BEST OF BYLINES: Aid to Africa cut – Africans answer back

Welcome to your first Best of Bylines newsletter of the week, bringing you a standout article from one of our 10 UK national and regional publications. This time, we hand over to Kent and Surrey Bylines and Charlotte Mbali’s insightful investigation into the impact of cuts in aid to African countries, championing the views of Africans themselves.

With cuts to aid from rich Western powers to ex-colonial countries, reports have been published predicting the drastic effects on the healthcare of marginalised people, potentially worsening humanitarian crises across Africa. Meanwhile, Africans point out how much wealth is exported from their countries by corrupt leaders and their cronies.

In 2025, Trump cut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with dire effects on HIV/AIDS patients, anti-malaria work, and basic immunisation. The UK has also cut overseas aid to 0.3 of GNI (total £9.9bn, the lowest since 1999). Prime Minister Keir Starmer explained that the funds were needed for military spending instead.

Who are the main victims of such cuts? A 2025 analysis in the wake of the USAID cuts categorises the effects under headings such as Food Aid, Global Health, and Women and Girls – with a useful map showing how the majority of projects were in Africa. But this is an archived page, presumably with no US money now given to those who used to report on and analyse such projects. Those who analyse global health policy are alarmed at the cuts to HIV/AIDS provision. In Uganda alone, 1 million refugees will no longer receive US aid.

It is bilateral aid, government to government aid, that is cut – while multilateral aid via international organisations is planned to increase, supporting the likes of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and the Global Vaccine Safety Initiative (GAVI). The policy swivel from bilateral to multilateral, with the hope of generating more private finance, has been analysed by Chatham House experts, but the firm fact is that aid has been reduced by one third since 2023 – mainly by USA and UK governments.

Into this sorry retreat from aid by leading Anglo-nations comes a potential solution. The Global Justice Report, a mainly French initiative led by Thomas Piketty with research funded by the EU, proposes to start a process of equalising health expenditure through a Global Justice Fund. The report highlights the current inequality in which per capita health spending in 2025 was €113 in sub-Saharan Africa. Compare this to €8,301 per capita in North America and Oceania (it is not clear why these EU economists have chosen to lump Oceania with North America!).

A Global Justice Fund created using a tax on the super-wealthy could lessen this gap, propose Piketty and the research team, so that by 2050 per capita health expenditure in Sub-Saharan Africa could rise to €4,000 and €10-12,000 in Europe. By 2100, all countries could converge on spending €14,400 per person everywhere.

Analysis in the media about the Global Justice Report has been mixed. As may be expected, the Los Angeles Times (owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong) fulminates against wealth taxes – or any type of cuts on the American standard of living. Unherd (owned by millionaire Paul Marshall) thinks the report is written by academics out of touch with the real world. The Guardian (financed by a historic public interest trust) says the report is “visionary” and outlines what it says is needed to keep within planetary boundaries: a cut in consumption (including too much meat eating), a cut in working hours, and wealth taxes to provide funds for equalising.

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What do Africans think about their current low share of the world’s wealth? A source relayed to me that, at a recent gathering hosted by the African Oxford Initiative, an African Rhodes scholar pointed out that Africa would not need the aid that is being cut if these same aid-giving countries stopped receiving its stolen wealth.

Reading the summaries of the Global Justice Report, I was surprised that it was so visionary that it totally failed to mention political corruption and illicit flows of currency. But then, as a regular reader of Oliver Bullough’s e-newsletter and admirer of his books Moneyland and The Butler of the World, I am already wised up to just how much the City of London deals in ill-gotten gains.

Illicit flows of currency consist of drug money, human trafficking, counterfeiting, cyber fraud, tax evasion, and bribery of those in power. Once the perpetrators have made their immoral gains, they scheme to export their wealth outside the country in which it was made. They achieve this mainly by false trade accounts, real estate deals, and cryptocurrency. It is estimated these illicit flows out of Africa amount to $580bn, while these countries carry $2tr of debt and lack the money they need to spend on vital infrastructure.

The good news coming at the end of this sorry tale of ungenerosity and corruption is that the South African government has at last moved to staunch this outflow.

In Oct 2025 the South African National Treasury legislated for a General Laws Amendment that put into law a 22-point plan which, among other things, enables lifestyle audits of public officials, enhanced due diligence on the accounts of those related to them, oversight of NGOs, bigger penalties for money laundering, mandatory transparency of beneficial owners of companies, ‘know your customer’” rules for financial tech and cryptocurrency, and more vigilance over the non-financial gatekeepers of illicit wealth (lawyers, diamond dealers, luxury estate agents, etc). There will be more effective policing of finance – including confiscation of rogue remittances.

The banks are now tightening up with detailed rules and procedures. It is too early to see the effects yet but there are formidable summaries of what the banks have to do to comply.

It seems like South Africa is moving faster and more effectively against illicit financial flows than the UK, which seems to be in slo-mo about enabling investigative journalists to discover beneficial owners of all those offshore companies in the ex-colonial treasure islands. I’d recommend reading The Butler of the World to find out about the vested interest in the City of London.

Meanwhile let’s applaud the argument from African scholars that the continent would get their share of wealth if only so much was not snatched out of Africa, ultimately enhancing the wealth of the already wealthy nations. Also note that the withdrawal of health aid may eventually be to the detriment of the rich world; infectious disease jumps national borders. At the same time as aid is being cut to African health facilities, Ebola flares up again in the Eastern Congo – a place cursed with illegal (and untaxed) outflow of rare minerals such as coltan that are now an essential part of our smart phones.

Although Pride Month may be drawing to an end, the celebrations certainly aren’t across Kent. Ren Hodges highlights events in Kent and Surrey that prove Pride is not a once-a-year happening. Read the full article here.