Just five days to his inauguration President-elect Donald J. Trump has
questioned why the United State was still spending money to fight the Boko
Haram insurgency in Nigeria, why all of the schoolgirls kidnapped by the
group have not been rescued and whether Qaeda operatives from Africa are
living in the United States. He went further questioned the effectiveness
of one of the more significant counterterrorism efforts on the continent.
According to New York Times Trump in four-page write up raised
Africa-related questions.
“How does U.S. business compete with other nations in Africa? Are we
losing out to the Chinese?” asks one of the first questions in the
unclassified document provided to The New York Times. That is quickly
followed with queries about humanitarian assistance money.
“With so much corruption in Africa, how much of our funding is stolen? Why
should we spend these funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the
U.S.?
Some of the questions are those that should be asked by a new
administration seeking to come to grips with the hows and whys behind
longstanding American national security and foreign assistance policies.
But it is difficult to know whether the probing, critical tone of other
questions indicates that significant policy changes should be expected.
On terrorism, the document asks why the United States is even bothering to
fight the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, why all of the schoolgirls
kidnapped by the group have not been rescued and whether Qaeda operatives
from Africa are living in the United States. And it questions the
effectiveness of one of the more significant counterterrorism efforts on
the continent.
“We’ve been fighting al-Shabaab for a decade, why haven’t we won?” poses
one question, referring to the terrorist group based in Somalia that was
behind the Westgate mall attacks in Kenya in 2013.
Although the document represents a first look at how the new
administration might approach policy toward Africa, a subject that was
rarely touched on during the campaign, officials with the Trump transition
team did not respond to queries about the list.
“Many of the questions that they are asking are the right questions that
any incoming administration should ask,” said Monde Muyangwa, the director
of the Africa program at the Woodrow Wilson Institute.
But she also noted that “the framing of some of their questions suggests a
narrower definition of U.S. interests in Africa, and a more transactional
and short-term approach to policy and engagement with African countries.”
Ms. Muyangwa said the queries could signal “a dramatic turn in how the
United States will engage with the continent.”
J. Peter Pham, who has been mentioned for the job of assistant secretary
of state for African affairs in a Trump administration, said he does not
expect Mr. Trump to do a complete U-turn in relations with Africa.
Mr. Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, said he
expects Mr. Trump will emphasize fighting extremism on the continent,
while also looking to enhance opportunities for American businesses. In
other questions, the Trump transition team challenges the benefits of a
trade pact known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
“Most of AGOA imports are petroleum products, with the benefits going to
national oil companies, why do we support that massive benefit to corrupt
regimes?” the questionnaire asks. Yet Mr. Pham said he expected a Trump
administration would support the pact.
“AGOA has created more than 120,000 jobs in the United States,” Mr. Pham
said in an interview. A big unknown, though, is how a Trump administration
will handle foreign assistance to the continent and its 54 nations.
President George W. Bush quadrupled foreign assistance levels to African
countries, and President Obama largely maintained that, even as his
administration was making cuts elsewhere.
Even so, the amount of American aid in 2015 to other critical allies —
Afghanistan ($5.5 billion), Israel ($3.1 billion), Iraq ($1.8 billion) and
Egypt ($1.4 billion) — far exceeded the approximately $8 billion for all
of sub-Saharan Africa.
The questions seem to reflect the inaccurate view shared by many Americans
about how much the United States spends on foreign aid and global health
programs. Polls show that Americans believe the country spends 25 percent
of its budget on foreign aid — but the truth is that foreign aid is just 1
percent of the federal budget.
“We’ve been hunting Kony for years, is it worth the effort?” poses another
series of questions related to Joseph Kony, the warlord head of Uganda’s
violent guerrilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army, who has eluded the
authorities for three decades. “The LRA has never attacked U.S. interests,
why do we care?
Is it worth the huge cash outlays? I hear that even the Ugandans are
looking to stop searching for him, since they no longer view him as a
threat, so why do we?” The hunt for Mr. Kony and his fighters has
generated a huge amount of publicity around the world, in large part
because of a video on his elusiveness and brutality, “Kony 2012,” that has
been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
But other questions, foreign policy experts say, return to a theme of a
continent that has squandered American money and effort. The questions
challenge, for instance, a hallmark of Mr. Bush’s Africa policy — the
Pepfar program, which has provided billions to fight AIDS and tuberculosis
in Africa.
Rex W. Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, complimented
the program, calling Pepfar “one of the most extraordinarily successful
programs in Africa” during his Senate nomination hearing. But, in
contrast, the Trump transition questionnaire asks, “Is PEPFAR worth the
massive investment when there are so many security concerns in Africa? Is
PEPFAR becoming a massive, international entitlement program?”
J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the questions showed
an “overwhelmingly negative and disparaging outlook” on the continent.
“A strange attitude runs through this,” he said. “There’s a sort of
recurrent skepticism that Africa matters to U.S. interests at all. It’s
entirely negative in orientation.”
But the questions do appear to accurately reflect what Mr. Trump has said
publicly about Africa in the few times that he has mentioned the
continent. For instance, during the Ebola crisis in 2014, Mr. Trump took
to Twitter to argue that Americans infected with Ebola should not be
allowed back into the United States. As two American health workers became
critically ill and were airlifted to Atlanta for treatment, Mr. Trump had
this to say via Twitter: “Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S.
Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH
PROBLEMS!”
The Ebola epidemic, which killed almost 10,000 people in Guinea, Sierra
Leone and Liberia (but no Americans), comes up once in the document.
“How,” the questionnaire asks, “do we prevent the next Ebola outbreak from
hitting the U.S.?”