Hosted by Kwangu Liwewe Agyei
Featuring Ebenezer Obadare and Zachariah Mampilly
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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When Donald Trump returned to the White House, many assumed his America First positioning would see a general withdrawal from the African continent. The second Trump administration’s initial policies, particularly the shuttering of America’s development agency USAID, initially appeared to confirm such suspicions. However, for this month’s Global Insights on The Lede, host Kwangu Liwewe Agyei considers the reality on the ground, which has proved considerably more complex.
Ebenezer Obadare, a Nigerian-American sociologist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, reassures Liwewe Agyei that “if one had the anxiety that Africa was going to be marginalized, that has clearly not been the case.”
“If one had the anxiety that Africa was going to be marginalized, that has clearly not been the case.”
For Obadare, the era of American idealism in Africa is over. “We live in the age of what experts call transactionalism,” he says. “It’s the age of America First.” Nevertheless, he argues that deepening U.S. security involvement in Nigeria, including airstrikes on alleged Islamic State group targets in the country’s northwest, is welcomed by many Nigerians. “If you are a victim of Boko Haram, it really doesn’t matter for you where the help is coming from,” he says. “All you want is relief from insurgents who seem determined to take the battle to communities and villages across Nigeria.”
While Obadare understands the Nigerian government’s reasoning in accepting American support, he highlights governance failures that cannot be fixed by American airstrikes. “An estimated 20,000 Africans with a higher education degree leave the continent every year. That’s a serious professional hemorrhage,” he says.
Zachariah Mampilly, a political scientist at the City University of New York, takes a more critical approach to U.S. policymaking on the continent. He tells Liwewe Agyei that the current moment is less a rupture than an acceleration of a long-standing pattern. “There has been a long-term pull away of the U.S. from the African continent that probably goes back at least to the Obama administration,” he says.
Under Trump, American intentions toward Africa have been stripped of their earlier pretenses. “It’s a much more naked relationship, oriented primarily around security and trade,” he says, with issues like democracy no longer considered relevant.
The punishing visa restrictions imposed on several African countries, Mampilly adds, have no grounding in any particular policy position, but rather come from “a deeply racist position that is part and parcel of how the Trump administration views African countries.”
Mampilly is no less critical of those enabling the Trump administration to carry out its African agenda. “Too many African elites are willing to go along with this because they might be getting some personal benefits,” he says.