Africa: Washington Is Treating Africa As a Target, Not a Partner - - and Africa Knows It

Frank Garcia has just been confirmed as Washington's top Africa diplomat. His appointment tells African governments everything they need to know about how little they matter to this administration.

Last month, the U.S. Senate confirmed Frank Garcia as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, ending a vacancy that had run for more than fifteen months. Garcia is a former Navy officer and longtime staffer on the House Intelligence Committee. He has no significant published work on African affairs and is, by most accounts, unknown in Washington's Africa policy community. One Nigerian newspaper described him as a figure ' His own written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee traced his first contact with the continent to a port call in Mombasa as a junior naval officer -- a detail he offered as evidence of a long fascination with Africa.

The confirmation came as part of a bloc vote covering 49 Trump nominees. Africa was, in other words, one item on a list. That tells you something.

Garcia's stated priorities are clear enough. In his March testimony, he declared that US policy had 'for too long' emphasised 'aid and dependency, with open-ended commitments and a focus on spreading divisive ideologies.' The new approach, he said, would be guided by 'a realistic calculation of costs, risks, and benefits to U.S. interests' -- trade over aid, investment over assistance. He cited the Lobito Corridor, a 1,300-kilometre railway linking Angola's Atlantic coast to the mineral belts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, as the model: infrastructure that simultaneously generates profit and secures critical mineral supply chains for the US , while also rivalling Chinese investments in the region.

It sounds coherent. The problem is that Washington has already been running this playbook for sixteen months, and the results are visible.

Shortly after taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration suspended USAID funding, which had provided African countries needs with more than $11 billion in 2023 -- primarily for health and humanitarian programmes. PEPFAR, the emergency AIDS relief programme that has saved more than 25 million lives since 2003, was effectively wound down. In Malawi, HIV/AIDS services have all but disappeared. In Ethiopia, 16 million people who depend on food aid faced an immediate shortfall. The DRC, already in the grip of devastating conflict, had relied on Washington for roughly 70 percent of its humanitarian assistance. The Prosper Africa Trade and Investment programme -- designed specifically to increase U