Trump is never happy unless he deliberately made you cry

DONALD Trump couldn’t care less about Africa.

President Donald Trump is a bigot and an 1800s-style mercantilist and trade protectionist. What this means is he would have fitted right in managing the British East India Company, as it colonised a third of the planet with the objective of extracting wealth and making its investors vulgarly rich.

It should go without saying that this sort of approach to world affairs is inherently destructive. More recently and as the New York Times reports, “a series of questions from the Trump transition team to the State Department indicate an overall scepticism about the value of foreign aid, and even about American security interests, on the world’s second-largest continent.”

More revealingly, one of Donald’s queries to the US State Department about aid: “Why should we spend these funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the US?”

Monde Muyangwa, the director of the Africa programme at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, says Donald’s approach appears to indicate “a dramatic turn in how the US will engage with the continent.”

There are two major projects, both initiated by George W Bush, which are at risk: Agoa and Pepfar.

The US spends about $8 billion on aid in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, a tiny proportion of the $43 billion it spends annually. Afghanistan alone receives $5.5 billion. And you have to put that in proportion to overall US government spending. Less than 1% of the national budget goes to foreign assistance.

Put that together and 0.1% of the US budget is spent on sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact is enormous. Pepfar (the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) receives $1.1 billion a year, almost 13% of the US sub-Saharan Africa aid budget, but has provided antiretroviral treatment to over 7.7 million people, HIV testing to over 57 million people and is considered the largest health initiative ever.

From 2004 till 2008, $11 billion was spent in 15 “focus countries”: Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia.

Donald is likely to cut the Pepfar budget and ignore development issues. As he asked, “Is Pepfar becoming a massive, international entitlement programme?”

But his trade protectionism is where things are really going to get sticky.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) was implemented in 2000 to support sub-Saharan Africa’s access to the US economy and especially for clothing and textiles manufacturers. Nigeria and Angola are the largest Agoa exporters, but small economies (like Lesotho and Swaziland) have come to depend on this access.

In 2008, the US exported $17 billion worth of goods to the 41 Agoa countries and imported $81 billion.

This is a slither of US trade ($1.5 trillion of exports vs $2.2 trillion of imports) but it is critical for Africa, especially as it has promoted diversification away from commodities towards value-added products.

Agoa is estimated to have created 120 000 jobs in the US. Donald, though, has a binary view of the world. If you’re benefiting, then he must be losing. Never mind that voluntary trade is for mutual benefit, Donald is never happy unless he has deliberately made you cry.

African countries will need to find their own resources and solutions in a world rapidly atomising into the politics of discord.