Dr Yusuf Bangura (Switzerland): Sierra Leone Telegraph: 25 April 2025:
US President Trump is viscerally opposed to foreign aid. As a transactionalist, he believes that there should be immediate returns to himself or the US for whatever money or favours he dispenses. He doesn’t believe in soft power.
Indeed, his DOGE adviser and soulmate, Elon Musk, believes that the ‘’fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.’’
It’s a wakeup call for African governments that believe they cannot develop their countries without foreign aid.
Sierra Leone signed a USD480 million aid agreement or ‘’compact’’ with the Millenium Challenge Corporation in September 2024 to improve its beleaguered energy sector. There has been high expectation in that country that this aid will help to tackle Sierra Leone’s low and epileptic supply of electricity.
There have been widespread complaints about frequent power cuts in the capital, Freetown, in recent months. There will now have to be a rethink on how to tackle that country’s perennial electricity crisis.
Few believed in the MCC’s framework for awarding its aid, which is based on a range of governance, human rights, and democracy indicators. Called political conditionality, it subjects poor countries to long time-consuming processes of negotiations and performance monitoring on those indicators, which most often don’t determine how final decisions are made.
Decision on Sierra Leone’s MCC application was put on hold after the dubious 2018 general elections. The US government under Biden used the MCC aid as a bargaining chip to force the government to enter into negotiations with the leading opposition party on how to resolve the electoral impasse.
However, it later granted the aid despite lack of substantive outcomes in the negotiations.
You can read more on this developing story here:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/23/doge-millennium-challenge-foreign-aid-00306333
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