, the Kenyans were worried that they were going to be fired. But there was a significant difference between the two teams, the employee noted: While the Kenyans were anxious about their livelihoods, the Americans were worried about their country.
