The Wrong Way To End Aid

Why am I disgusted by the Trump administration’s pause on USAID projects and funds? Humanitarian aid has always been part of a neocolonial project, and I have spent decades critiquing the work it does in Africa, especially how it produces a kind of imagined Africa and propagates a set of ideas about what the continent needs (see my book “White Saviorism and Popular Culture” and the forthcoming documentary “When I Say Africa”). This humanitarian-industrial complex depends on the infrastructural and extractive inequalities that are created by colonialism and sustained and rebuilt by imperialism and late-stage capitalism.

Organizations such as USAID enter this space as the “good guys,” intending to help and intervene to alleviate humanitarian crises — postwar devastation, climate disasters, pandemics, and increasingly education, basic health care, women’s rights or gender equality. But as responses to Elon Musk’s (in theory President Donald Trump’s) administration’s “pause” on USAID make clear, its actual role has always been foreign relations, as this comment from Michael Schiffer in Just Security illustrates:

Why? Because foreign assistance, though charitable, isn’t charity. It’s a strategic investment that safeguards America’s most important interests while reflecting its highest values. 

It has been a while since I worked with USAID funds, running a voter education project before South Africa’s first democratic elections and working for the adult basic education NGO Project Literacy, based in Pretoria, South Africa. Project Literacy was largely dependent on donor funding in the 1980s and 1990s, though it successfully weathered the shift of donor funding to the South African state, a move that shut down many of our sister literacy organizations following the election. We were, of course, happy to take advantage of Western donor funding, mostly from Europe, but it always came with strings, especially the money from USAID. If we needed resources, we were required to buy from U.S. manufacturers and companies, and 15 percent of any grant was spent on an audit by accountants from Washington. More frustratingly, every proposal required twisting our work into pretzels to fit with whatever the buzzword or “victim” of the day was. We had an established, sustainable program that taught thousands of adult learners every day, but we couldn’t raise funds to keep the lights on, the vehicles filled with gas or the rent paid. Even when supporting essential programs, USAID’s primary purpose was supporting the American economy and imparting American values.

Even the arguments being made to the Trump administration emphasize that foreign aid matters because it matters for the United States’ position in the world, it represents the U.S. globally as a strong, ethical place, and it builds good international relationships. So even at its best, aid is all about the U.S., not about the places it supposedly helps. At its worst, though, it is patently defining global agendas, policing American ideas of worth and values, human rights, and “empowerment.” As Will Shoki points out in this week’s editorial for Africa Is a Country, this aid solves problems that have been caused or sustained by the United States and other Global North policies. Aid meets the often imagined needs of people whose realities are grounded in histories of extractions and continued exploitation. These realities could be alleviated through different kinds of trade agreements, labor laws and policies that do not limit the ability of nations in the Global South to insist that workers in their factories owned by U.S. corporations are paid well, have health care, and work in sanitary and safe environments. Western humanitarianism not only does not solve any of these problems but creates narratives of helplessness and inhumanity that justify exploitation and make it seem that the only solution to these problems is aid. It is the ultimate anti-politics machine wielding soft power to the benefit of Western capitalist interest.

So yes, Musk’s decision that the U.S. no longer needs to provide aid — especially, it seems, to his home country, South Africa, the country that allowed his family to build enormous wealth — should and could be a good thing. It might indeed be a reset opportunity for South Africa and other places to look for new ways to make their people safe, healthy, educated, employed and housed and to look for new allies in that project. But it is still a shocking and — no other word for it — gross action. And it is one more exhibition of this administration’s total ignorance of how global economies work, the impact of climate disasters around the world and the repercussions of the global conflicts they fund. The irony (or maybe it’s entirely consistent) of course is that this administration has identified migration and refugees as the big issues it wants to “solve” — despite the fact those problems will only grow worse with no humanitarian assistance from the U.S.

Despite the need to dismantle the humanitarian-industrial complex, canceling all aid (except to Egypt and Israel, who have been allowed to spend it on arms) is wrong. Why? I would push back against Schiffer’s characterization of charitable aid as not charity. It is, of course, many other things, most of them violent and extractive, domineering and limiting, and definitely not enough to really alleviate global inequality. But sometimes charitable acts are charity; philanthropy is the right thing to do. In the face of escalating violence around the world, often funded by the United States, climate change disasters profoundly created by the U.S. economy, more and more people need help.

Flawed as it is, the infrastructure that provides this help needs to be changed, but not like this.