One of the most arresting moments in The Independent’s latest documentary by Bel Trew, our chief international correspondent, about the chilling effects of Donald Trump shutting down America’s aid programme, comes when she asks a boy in Zimbabwe, orphaned when his parents died of Aids, what he was called. “My name is Hardlife,” he says.
Before Mr Trump returned to the White House, this young man had hope for the future. The President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, a programme set up by George W Bush in 2003, was one of the world’s most successful health initiatives ever. The world was on track to end Aids in five years’ time, by targeted and realistic intervention, delivering antiretroviral drugs to HIV-positive people in countries of the global South.
Within days of Mr Trump’s second inauguration, however, he announced a freeze in United States aid spending. Two months later, he confirmed the closure of USAID, the aid agency that he said was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics”.
Since then, as is typical of the Trump administration, confusion has reigned. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has said that he wants the programme supplying life-saving drugs for babies with HIV and adults who are sick with Aids to continue, but that it should get smaller. (If it were allowed to achieve its aim of eliminating Aids by the end of the decade, it would indeed be smaller.)
The president has signed a waiver for “life-saving care” – but, as Trew reports from Uganda and Zimbabwe, this has not resulted in restoring the supply of drugs that was abruptly cut off in January.
When The Independent asked Mr Trump about this on board Air Force One, he said: “We did a waiver.” When our reporter pointed out that this had not restored the supply of vital medicine, he replied: “I can’t help that.” He said that “you have to get your people to act properly”, as if The Independent were responsible for administering the US foreign aid programme.
The president also complained that it was unreasonable to expect the US to take sole responsibility for tackling Aids. “Other countries should be helping – where is France, where is Germany, where are those other countries?” he asked. “Nobody does anything but the United States.”
This is, of course, not the case, although it is true that the US had the biggest aid programme of any country in the world, as might be expected of the richest country in the world. It might also be expected that the president of the US would be proud of the Aids programme in particular, one set up by his Republican predecessor, which has saved millions of lives and was on track to save many millions more.
Unfortunately, the British government responded to Mr Trump’s semi-legitimate complaint about the US bearing too great a share of the cost of defending Europe by cutting its aid budget to increase spending on defence.
So when Mr Trump makes the less justified claim that the US funds too great a share of the world’s aid budget, the UK government looks the other way. We defy anyone to watch Trew’s report from Uganda and Zimbabwe and say that the withdrawal of life-saving Aids medicines is not a tragedy.
There is hope that the Trump administration will resume the Aids programme, but the UK and other rich nations could put pressure on it to do so by offering to step in to sustain it.
Even the most cynical and isolationist parts of British public opinion, which is, we realise, sceptical about foreign aid, must accept that President Bush’s Aids programme has been a moral triumph – and should continue to be supported.
