Washington, DC — “Africa can expect substantial changes from the United States over the next four years,” Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, wrote in a pre-Inauguration analysis. While Donald Trump in his first term pursued an “America first” foreign policy, as he has committed to do again, the “new centrality” that Africa enjoys on the world stage will necessitate adaptations to the U.S. approach, Rama predicted.
Although the new administration’s Africa policies are evolving, actions Trump initiated hours after taking office will have ramifications across the continent.
The long list of executive orders signed Monday, the afternoon Trump took office, include a 90-day suspension of all foreign development assistance and began the year-long processes required to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO). Among the effects of an omnibus set of decrees, entitled Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders And Actions, was ending the President’s Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement that Biden established in 2022 during the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was confirmed by the Senate on Inauguration Day, can waive the pause for selected aid programs. But Monday’s executive orders will have immediate effects.
Decisions specifically focused on Africa are expected soon. They include the sanctions imposed on warring armies in Sudan during the final days of President Joe Biden’s term.
Rubio, who represented Florida in the Senate since 2011, is the senior Trump appointee for developing and implementing Africa policy. Although making no mention of Africa in his opening statement, during confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio testified in response to questions that Africa offers “an extraordinary opportunity” for the United States, pointing to the growth in markets and consumers.
“Democratic and Republican administrations have not prioritized the continent,” New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker said, and will account for one in four humans on earth by 2051. “Lack of focus on Africa can endanger the whole planet,” he added.
Rubio sees ‘extraordinary opportunity in Africa, ‘real genocide’ in Sudan
Booker pressed Rubio to give priority to the devastating conflict in Sudan – the world’s worst humanitarian disaster – where 26 million people, half the country’s population, require food assistance, 30 percent have been displaced by 18 months of fighting between rival military factions, and where the United Nations’ famine review committee on 1 August 2024 formally declared a famine – a high bar that goes beyond widespread starvation.
“This is a real genocide” Rubio said, citing “ethnic targeting of specific groups” by military rivals supported by U.S. allies. He named the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major backer for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia that the Biden administration sanctioned earlier this month. Rubio advocated “pragmatic engagement” with UAE, which he called an important player in the Middle East. Two days after taking office, Rubio had a phone conversation with UAE Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss Gaza. Sudan is not mentioned in the conversation readout.
Another African crisis the State Department and the administration faces is the escalating conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the M23 militia, backed by Rwanda, have surrounded the country’s third largest city, Goma, a metropolis of over two million people who already are fleeing in large numbers. Fighting is intensifying around Minova, about 25 miles / 40 kilometers from Goma, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), adding to mounting human suffering in the region. Every day, more people flee, adding to the hundreds of thousands already displaced in the Kivu area. Negotiations to halt the fighting that has lasted 30 years collapsed in December when a planned summit of DRC and Rwanda leaders was abruptly cancelled.
Africa Team Takes Shape
Troy Fitrell, a career diplomat who just completed a three-year tour as U.S. ambassador to Guinea, took over on Monday as the interim senior official for Africa at the State Department, following the departure of Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Molly Phee, who assumed that post in September 2021. Almost all other senior officials in the Department left at the request of the incoming administration. The Africa Bureau overseas embassies and manages relations with 48 sub-Saharan countries and the African Union. Relations with Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Morocco are handled by the Near East bureau.
Ambassador Fitrell heading Africa Bureau at State while nomination for Assistant secretary process unfolds
The Trump team’s expected nominee as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa – a position requiring Senate confirmation – is Dr. J. Peter Pham, a widely published analyst who during the first Trump administration served successively in two special envoy posts and is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he previously headed the Africa Center.
Pham is an ordained Episcopal priest whose business engagements include chairman of Ivanhoe Atlantic, a private U.S. company with mining operations in Liberia and Guinea. He has been on the boards of mobile technology company Africell, that provides cell service in Angola, Sierra Leone, DRC and The Gambia, and Rainbow Rare Earths, a UK-registered company operating in South Africa, Burundi and Morocco, which pioneered commercial recovery of rare earth elements from phosphate mining.
While serving in the first Trump administration as Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, Pham helped to negotiate the handover in the DRC by President Joseph Kabila, who had held onto power for 18 years. Although he was out-polled by reformer Martin Fayulu in the December 2018 election – according to election observers and the Catholic Church – the runner-up, Felix Tshisekedi, struck a deal with Kabila, whose powerful party held a majority in the National Assembly. Tshisekedi was sworn in on January 24, 2019.
Pham has maintained ties with Tshisekedi and made several trips to Kinshasa as a private citizen. In December, according to the Paris-based newsletter Africa Intelligence, Pham took part in talks with a small DRC delegation headed by Jacques Tshibanda Tshisekedi, the president’s brother and security coordinator, who came to Washington, DC to firm up ties with the incoming Trump team.
Tibor Nagy, who during most of the first Trump term was State’s top Africa official, is returning to the State Department in a “temporary position” that he said on social media “will be beyond just Africa”.
At the White House, Joe Foltz, who for the past two years was staff director for the House Africa subcommittee, is expected to be tapped as senior director for Africa at the National Security Council (NSC), where he spent 13 months during the first Trump term working on multilateral issues. He is a former foreign service officer who spent much of his career at USAID.
Heading the National Security Council is Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret who served two tours in Afghanistan. He represented Florida’s 6th district in the House of Representatives until assuming his position as National Security Adviser on Monday. On Wednesday, according to the Washington Post, dozens of National Security Council personnel – most on assignment from the State and Defense Departments and intelligence agencies – were sent home pending a “full review” by Waltz, who said in a post on X in early January “anyone working under President Trump in the NSC will be fully aligned with his America First agenda.”Waltz has made another hire with Africa experience, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Rudolph (Rudy) Atallah, who for six years was Africa Counterterrorism director at the Pentagon Office, according to his LinkedIn profile. Atallah was hired in 2017 in Trump’s first term as NSC senior director for Africa, but the offer was withdrawn several weeks after he began the job. Now, Semafor reports, Atallah has been named to the NSC’s counterterrorism team focusing on Africa.
The Urgency of Sudan
The January 7th and 16th sanctions against two warring parties in Sudan followed months of mounting Congressional and public pressure. Designed to stem escalating fighting and suffering, the action targeted both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which two decades ago perpetrated genocide in Darfur and now operates nationwide, and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). One early step by the Trump team, which must manage implementation, could be naming a special envoy on Sudan. Last February, responding to Congressional and public pressure, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken selected Tom Perriello, a former Democratic House member from Virginia, for the post.
Envoys could advance U.S. diplomacy in Sudan, the Sahel, the Great Lakes, and Horn – Hudson
Special envoys could “critically elevate and advance U.S. diplomacy” in three other “challenging areas,” wrote Cameron Hudson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. The Sahel, the Great Lakes, and the Horn of Africa are embroiled in conflicts that threaten U.S. allies and interests, Hudson said.
Pham, one of a small number of special envoys appointed during Trump’s first term, worked initially on the African Great Lakes region after being appointed in 2018, before being assigned to tackle conflict in the Sahel from March 2020 until Trump left office in January 2021. He was the first choice to be Assistant Secretary for Africa in 2017 but his nomination was blocked by objections from Sen. James Inhofe, powerful chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a Republican from Oklahoma who opposed Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara and viewed Pham as sympathetic to the Moroccan regime.
This time, Trump already has named special envoys for the Middle East, Latin America and the United Kingdom. He selected as his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American with extensive business interests in Nigeria, whose son is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany. SCOA Group, where Boulos is the CEO, operates a Lagos-based dealership that sells automobiles, trucks and construction and mining equipment and is part of the Fadoul Group, founded in Burkina Faso by Zouhair Fadoul, whose daughter, Sara Fadoul Boulos, is married to the senior Boulos.
Trump showed little interest in Africa during his previous presidency and is the only American president in 40 years who hasn’t visited Africa while in office. However, he drew attention by reportedly talking about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa during a heated exchange with members of Congress in an 2018 Oval Office meeting, asking: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
Later that year, after Tucker Carlson on Fox News accused the South African government of seizing land from white citizens, Trump falsely claimed that “large scale killing of farmers” was taking place in South Africa and said in a Tweet that he was asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate land and farm expropriations.
Prosper Africa – a one-stop shop for investing in Africa’ – Nagy
Despite presidential indifference, Trump’s former Assistant of State for Africa said there were a number of achievements. A few days before leaving office on Inauguration Day in 2021, Nagy told AllAfrica in an interview: “For the first time ever, in the 60-plus years we’ve had relations with Africa, the United States of America has a one-stop shop for investing in Africa”, he said, referring to the Prosper Africa initiative launched in 2019 to boost U.S. business ties. Prosper Africa was expanded by the Biden White House to coordinate the work of 17 U.S. government agencies and is expected to continue in the new Trump term.
Nagy listed as other successes the “continued acceleration” of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), began by President Obama, and the Trump administration’s launch of the University Partnership Initiative for building ties between educational institutions in Africa and the United States. Nagy also cited diplomatic advances in political transitions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola and Mauritania, as well as in Ethiopia – where he acknowledged there remained serious problems.
During the Biden years, Peter Pham continued to produce a steady stream of articles and regular posts on the social media platform X, where he has more than 50 thousand followers. Since Trump won election last November, Pham “has been reaching out to people close to the incoming president,” Africa Intelligence reported, and – on 8 January, “talked shop over a game of golf with Donald Trump Jr.”
Project 2025 and the Trump Agenda
In 2024, Pham co-chaired the Africa group that authored Project 2025, a 920-page policy document produced by a coalition of conservative organizations to guide the next U.S. administration. Although Trump distanced himself from the document after it became a hot issue during the campaign, a number of its authors have been appointed to senior positions in the new administration and there are striking similarities between the 2025 recommendations and policies thus far announced.
The Project 2025 section on Sub-Saharan Africa, which Pham helped write, contains four key recommendations, below, with excerpts of the explanations provided in the plan:
Shift strategic focus from assistance to growth.- While the United States should always be willing to offer emergency and humanitarian relief, both U.S. and African long-term interests are better served by a free market-based, private growth-focused strategy to Africa’s economic challenges. Counter malign Chinese activity on the continent.- development of powerful public diplomacy efforts to counter Chinese influence campaigns with commitments to freedom of speech and the free flow of information;- creation of a template “digital hygiene” program that African countries can access to sanitize and protect their sensitive communications networks from espionage;- recognition of Somaliland statehood as a hedge against the U.S.’s deteriorating position in Djibouti;- focus on supporting American companies involved in industries important to U.S. national interests or that have a competitive advantage in Africa. Counter the furtherance of terrorism.- The U.S. should support capable African military and security operations through the State Department and other federal agencies responsible for granting foreign military education, training, and security assistance. Build a coalition of the cooperative.- focus on countries with which the U.S. can expect a mutually beneficial relationship;- maintain a baseline level of contact even with countries with which it has less-than-fruitful relationships to encourage positive developments and be in position to seize unexpected diplomatic opportunities;- focus on core diplomatic activities and stop promoting policies birthed in American culture wars.
In the section on foreign assistance, the document credits USAID with saving millions of lives with pandemic and infectious disease responses, especially for malaria and HIV-AIDS, while labeling poverty and hunger reduction programs as failures. “USAID efforts in Africa require a rethink, the document says, foretelling Section 1 in Monday’s Executive Order that says the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
Africa on Capitol Hill
As the Trump Africa team is assembled, lawmakers from both parties are weighing in with suggestions and appeals. Since his selection as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when Republicans took control of the Senate on January 7, Jim Risch from Oklahoma has chastised the Biden administration for waiting “until its last 13 days in office to label atrocities in Darfur as a genocide” and impose sanctions; called for a “reset” of U.S. policy and assistance to South Sudan, and pressured the Treasury Department to oppose additional IMF funding for Ghana until debts to American companies are paid.
Risch has spoken out on a range of Africa issues since coming to the Senate in 2009, and as former Ranking (minority) Member of the Committee made a number of visits to the continent. John G. Tomaszewski, a senior member of the Committee staff who leads Africa policy for Risch and previously spent 10 years working in and on Africa for the International Republican Institute, has accompanied the Senator and made regular oversight visits to U.S. embassies in various capitals, where he also met with government officials and civil society.
On the House side, new Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast selected Rep. Christopher Smith from New Jersey to chair the Africa Subcommittee. where Rep. Sara Jacobs from California sits as the ranking Democrat. Smith previously headed what was then called the Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations subcommittee from 2001-2006 and again from 2011-2018.
Both Smith and Jacobs have pressed the Biden administration for tougher action to end human suffering in Sudan. In October, Smith said the leaders of both warring factions, who he called ‘the twin butchers of Darfur’, should be sanctioned by the United States “for their gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Jacobs introduced the Stand Up for Sudan Act, which would prohibit U.S. arms sales to the UAE until that country ends aid to the RSF.
Serving as senior Africa policy staffer for Mast is Christopher Kulukundis, who is also slated to succeed Foltz as staff director for the Africa Subcommittee. Another Hill aide and advisor to Smith with Africa expertise is Piero Tozzi, who served as Subcommittee staff director when Smith served previously as chair and who currently directs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that Smith chairs.
“The big difference this time is that Congress will be closely involved in policy development in a way that didn’t happen in the last administration,” according to Riva Levinson, a government relations strategist whose engagement with African issues dates from the Reagan presidency. Having people with Congressional experience in key Africa policy posts will facilitate communication between the two branches and result in “more robust and sustainable” decisions, she told AllAfrica.
Attention and pressure from Capitol Hill has provided a critical boost for diplomatic efforts and has “given people in Sudan comfort” at a time when they felt forgotten by the world, Special Envoy Perriello told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting earlier this month. Asked what tools his successor – if one is named by the new administration – might use to break the Sudan diplomatic deadlock, he advised a bold “venture capital” approach rather than a cautious low-risk-of-failure approach: “try 10 things” and maybe one or two will end up “really making a difference.”
As fighting spreads, with the Sudanese Army and allied militias moving to capture the capital Khartoum, Congressional pressure is likely to grow. “Regardless of where Sudan ranks in Trump’s foreign policy priorities,” Leena Badri wrote in an analysis for the London think tank Chatham House, “it remains a crucial question for many U.S. partners in the Middle East and thus will need to be dealt with – either directly or indirectly.”
Growing support for Somaliland – ‘the Little Country That Can’
Another anticipated action is initiating U.S. relations with Somaliland, a self-governing territory whose declared independence from Somalia is not recognized by any government.
On Somaliland, Congressional voices have spoken out. The Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party this month urged the Biden State Department “to establish a representative office” in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital. “Such a move is critical for advancing U.S. strategic interests in the Horn of Africa and countering the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China,” John Moolenaar, the chair, wrote in a January 15 letter to then-Secretary Antony Blinken.
Pham himself is an advocate for building U.S. ties. “It is high time that the #USA & the international community deal with the reality of #Somaliland,” he posted on X in November. He was responding to a post from Nagy congratulating Somaliland on elections. “The ‘Little Country that Can’ continues to exemplify the characteristics that the liberal world values – but unfortunately has not the courage to formally recognize (yet)!!” Pham and Nagy visited Hargeisa in 2022, along with former Africom commander General William ‘Kip’ Ward and Joshua Meservey from Heritage Foundation.
On another program with longstanding bi-partisan support, Chris Smith, signaling a priority of the House Africa Subcommittee under his leadership, has announced a probe of alleged payments for abortion by the Biden administration using funds from PEPFAR – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief established by President George W. Bush and credited with saving 25 million lives. “It is unacceptable for our government to use PEPFAR’s taxpayer dollars to promote or provide abortion,” Smith said.
A critical trade policy also will undergo review. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the cornerstone of U.S. trade relations with the continent since 2000, extends duty-free access to American markets for 32 African countries. It was adopted and renewed four times with bipartisan backing in Congress. Another renewal of the Act, which expires in October, nearly passed last month as part of the Continuing Resolution to avoid a government shutdown and fund the government through March 14, 2025. AGOA extension was included in a deal negotiated by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (Republican-Missouri), Punchbowl reported, but was dropped in a last-minute compromise adopted on December 20.
When renewal discussions resume, South Africa will likely be a target for criticism. “South Africa has been under constant threat of suspension from Agoa for more than two years,” Peter Fabricius wrote in a Daily Maverick analysis earlier this month. Because of a perception of “chumminess with Russia, China and Iran”– and hostility towards Israel, many Republicans, and some “significant Democrat” now view South Africa as “a threat to US foreign policy and national security interests, which would violate eligibility for Agoa,” Fabricius wrote.
Rosa Whitaker, who was the first Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa, serving both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in an AllAfrica guest column in July 2024, that the legislation “waives duties on most of what Africa grows, mines, makes or assembles, to give it a boost in the U.S. market. This has raised the living standards of millions of Africans since 2000, at a fraction of the cost of traditional aid and without sacrificing American jobs (except perhaps in the aid industry).”
Nevertheless, President Trump’s fondness for trade tariffs could pose an obstacle for renewing AGOA.
AllAfrica’s Tami Hultman contributed to this report.
