SPEECH BY FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE, DR. ABUBAKAR BUKOLA SARAKI, CON, AT THE GLOBAL STRATEGIC ADVISORY GROUP (GSAG) MEETING WITH THE THEME: “DEVELOPMENT POLICIES—WITHDRAWAL OF THE U.S. FROM INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES”, HELD AT VILLA LA COLLINA, LAKE COMO, ITALY, ON JUNE 30TH, 2026.

Chair, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a privilege to participate in this important dialogue at a time when the global order is undergoing one of its most profound transformations since the end of the Cold War.

The theme of this conference—Global Partnerships Without U.S. Leadership— invites us to examine not merely the consequences of changing American foreign policy, but the deeper implications of a rapidly evolving international landscape. We are meeting at a genuinely historic inflection point in international development. Not a cyclical adjustment. Not a budgetary correction. But a structural rupture—one that compels 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interrupted, and many civil society organizations that formed the backbone of development delivery have seen support withdrawn almost overnight.

These realities demand urgent international attention and coordinated multilateral action. Yet if our discussion today focuses solely on how to replace lost funding, we risk overlooking the far more consequential question before us.

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.

History teaches us that every major geopolitical shift creates both disruption and opportunity. 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.

I speak as someone who has governed— as a former Governor and former

President of the Nigerian Senate—and as someone who has engaged with the international development system for decades. I have witnessed both the transformative impact that development cooperation can achieve and the structural limitations that have too often constrained its effectiveness. From that perspective, I believe the current moment should not be viewed as a threat to the development enterprise. Rather, it represents its greatest opportunity for renewal.

My central argument today is simple: Africa must seize this moment not to replace one dependency with another, but to redefine development cooperation altogether.

This 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.

These transitions are not merely desirable.

They are imperative

How Did We Arrive Here?

To chart the way forward, we must first understand how our continent arrived at its current state of dependency. 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 do not control.

Our fiscal policies are often shaped by external interests. Our development agendas are too frequently driven by donor priorities rather than our own diagnosed needs. Take healthcare as one example: despite malaria being one of Africa’s highest morbidity burdens, much health aid has been directed toward other priorities—not always because those were Africa’s primary needs, but because they were donor priorities. This mismatch reinforces a model of dependency rather than empowerment.

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. I experienced this firsthand when, as Senate President of Nigeria, I challenged the executive on foreign loan approvals and received significant political push-back—because the system was not designed to support proper scrutiny of purpose or impact. Many of these loans were accepted as if they were free gifts, yet repayment obligations remained. Worse still, donor agencies regularly designed programmes that created jobs and markets for their own economies rather than for us.

There are three structural failures that I believe this forum must honestly confront.

First: aid volumes were always a fraction of what Africa actually needs. Africa’s infrastructure financing gap alone stands at between $130 and $170 billion per year. Total ODA to Africa from all sources combined reached approximately $34 billion in recent years—less than a quarter of infrastructure needs alone. Aid was always a supplement to domestic resource mobilisation and private investment. When treated as a substitute for these, it created dependency rather than development.

Second: the short project cycles embedded in most aid programming— typically three to five years—are fundamentally misaligned with the generational timelines required for

institution-building. A capable civil service, an independent judiciary, a professional security sector, a transparent public financial management system—none of these can be built in a project cycle. They require sustained, patient, adaptive investment across decades.

Third: the architecture never adequately addressed the trade and investment barriers that kept African economies structurally dependent. For decades, African nations exported raw materials under preference schemes that simultaneously inhibited industrialisation. Africa accounts for over 70 per cent of global cocoa production but captures less than 5 per cent of the $130 billion global chocolate market. Nigeria supplies approximately 40 per cent of the world’s raw shea nuts but holds only around 1 per cent of the global sheaproducts market. We export bauxite at $65 per tonne and import aluminium at $2,300 per tonne. We dig for others to profit because we are trapped at the bottom of the value chain while others build on it. The World Bank estimates that Africa loses over $100 billion each year in potential earnings due to the lack of local value addition across key commodities alone.

The Opportunity in the Disruption

I am not here to celebrate America’s retreat from development engagement. The humanitarian costs are real and they demand urgent multilateral response. But I am here to argue that this moment— painful as it is—creates the political space to do something we should have done long ago: to build a genuinely different architecture.

Africa today holds more strategic leverage than at any point since independence. The geopolitical competition for African partnership—between China, Europe, the Gulf states, India, Turkey, and others— means that African nations, for the first time in generations, have real partner choice. That leverage must be used wisely.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has disbursed an estimated $94 billion in loans to African countries over the past two decades. Russia’s presence has expanded in the Sahel. Gulf states are investing heavily across the continent. Turkey and India are deepening their

African relationships. This is not a crisis for Africa’s geopolitical standing—it is a structural shift in our negotiating position.

But leverage is only valuable if it is deployed with clarity about what Africa actually wants. And that requires Africa to speak with a defined vision, not simply to react to what external actors offer.

What Genuine Partnership Must Look Like

I want to be direct about what I believe genuine partnership—as opposed to the old model of aid dependency—actually requires. I will frame this as a set of clear imperatives, because I think vague aspiration is not what this forum needs.

The first imperative is ending raw material exports as our primary economic model. Africa must firmly say no to the automatic export of raw commodities without value addition. From lithium ore to battery production in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From cocoa beans to chocolate in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. From bauxite to aluminium products in Guinea. From cotton to textiles in Benin. From timber to finished wood products in Gabon. When we export raw materials, we forfeit jobs, technology, brand development, and the higher-margin profits that come from processing. Manufacturing and value chains create far more employment than raw commodity extraction. For every million dollars of mining export revenue, you may generate a few dozen jobs. For a million dollars of finished goods, you could generate hundreds of jobs across processing, logistics, marketing, and services. A genuine development partnership from Europe must support— not inhibit—Africa’s industrialisation. Trade frameworks that open European markets to African raw materials while maintaining barriers to African manufactured goods are not partnership. They are a continuation of the old structure under a different name.

The second imperative is strengthening domestic resource mobilisation as the foundation of sovereignty. Tax-to-GDP ratios across Sub-Saharan Africa average approximately 15.6 per cent, compared to an OECD average of 34 per cent. Nigeria’s is approximately 6 per cent—one of the lowest in the world for an economy of its size. This is a political choice. And political choices can be changed by political leadership. During my tenure as Senate President, we placed strong emphasis on fiscal oversight—introducing open budget hearings, confronting the issue of unremitted revenues held outside the treasury system, and working on petroleum sector governance reform. These were not easy fights. But they were necessary ones, because the alternative is permanent external dependency.

African governments must also mobilise the capital that already exists within and around the continent. Africa’s diaspora remitted over $95 billion in 2024— nearly matching the continent’s total foreign direct investment. The remarkable growth of institutions such as the African Export-import Bank, which grew its asset base from around $6 billion in 2015 to approximately $44 billion today, demonstrates what is possible when African finance serves African ambition. This model of African-led finance offers a blueprint. By aligning domestic pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and regional capital markets with these institutions, we can create a self reinforcing cycle of African savings, African investment, and African growth.

The third imperative is investing in institutional quality as the foundation of everything else. When institutions are weak, vision is short-circuited and dependency becomes entrenched.

Governments lose the capacity to review, innovate, or chart new developmental pathways. During my time as Senate President, one of the most significant realisations I had was that dependency persists not merely because we lack resources, but because our institutions have not been designed or empowered to manage those resources transparently and efficiently. Weak institutions create weak accountability. Poor governance reduces investor confidence and constrains domestic revenue mobilisation. External dependence then becomes a cycle, not a choice.

Transparent budgeting, legislative oversight, fiscal accountability, an independent judiciary, credible electoral systems—these are not optional luxuries. They are liberation tools. And they are precisely the areas where long term, patient institutional partnership from Europe could make the most durable difference—not three-year project cycles, but ten-year compacts that build systems capable of outliving any single administration or donor relationship.

The fourth imperative is investing in our people, and particularly our youth. Africa has over 60 per cent of its population under the age of 25. This is not a problem to be managed. It is, with the right investment, the world’s largest untapped source of human capital, innovation, and market growth. But a youthful population is not automatically a dividend—it is a duty. Without education, digital skills, entrepreneurship ecosystems, and the institutional infrastructure to absorb them productively, this demographic becomes a source of frustration and instability rather than prosperity. Our entrepreneurs, researchers, and innovators are already developing world-class solutions to local and global challenges. They need enabling environments: infrastructure, financing, and policies that reward rather than constrain creativity.

What This Means for Europe I want to be clear about what I am asking of this forum’s primary constituency. I am not asking Europe to simply fill the USAID gap. That would be the substitution model—replicating the old architecture under new management. It would help in the short term but would miss the strategic opportunity, perpetuate the structural problems of the old model, and ultimately prove unsustainable as European domestic political pressures on development budgets intensify.

What I am proposing is a transformation model—one that uses this moment of disruption to pioneer a genuinely new architecture. One built on trade and investment rather than aid. On institutional partnership rather than programme delivery. On African agency rather than donor prescription. On long-term compacts rather than short-term projects.

Europe’s interest in Africa is not, and should not be, primarily philanthropic. It is strategic. African migration patterns, African democratic consolidation or failure, African partnership with China and Russia or with Europe—these will shape European security, European economics, and European values in ways that no development budget or border policy alone can substitute for. An Africa that is institutionally strong, economically growing, and politically stable is an Africa that is a partner, not a source of pressure.

Practically, this means several things. It means reforming EU-Africa trade frameworks to genuinely enable African industrialisation—not maintaining the current asymmetries where African raw materials enter freely but African manufactured goods face barriers. It means using Europe’s regulatory leverage and capital market relationships to mobilise private investment at scale, with African Development Bank and African Export-Import Bank as genuine co-investment partners rather than subordinate recipients. It means longterm institutional compacts—ten years, not three—for building African governance capacity in the judiciary, legislature, civil service, electoral systems, and public finance. And it means honest engagement on governance: the greatest threat to African development is not the absence of external aid but the presence of internal predation—corruption and state capture—that diverts resources and destroys institutional legitimacy. A genuine partner does not look away from this to preserve diplomatic comfort.

What Africa Must Also Do

I want to be equally honest about what African states must do differently. It would be intellectually dishonest to speak only of what external partners must change without addressing with equal rigour our own obligations.

African governments must accelerate domestic resource mobilisation—not as a donor condition but as an African sovereignty priority. Tax collection, anticorruption frameworks, and the formalisation of the informal economy are political choices that require political leadership willing to reform systems that frequently benefit entrenched elites, including sometimes the political class itself.

African governments must implement the African Continental Free Trade Area with greater urgency. Intra-African trade stands at approximately 15 per cent of total African trade, compared to over 60 per cent in Europe. The economic case for integration is overwhelming. The AfCFTA, once fully operational, will create a single market valued at over $3.4 trillion. But its promise will only be realised through implementation: aligning national policies, investing in cross border infrastructure, and empowering African enterprises to compete regionally and globally.

And African governments must protect and strengthen democratic institutions as the foundational infrastructure of sustainable development. The evidence is consistent: democracies with independent institutions and accountable governance tend to outperform alternatives on development outcomes over the medium to long term. Nigeria’s democratic journey since 1999—imperfect, contested, sometimes frustrating—has nonetheless produced sustained growth, a vibrant private sector, an active civil society, and multiple peaceful transfers of power. These achievements matter. They should not be taken for granted.

Conclusion

Ladies and Gentlemen,

History occasionally presents nations and continents with defining moments that test their vision, courage, and capacity for transformation. This is one of those moments.

The changing role of the United States in international development is undoubtedly significant. Yet beyond the immediate challenges lies a far greater opportunity— an opportunity for Africa to rethink development, for Europe to reimagine partnership, and for both to build a relationship founded not on dependency, but on mutual interests, shared prosperity, and common purpose.

The question before us is not how quickly we replace what has been withdrawn. The question is whether we have the wisdom and determination to build something better in its place. Africa does not need new patrons; it needs genuine partners willing to invest in its institutions, industries, infrastructure, innovation, and people. Partners who see Africa not as a challenge to be managed, but as a strategic partner in shaping the future global economy.

Our responsibility is clear. We must strengthen governance, deepen regional integration, invest in our young people, mobilize our own capital, and speak with a more unified voice on trade, energy, climate, technology, and development finance. Above all, we must embrace a development model driven by production, value creation, innovation, and self-determination.

The world is changing. The future will belong not to those who merely react to events, but to those who help shape them. Africa has the resources, the talent, the markets, and the demographic strength to be one of the defining forces of the twenty-first century.

Let future generations look back on this moment not as the period when development assistance declined, but as the moment when Africa stepped forward with confidence, claimed its agency, and helped shape a new global order.

The era of dependency must give way to the era of partnership.

The era of potential must give way to the era of performance.

And the era of Africa’s promise must become the era of Africa’s leadership.

Thank you.