Trump and Musk bring a wide auxiliary mechanism to stop in Africa

For decades, sub -Saharan Africa was an individual axis of US foreign aid. The continent has received more than $ 8 billion annually, money used to feed the hungry children, providing life -saving medications and providing humanitarian aid in wartime.

Within a few weeks, President Trump and South African billionaires, Elon Musk, burned a lot of this work on the ground, fully undertaken the US International Agency.

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

Federal judge on Friday to stopCurrently, some elements of Mr. Trump’s attempt to close the agency. But the speed and shock of the administration’s actions has already led to confusion, fear, and even the madness of greatness in the offices of the American Agency for International Development throughout Africa, which is the best recipient of the agency’s financing. Workers or leave were shot collectively.

With the real size of progress, African governments are wondering how to fill the remaining holes in vital services, such as health care and education, until the United States has been funded until recent weeks. The American relief groups and bodies that nourish the refugees hunger or at home have witnessed that their budgets are cut into two halves, or what is worse.

To a large extent, the largest price is paid by the ordinary Africans, who depend on millions of them on American aid for their survival. But the consequences also hesitate to the relief sector, and it was, for the better or worse, a column for Western participation with Africa for more than six decades. With the collapse of the United States Agency for International Development, this entire model is vibrating badly.

“This is exciting and raising, and it is difficult to imagine it,” said Murithi Muttega, director of the Africa program at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Mutiga described the agency’s collapse as “part of the post -Cold War matter.”

“Once, the West’s priority was assumed” in Africa, he said. “no more.”

Experts say that the sudden decline of the agency will cost many lives by creating huge gaps in public services, especially in health care, as the American Agency for International Development poured many of its resources.

In Kenya alone, at least 40,000 health care workers will lose their jobs, US agency officials for International Development say. On Friday, many UN agencies that depend on US financing began preparing part of their employees. The United States also provides most of the funding for two major refugee camps in northern Kenya, including at least 700,000 people from 19 countries.

The Ethiopian Ministry of Health launched 5,000 healthcare professionals who were recruited under American financing, according to an official notification obtained by the New York Times.

“We are not believing,” said Medhanye Alem of the Torture victim center, who treats survivors of shock -related shocks in nine positions in northern Ethiopia, all of which are now closed.

Of more than 10,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development worldwide, 300 employees will hardly remain in implementation on Thursday evening. It will remain only 12 In Africa.

Kane or Opallow, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington, said the most urgent challenge for many governments is not to replace American employees or money, but to save the American health systems that quickly collapse to the ground.

Mr. Opo said, for example, has enough drugs to treat people with HIV for more than a year. “But nurses and doctors to treat them are abandoned, and clinics are closed.”

It is also possible that the broader economic shocks in some of the world’s most fragile countries will be.

Charlie Robertson, an economist specializing in Africa, said that US aid represents 15 percent of economic production in southern Sudan, 6 percent in Somalia and 4 percent in the Central African Republic. He said: “We can see the governance effectively stop in a few countries, unless others went up to replace the hole that the United States left.”

Whether the American Agency for International Development has really died, it may be determined by the Congress and American courts, where supporters have presented a set of legal challenges. But the Trump administration appears to be determined to move faster than its competitors.

Since Mr. Musk and his team seized the agency’s operations in Washington, where they closed its headquarters and hung or suspended 94 percent of its employees, the wide aid machines in Africa stopped to stop.

In the main centers in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, American relief officials were shocked to find themselves “criminals” by Mr. Musk, then they were ordered to return to the United States, according to eight employees or contractors from the United States Agency for International Development who all spoke on condition of not disclosing his identity For fear of revenge.

On Friday, the Trump administration has given all the United States Agency for International Development 30 days to fill their bags and return home, causing unrest between families now facing the possibility of children outside the school within a short period. If the federal court, which is now reviewing this directive, does not flip it, then a few of them will have jobs to return to it.

Many US International Development Agency officials have noticed that the Google AI system has been activated recently on their internal communication systems recently, and that the interior video calls made on the Google platform suddenly were set to automatically record it.

Officials said they are concerned that Mr. Musk team can use artificial intelligence to monitor their talks to get rid of dissidents, or to excerpts from conversations that may be weapons to discredit the agency.

The agency’s colleagues have turned into Signal, an encrypted correspondent application, this week to share information informally. One of them said.

Individually, even senior US International Development Agency officials agree that the agency needs comprehensive reform. In the interviews, many of them realized the need to simplify its bureaucracy, and even interrogate the relief system, which relies heavily on American contractors and enhances a harmful culture of dependency between African governments.

The ads of Marco Rubio, Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the United States Agency for International Development, that the emergency and life outlet assistance will be exempted from management discounts at the beginning by employees. But the officials said, it turned out that he was largely miraculous. Despite the promise of concessions, many found it impossible to get one.

The worst of all, many said, The broad aspects presented by Mr. Musk The White House depicts the agency as a rogue criminal agency run by rescue officials who follow their personal agenda. Many people said that such attacks were very wrong and harmful to Americans who sought to alleviate human suffering around the world.

In Nairobi, where the United States Agency for International Development includes about 250 Kenyan employees and 50 American employees, many Kenyans spoke in a tense municipal hall this week.

They have worried that talking at the White House of corruption on a large scale inside the agency may cause the other Kenyans the belief that they, too, have benefited from fraud.

Like Americans present in the municipal hall, the Kenyans are concerned that they are about to shoot. But there was a great difference between the two groups, the official noted: While the Kenyans were concerned about their livelihoods, the Americans were concerned about their country.