Rubio’s explicit statement that aid from the US will only be supported by the White House if it brings more returns to the US rekindles the question: Who benefits from aid? Scholars such as Rasna Warah, Dambisa Moyo and Wolfgang Sachs have pointed out that aid has not brought development to Africa, but conversely, has entrenched poverty and neo-colonialism. Development aid has been credited with having saved Africa from the scourge of excruciating poverty and large-scale diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, which many governments on the continent had no financial capability to curb. Both African governments and citizens have celebrated the presence of Western and Western-sponsored NGOs in their countries. Development aid constitutes a sizeable portion of foreign currency flows to Africa. Some countries, like Malawi and Rwanda, have had nearly half of their budgets funded by aid, and this speaks more to overreliance and dependency rather than simply getting aid.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that aid, mostly on the humanitarian front—especially in the aftermath of natural disasters or health pandemics—has brought some relief to the social constraints in Africa. The 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola virus disease outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is a pertinent example. However, while aid has been extended to various African countries, no meaningful socio-economic transformations have been observed at the levels catalysed by the Marshall Plan in Europe or the accelerated development in East Asia. Aid in Africa has been, at best, a relief measure. It carries no sustainability and, if sustained, kills development by creating dependency syndrome. In my 2016 essay co-authored with Lucky E. Asuelime, we argued that African leaders are so drunk on love for aid that they have now moved to climate change negotiations as another platform to extort aid from the West.

There is a need to shift from aid to other relations that are better dictated by Africans and their needs. However, the argument that aid has destroyed Africa emanates from the fact that aid is a tool for the continued syphoning of African resources worth more than what has been given in aid. Tafataona Mahoso, a Zimbabwean critic of Western aid to Africa, likened this relationship to ‘chema yemuroyi’ (which translates to: witch/wizard’s bereavement contribution token), after having bewitched your children to death. Africa’s lag in development is not solely its own making but a result of complex global relations deliberately engineered to impoverish the continent for the benefit of the global North. Development aid becomes not only an albatross around the neck of African leaders but also a pacifying mechanism for both African leaders and populations.

Reduction of aid would drive Africans to claim their fair share of global trade and also ask the best of their leaders in driving true development. African leaders who rely on aid to cover for their leadership shortfalls, including corruption and theft, would be exposed, leading to either transformations in policies or deposition by their citizens. Moyo argues that aid fuels corrupt and autocratic regimes that respond to the desires of the aid source countries more than the developmental needs of their citizens. The irony is that aid funds are used mostly to finance the lavish lifestyles of the corrupt political class and placate other influential sectors of the society, like the security chiefs.

One of the killing elements in official development assistance (ODA) is the various conditionalities that come with the aid. These conditions sometimes include the signing away of commercial and resource rights to the aid source countries. Examples are the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw African countries being forced to adopt socio-economic policies that destroyed the socialist basis of these countries, leading to the return of global capital to take over the countries. Another recent example is the Build Back Better World initiative by the 2021 Group of 7 (G7) to offer infrastructure aid to Africa with the condition of moving out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The worst are bilateral conditionalities where countries are forced to offer exclusive rights of minerals or markets to access aid; while such information is not publicly available, such cases cannot be dismissed at face value. This is also coupled with external factors deliberately meant to keep Africa poor and perpetuate the aid industry and western dominance.

For instance, Western countries agreed not to fund any energy generation production that uses fossils, on the pretext of climate change, during the 2021 Glasgow Conference of the Parties (COP26). Countries part of the agreement included the US, UK, Canada and Switzerland. However, in the aftermath of the European Union (EU) trade breaks with Russia, due to the Ukraine War, these countries, including the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain, have been sourcing the same fossils for their electricity generation, including from Africa. This means that Africa, which has vast reserves of coal and gas, may spend future years without a universal electricity supply due to the desire not to upset the donor countries. However, the continent would retain its resource sovereignty, which is currently lost to various western corporations, with a break from this system.

African leaders can also begin to make use of indigenous intellectuals and experts for internal development, against the so-called experts who are brought in as part of aid packages. This would mean a retention of development-planning sovereignty. For instance, during the 2012 constitution-making process in Zimbabwe, the United Nations Development Programme, which funded the process, seconded to the Constitution Parliamentary Select Committee a South African constitutional lawyer, Hassen Ebrahim, despite Zimbabwe having many constitutional law professors.