By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Despite announcing sweeping aid cuts that have caused considerable humanitarian distress across the continent, President Donald Trump values Africa, US Senior Adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos, has said.
Trump announced the aid freeze on his first day in office in January, in line with his “America First” foreign policy. Meanwhile, Washington’s recent tariffs have raised fears of the end of a trade deal between the US and Africa, originally intended to boost economic growth.
But Mr Boulos told the BBC that Africa was “very important” to Trump and downplayed reports that the US was planning to close some of its missions on the continent.
“He highly values Africa and African people,” Mr Boulos added.
The aid cuts have affected health programmes across Africa, including shipments of critical medical supplies such as HIV drugs.
The majority of the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) programmes, which provided health and humanitarian assistance to vulnerable nations, have since been terminated.
Eight countries—six of them in Africa, including Nigeria, Kenya and Lesotho, could soon run out of HIV drugs following the US decision to pause foreign aid, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.
There are fears that nearly six million more Africans could be pushed into extreme poverty next year following the aid cuts, according to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a pan-African think tank.
Earlier this month, eight people, including five children, died after walking for hours to seek treatment for cholera in South Sudan, after aid cuts by the Trump administration forced local health clinics to close, the international charity Save the Children reported.
However, Mr Boulos said those reported deaths could not be directly linked to the US aid cuts and insisted the cuts were necessary to ensure the money was being properly used.
“It is absolutely necessary [for the US] to review some of these programmes for much more efficiency and transparency,” Mr Boulos said.
“We have to make sure the [aid funds] are going to the right place and that we are getting the desired outcome,” he added.
Boulos, whose son is married to Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, said several US companies had expressed interest in exploiting minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, following his recent trip to the resource-rich central African nation.
