When Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the richest and the most powerful people on the planet, respectively, decided to defund, dismember and then destroy America’s international aid effort, it was obvious that it would unleash untold suffering on the most vulnerable people on the planet.
America’s official overseas assistance programme was by no means generous in the first place, but the performative, clumsy cruelty inflicted on what is now the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and associated programmes has reduced it to virtually nothing. It was done carelessly and with no consideration for the consequences in the communities devastated by the abrupt withdrawal of help. At the time, Mr Musk even “joked” that his underqualified team of coders had accidentally cancelled an Ebola prevention programme.
