For the family in northeastern Nigeria weighing whether the market will have food this week, for the mother displaced in eastern Congo, and for the Ethiopian farmer waiting on rain, the decisions made in Washington about Africa are not abstractions. They shape the quality of daily life across the continent’s three most populous nations. The connection runs directly through American taxpayers, whose mandatorily paid taxes help determine what happens on the ground.
That is the starting point of a recent analysis by Jeffery Kazembe Batts, published as the Russia-Africa relationship accelerates and questions deepen about how the Trump administration is engaging the continent. Russia just concluded its third Russia-Africa summit in the last seven years, with 17 African heads of state gathering in Moscow. China has long been Africa’s largest trading partner. Neither country has an African population to compare with the up to six of the 50 million people in the USA who affirm an African identity, a diaspora connection to a continent of 54 nations and more than a billion people.
Batts asks whether a successful U.S.-Africa relationship can be built on mutual benefit, respect for African priorities, and shared prosperity rather than dependency or exploitation. His answer runs through three countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia.
Nigeria, a nation of 220 million people, is viewed in Washington as both an economic and strategic ally. Stronger ties, the argument goes, can support development through investment, technology transfer, and expanded trade. The country’s oil and gas resources continue to attract American interest, and its growing demand for electricity creates openings in power generation, transmission, renewable energy, and infrastructure. Nigeria’s technology sector, one of Africa’s leading fintech and startup ecosystems, could benefit from increased American engagement that gives local businesses access to capital, expertise, and international markets.
But for ordinary Nigerians, promise and hardship sit side by side. Unemployment, inflation, unreliable electricity, inadequate infrastructure, and rising living costs remain part of everyday life. Economic growth has not always translated into wider prosperity. Dependence on petroleum revenues, governance concerns, and corruption continue to slow diversification. Capturing the full benefits of foreign partnerships, the analysis argues, requires stronger institutions, improved transparency, expanded manufacturing, and jobs for a growing youth population.
Security compounds the strain. Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province remain active in the northeast, while banditry and communal conflicts affect other regions. On Christmas last year, the USA delivered what the author calls a gift in the form of bombing the northwest part of the country. U.S. security cooperation can help, but long-term stability depends on Nigerian-led solutions that combine security with economic opportunity and community development.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to more than 100 million people, the stakes are written in the ground itself. The country holds cobalt, copper, coltan, lithium, and other critical minerals at the center of global demand for electric vehicles, renewable energy, and modern technology. As the green energy transition accelerates, American investment in mining, infrastructure, energy, and mineral processing could create jobs and support growth. Congolese leaders increasingly seek agreements that support processing, manufacturing, workforce development, and technology transfer, so that more wealth stays home rather than leaving as raw exports.
Two developments warrant scrutiny to ensure broad public benefit: the Lobito Accord, under which a resource extraction corridor through Angola is under construction, and the Washington Accords, signed by Congo President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwanda President Paul Kagame with Trump present. The central challenge remains translating mineral wealth into better lives for ordinary citizens, something decades of abundance have failed to deliver amid poverty, poor public services, and limited opportunity. Meanwhile, eastern Congo continues to experience violence, displacement, and instability involving armed groups, including M23, complicating any path to lasting development.
Ethiopia, with more than 120 million people and never conquered, occupies a strategic position in the Horn of Africa near the Red Sea and major shipping routes. As host of the African Union headquarters, Addis Ababa is a key center of continental diplomacy. Yet communities there still face conflict, drought, displacement, and food insecurity, and areas affected by violence, including parts of Tigray and Amhara, still require humanitarian support and recovery assistance.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam symbolizes the country’s ambition to increase electricity production and build a stronger, industrialized economy, though disputes with Egypt and Sudan over Nile water management continue. Trump once outrageously uttered that Egypt should “just bomb the GERD,” pouring oil on fire, but the analysis notes that economic progress depends on political stability, not war. Ethiopia’s decentralized, ethnically identified state structure lies at the core of ongoing secession movements that problematize national unity. Its goals are clear: attract productive investment, secure an agreed-upon port on the Red Sea, maintain essential humanitarian support, and build the economy.
The closing appeal is directed at Africans in the USA: to stay aware and help create scenarios in which the American government allows African nations to thrive and their people to live better. Partnerships through trade, investment, technology, education, and diplomacy can matter, the author concludes, but only when they strengthen institutions, create jobs, and expand opportunity for future generations. Whether the families in Nigeria, Congo, and Ethiopia at the heart of the analysis will see those gains in their own lifetimes remains the open question.