President-elect Donald J. Trump’s impending return to the White House has raised hopes among some African leaders, who expect it could lead to more investment, more trade deals and less lecturing on issues like democracy and human rights.
Until now, Mr. Trump’s most memorable pronouncements on Africa were to describe its countries with an expletive and to ban immigration from some of them.
Nevertheless, interviews with over a dozen current and former African and American officials, along with security analysts and business experts, reveal that, far from dreading Mr. Trump’s return, many African leaders are keen to engage him.
“I see a ray of light in this administration,” said Hilda Suka-Mafudze, the African Union ambassador to the United States, at a recent event in Washington where African diplomats and experts questioned former officials from Mr. Trump’s first term about what the incoming administration might bring.
Experts say that Mr. Trump is expected to take a pragmatic and transactional approach to his dealings with Africa. Because of that, some African leaders now expect that his administration could bring their countries more profit from Africa’s wealth of natural resources, more healthy competition with China and other African partners and more jobs to help the world’s fastest-growing continent deal with a massive youth boom.
Mr. Trump has yet to outline any vision for Africa. In his first term, he threatened to slash aid budgets to Africa, and many experts have warned that his administration will pose great dangers to human rights, public health, humanitarian aid and the fight against climate change on the continent.
American influence in Africa has also slumped.
A Gallup poll this year showed that China was the most popular power in Africa. The United States lost security access to parts of the jihadist-hit Sahel region amid a spate of coups. American embassies in Africa are understaffed.
So some African leaders and analysts believe that a Trump administration could set a new direction.
Trade, Not Just Aid
Mr. Trump is likely to loosen restrictions on the fossil fuel industry, creating opportunities for African oil and gas producers, said Zainab Usman, the director of the Africa program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Although Africa is believed to be the continent most vulnerable to climate change, many African leaders want to exploit their resources since their carbon footprint is minuscule relative to industrialized nations.
One way of increasing trade with Africa, many experts said, would be to renew, and expand, the African Growth and Opportunity Act — legislation that allows more than 30 African countries to export some products to the U.S. duty-free. The act, which has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, is set to expire next year. The African Union wants it renewed for at least 16 years, but it is unclear whether the act will be a priority for an administration that has made increasing tariffs central.
South Africa’s automobile industry and Kenya’s clothing manufacturers could be some of the biggest losers if the act were not renewed, said David Omojomolo, an Africa economist at the research firm Capital Economics.
The African Export-Import Bank, a Pan-African financial institution in Cairo, has hired a lobby group in Washington to help push for its renewal. The group’s leader said her team was already speaking with top officials and insiders in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
“They are going to have a transactional, enterprise-driven approach that puts America first,” said Rosa Whitaker, the former assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa for presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But, she added, “we can’t put America first if we keep putting Africa last.”
Catching Up With China
As Africa’s economic ties with other nations — principally China — have grown, the importance of its business with the United States has shriveled. In 2000, over 20 percent of African exports went to the United States. In 2022, less than 5 percent did, according to the World Bank.
From 2000 to 2020, Africa represented just one percent of U.S. foreign direct investments. These investments have shrunk by a third from 2014 to 2022, according to United Nations trade data.
“U.S. companies jump over Africa and invest directly in China and India, but our door is open,” said Olushegun Adjadi Bakari, the foreign minister of Benin, one of Africa’s leading cotton producers.
Countering China’s influence in Africa, including competition for rare earth minerals powering things like electric vehicles and wind turbines, will be central to the Trump administration’s strategy, according to political and economic analysts.
They also say that Mr. Trump is likely to keep the Lobito Corridor — a signature Biden railway project planned to stretch from the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola’s Atlantic coast through Zambia — to secure supply chains.
But the incoming administration will be playing catch-up. China is Africa’s largest trading partner and a major financier of roads and ports, and it is fast laying out the 5G networks that will power Africa’s digital future.
American companies sometimes find it hard to compete against China in Africa and frequently cite reputational risk — particularly that of child labor in supply chains — and red tape to explain their reluctance to invest in Africa.
African leaders have repeatedly said they want to do business with both China and America, and not just pick one side.
“The world is a rainbow — it’s not made of two colors,” said President João Lourenço of Angola.
Make Deals, Not War
What do secessionist movements in Cameroon, Nigeria and Somalia have in common?
They have rejoiced over Mr. Trump’s election, anticipating he could champion their causes.
Officials who previously served under Mr. Trump in Africa say he could recognize Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991. In exchange, the United States might ask for an airfield and a seaport on the strategic route along the Gulf of Aden.
“There is a general belief that Somaliland will be better off under the Trump administration,” said Bashir Goth, who leads the Somaliland mission to the United States.
Several people who have met with Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, said he had expressed a particular interest in Cameroon’s Anglophone separatists, who began fighting to break away from their Francophone countrymen in 2016.
Stop the ‘Lectures’
Uganda and Ghana passed anti-gay laws. Gambia came close to legalizing female genital cutting, after banning it. Soldiers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Niger overthrew their elected governments.
All these developments have been met with disapproving statements from the U.S. government — or, as some Africans have it, a lecture. And some resulted in sanctions.
That might now change. Tibor Nagy, who previously served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under Mr. Trump, said he hoped the United States was “going to drop the stupid megaphone, stop giving lectures and back away from what I call cultural colonialism.”
Mr. Nagy said that religious persecution could be an exception, particularly of Christians in Nigeria. A strong U.S. lobby is pushing the narrative that Christians are targeted by terrorist groups and Muslim herdsmen for their faith — though Nigerian analysts say that is a gross distortion of the dynamics of several complex conflicts in what is Africa’s most populous nation.
Lectures on democratic norms may also take a back seat in Africa’s “coup belt” in the Sahel region — a strip of countries south of the Sahara that are struggling with jihadist insurgencies and are controlled by military juntas.
Several of those countries formerly had strong security partnerships with Western nations, but those relationships have soured. Instead, some have bought Turkish and Chinese drones or hired Wagner, the Russian mercenary force, to help fight terrorists.
J. Peter Pham, Mr. Trump’s former U.S. envoy to the Sahel, said that cutting off junta-led countries directly pushed them to turn to Russia.
When the Biden administration denied a request from Mali’s military president for an American transponder for an unarmed plane, the leader complained to the Russian foreign minister and was promptly invited to Moscow, according to Mr. Pham.
Soon after, 1,500 Wagner mercenaries arrived in Mali, and French troops and U.N. peacekeepers were ejected.
Still, Mr. Pham said, it’s not too late to mend fences with the juntas. A major defeat for Wagner in Mali this summer presents the United States with “a tremendous opportunity,” he added.
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