Trump and musk will stop huge support machines in Africa

For decades, Sub -Saharan Africa was a special goal of American foreign support. The continent received over $ 8 billion a year, money that was used to feed starving children, providing drugs saving life and ensuring a humanitarian war.

Within a few low weeks, President Trump and the billionaire Elon Musk, born in South Africa, burned a significant part of this work to Earth, sweating completely to dare the American international development agency.

“Close it!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday, accusing the agency of indefinite corruption and fraud.

The federal judge has stopped on Friday, for now some elements of Mr. Trump’s sample to close the agency. But the speed and shock of administration have already led to confusion, fear and even paranoia in USAID offices in Africa, the best recipient of agency financing. Employees had to shoot massively.

As the real scale of precipitation is displayed, African rule is wondering how to fill the gaps left in crucial services, such as healthcare and education that they have been financed by the United States until recent weeks. UN support groups and bodies, which feed hungry or home refugees, saw their budgets in half or worse.

Ordinary Africans pay the greatest price, of which millions rely on American support for their survival. But the consequences also resound in the support sector, which for better or worse, has been a pillar of Western commitment to Africa for over six decades. With the fall of USAID, this whole model is badly shocked.

“It is dramatic and consistent and it is challenging to imagine that he has returned,” said Muti Mutiga, director of the African program at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Mutiga described the fall of the agency as “part of the dissolution of order after the Cool War.”

“Once upon a time, the primacy of the West was accepted in Africa, he said. “No more.”

Experts say that the rapid reverse of the agency will cost many human lives, creating huge gaps in public services, especially in healthcare, where USAID spilled most of its resources.

In Kenya herself, at least 40,000 healthcare professionals will lose their job, say USAID officials. On Friday, several UN agencies depending on American funds began to apply to some of their employees. The United States also provides most of the funds for two enormous refugee camps in northern Kenya, in which there are 700,000 people from at least 19 countries.

The Ministry of Health of Ethiopia dismissed 5,000 healthcare professionals who were employed under American funds, in accordance with the official notification obtained by the Novel York Times.

“We are in disbelief,” said Medhanye Alem from the Center for Torture Victims, which treats the survivors of the trauma related to the conflict in nine centers in northern Ethiopia, all closed.

Of the over 10,000 USAID employees around the world, only 300 will remain under changes to employees on Thursday evening. Only 12 left in Africa.

The most burning challenge for many governments is not to replace American employees or money, but to save American healthcare systems that quickly break down to earth, said Ken O. Opalo, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington.

For example, Kenya has a sufficient number of drugs to treat people from HIV for over a year, said Opalo. “But nurses and doctors are released to treat them and the clinics are closing.”

Wider economic shocks are also probably in some of the most exquisite countries in the world.

American support is 15 percent of economic production in South Sudan, 6 percent in Somalia and 4 percent in Central Africa, said Charlie Robertson, an economist specializing in Africa. “We saw how management effectively ceased in several countries, unless others accelerate to replace the hole left by the US,” he said.

Whether USAID is really dead can still be established by Congress and US courts, where supporters have made a number of legal challenges. But Trump’s administration seems determined to move faster than its pretenders.

When Mr. Musk and his team conducted commanding the agency’s activities in Washington, closing the headquarters and release or suspension of 94 percent of staff, his huge support in Africa stopped.

In the main centers in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, American assistance officials were shocked when Mr. Musk called “criminals”, and then ordered to return to the United States, according to eight USAID employees or performers who all talked about the state of anonymity for fear of fear retaliation.

On Friday, Trump’s administration gave all USAID employees to pack bags and return home, causing confusion among families, in the face of the perspective of pulling children out of school in a low time. If the federal court, which now browses this directive, does not refute it, few will have tasks to return.

Several USAID officials have noticed that the system of artificial intelligence Google, Gemini, has recently been activated in their internal communication systems, and internal video connections carried out on the Google platform have been suddenly set for automatically recording.

Officials said that they are afraid that Mr. Musk’s team can operate artificial intelligence to monitor their conversations to equalize dissidents or fragments of conversations that can be armed with discredit the agency.

This week, colleagues from the agency turned to Signal, an encrypted application for sending messages to unofficially share information. One of them drives people powered by fear.

Privately, even older USAID officials agree that the agency needs a review. In interviews, a few recognized the need to improve their bureaucracy, and even questioned a support system, which is so strongly based on American performers and supports the harmful culture of the relationship between African rule.

Announcements of Marco Rubio, secretary of state and the duties of the head of USAID, that emergency food and rescue assistance will be released from administration cuts, were initially welcomed by employees. But, as the officials said, it turned out that it was largely miraż. Despite the promise of dismissals, many found him impossible.

Worst of all, many said, it was Broadsides delivered by Mr. Musk and the White House depicting the agency as a dishonest, criminal agency run by officials spent as part of their personal programs. Such attacks were false and deeply painful for Americans who tried to alleviate human suffering around the world, said several people.

In Nairobi, where USAID has about 250 Kenya and 50 members of American staff, several Kenyans spoke this week in a busy town hall.

They worried that talking in the White House of Universal Corruption in an agency could cause that other Kenyans believe that they also took advantage of fraud, said the official who participated in the meeting.

Like the Americans present in the town hall, the Kenyans are afraid that they will be released soon. The official noticed that there was one crucial difference between these two groups: while the Kenyans would worry about their source of income, the Americans were worried about their country.