Saraki To Africa: Turn Declining Aid Into Sustainable Development

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LAGOS – Former Senate President Abu­bakar Bukola Saraki has harped on the need for Africa to use the opportunity of the decline in development assistance to build more sustainable development architecture for the continent.

He stressed that Africa should move from aid to genuine partnership; using development cooperation to strengthen insti­tutions, governance, and demo­cratic accountability.

The former Senate Presi­dent stated this on Tuesday as a panelist at the Global Strategic Advisory Group (GSAG) meet­ing held in Villa La Collina, Lake Como, Italy, in a paper he delivered with the titled, ‘Devel­opment Policies—Withdrawal of the U.S. from International Development: Opportunities and Challenges’.

According to Saraki, the theme of the conference—Glob­al Partnerships Without U.S. Leadership—has provided an opportunity for them to examine not merely the consequences of changing American foreign poli­cy, but the deeper implications of a rapidly evolving international landscape.

He maintained that the structural rupture—should compel governments, multilat­eral institutions, development practitioners, and policymakers around the world to confront a question that has been deferred for too long: What should inter­national development coopera­tion look like in the twenty-first century, and who should lead it?

“For decades, the United States served as the anchor of the global development archi­tecture, providing leadership through development finance, humanitarian assistance, health interventions, democracy sup­port, and security cooperation.

“Today, however, America is undergoing a strategic re­orientation of its priorities. The reduction of development assistance, the restructuring of USAID programmes, and a growing emphasis on domestic concerns reflect broader politi­cal and economic shifts within American society.

“The immediate consequenc­es are significant and deeply concerning. UNAIDS projects that up to 6.3 million additional HIV infections could occur over the next five years if critical funding gaps are not addressed. The African Development Bank estimates that developing coun­tries face an annual financing shortfall of between $15 and $18 billion as a direct consequence of recent U.S. aid reductions. Health supply chains have been disrupted, emergency nutrition programmes interrupted, and many civil society organisa­tions that formed the backbone of development delivery have seen support withdrawn almost overnight.

“These realities demand ur­gent international attention and coordinated multilateral action.

“The challenge is not simply how to fill the gap left by a re­treating United States. The chal­lenge is whether we can use this moment to build a development architecture that is more sus­tainable, more equitable, more strategic, and ultimately more effective than the one it replaces.

“The real question before us is not whether the United States is stepping back. The real ques­tion is whether Africa, Europe, and other emerging partners are prepared to step forward.”

Saraki noted that Africa must seize the moment not to replace one dependency with another, but to redefine develop­ment cooperation, stressing that it requires three fundamental transitions: moving from aid to genuine partnership; using development cooperation to strengthen institutions, gover­nance, and democratic account­ability; and investing in the next generation of political, econom­ic, and technological leaders who will shape Africa’s future.

Explaining why Africa must break away from dependency, he noted that the transitions are not merely desirable but are imperative, pointing out that for more than six decades after the first African nations achieved sovereignty, the project of full independence—economic, polit­ical, and intellectual—remains unfinished. “Our economies still echo colonial designs: systems of extraction and export, where raw materials leave our shores at minimal added value and return as finished products command­ing prices we don’t control.

“Our fiscal policies are often shaped by external interests. Our development agenda is too frequently driven by donor priorities rather than our own diagnosed needs.

“The traditional aid archi­tecture—built on donor-recipi­ent hierarchies, conditionality frameworks, and programme delivery rather than systemic change—was never designed to produce the institutional transformation that generates sustainable development.”