In recent months, Western governments have been loudly rethinking their aid strategies. The US announced a dramatic reduction in foreign assistance, claiming that the “foreign aid industry” destabilizes world peace by promoting values “inverse to harmonious and stable relations.” Meanwhile, the UK government slashed its aid budget, citing the need to prioritize defense spending. Germany, the world’s second-largest aid donor, has also signaled reductions in its aid spending following its recent elections. These moves have sparked debate about what these cuts mean for African countries. Some commentators frame them as wake-up calls, urging African governments to become self-reliant and finally build sovereign systems without leaning on Western donors.

However, calls for sovereignty cannot be separated from the history of aid and the role of NGOs on the continent. This is not just a moment of budget cuts. It’s a moment that demands a deeper reckoning with how aid and development have functioned as tools of control—how they hollowed out the African state and replaced political struggle with donor-led projects. Aid is more than a line item in a budget—it is a system of power. These cuts, rather than a break from the past, expose the deeper structures of dependency that have long defined African engagement with Western development models.

The idea that foreign aid is about support or solidarity has always been a carefully constructed illusion. Back in 2002, Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill, in their article Missionary Positions: NGOs and Development in Africa, called out NGOs as “the missionary arm of neoliberalism”—not neutral helpers, but key players in a system that restructured African states under the banner of reform. Their work is still relevant today. What they laid bare was how, especially in the wake of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), introduced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the 1980s, SAPs slashed public spending and privatized state functions, gutting local infrastructure and leaving a vacuum that NGOs quickly moved to fill. Non-governmental organizations became the main interface between African people and their governments, except that the state had been replaced by development agencies and international donors.

Importantly, Manji and O’Coill also show that the rise of NGOs was not just a story of soft power—it was a continuation of colonial control by other means. As African countries gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, former colonial powers didn’t disappear; they rebranded. The overt racial hierarchies of empire gave way to a new language of “development.” NGOs emerged at this moment, filling the vacuum left by retreating colonial administrations. The discourse of development replaced the language of civilizing missions, but the dynamics of domination and paternalism remained. Under the guise of helping, NGOs continued to manage African populations and territories, only now with the moral authority of humanitarianism.

Non-governmental organizations in Africa, mostly backed by foreign donors, offered schools, clinics, food programs, and even roads. But, as Manji and O’Coill show, this wasn’t a neutral or benevolent intervention. The NGOs replaced the political with the technical. They reframed poverty as a problem of skills and resources, not as the outcome of global inequalities or failed economic models. Development, once a political project of liberation and redistribution, became a managerial task outsourced to foreign-funded organizations.

This shift was not only institutional but also linguistic. As Manji and O’Coill highlight, the very language of development was transformed. Buzzwords like “empowerment,” “capacity-building,” and “participation” were stripped of political content and repackaged as apolitical tools of governance. The discourse no longer spoke of justice or structural inequality—it spoke instead of efficiency, best practices, and deliverables. In doing so, development became something done to people, rather than something done with or by them. This helped legitimize NGOs as neutral actors, even as they worked within—and helped reproduce—structures of global inequality.

USAID played a key role in institutionalizing this model. It has long been one of the largest funders of NGOs across Africa. Unlike direct support to governments, which comes with expectations of transparency and political engagement, channeling money through NGOs gave donors like the US and UK more control, fewer complications, and less public scrutiny. It allowed them to shape development priorities and implementation while bypassing state institutions altogether.

This logic persists today. Even as political relationships between Washington or London and countries such as Uganda, Kenya, or Ethiopia become strained, the NGO infrastructure funded by their aid programs remains intact. In Uganda, for example, USAID has funded hundreds of initiatives in education, agriculture, and health. Although some of these efforts have delivered services, they are also emblematic of a development model that sidelines governments and treats African publics as recipients, not agents.

This is why the current moment feels both urgent and misleading. Yes, African states must build independent systems. But the real issue isn’t just the loss of money, it’s the legacy that money has left behind. For decades, foreign aid has helped shift accountability away from elected governments and toward foreign donors. It depoliticized poverty and institutionalized dependency, all while claiming to promote development.

What emerges, then, is not a model of sovereignty but of structural dependency. Manji and O’Coill describe NGOs as “instruments of pacification” rather than mobilization. Far from empowering people to demand justice or transformation, they defuse dissent, redirect energy into professionalized service delivery, and ultimately protect the very global systems that created underdevelopment in the first place. The withdrawal of USAID or UK aid does not undo this reality; it simply reveals it more starkly. What, then, is to be done? This moment invites not just critique, but a strategy. As aid recedes, the urgent question is not how to replace it, but how to move beyond it. Sovereignty cannot mean swapping Western donors for private investors or new geopolitical patrons. It must mean rebuilding public institutions, confronting the neoliberal wreckage of the SAP era, and rejecting the NGO-ization of the state. But that vision won’t materialize automatically. It will require political struggle—inside African states, across civil society, and in global fora. If aid helped depoliticize development, moving beyond it means re-politicizing it again.

The NGO model outlasted the aid flows that created it. It lives on in the clinics, schools, and community programs scattered across African countries—often doing necessary work, but always within limits defined by donors. Manji and O’Coill warned us not to mistake this for liberation. As aid budgets shrink, the work ahead is not just to survive the cuts, but also to refuse the system that made them matter so much in the first place.