With the pause of billions of dollars in global funding to the United States’ health and education projects in Nigeria and other countries, experts have advised President Bola Tinubu to act fast to prevent an endemic of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.
The experts, Baba Yusuf and Etim Etim, were guests on the Friday edition of Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political programme aired on Channels Television.
According to them, the Tinubu administration should treat the freeze of aid funding to health cases like HIV/AIDS and Malaria in Nigeria by the Donald Trump presidency as a national emergency.
They urged the president and members of his cabinet to quickly get in touch with manufacturers of antiretroviral drugs and provide the necessary funding to keep subsidising drugs to tackle Human Immunodeficiency Virus and its advanced stage, the Acquired Immuno-deficiency Syndrome.
Yusuf and Etim also said the 2025 Budget in the National Assembly should be tweaked to accommodate the vacuum to be created by the funding cut.
Etim said, “My concern is on the health issues because President (George) Bush put in a plan in which drugs for HIV/AIDS are subsidised and sent to us and other African countries. And now, those drugs are either going to be too expensive or unavailable.
“What should the Nigerian government do to ameliorate the effects of this ban? My thinking is that the government should quickly get in touch with the manufacturers of those antiretroviral drugs and provide direct funding to the manufacturers and bring those drugs to this country.
“We should quickly treat this as an emergency case because the AIDS’ penetration in this country at a time was fairly high, one of the highest in the world but it was driven down. We should not allow the HIV/AIDS pandemic to rise again. That should be the focus of the minister of health and the Federal Government.”
A Continental Response?
Yusuf, a former Managing Director of NAHCO Free Trade Zone, agreed with Etim, adding that Africa, through the African Union (AU), should send a continental response to Trump by introducing the politics of raw materials to get him to rethink his aid freeze.
He said, “The response to Trump with regards to AIDS, in my humble opinion, should be a continental reply; from the AU, if that is possible.
“Africa remains the hotspot of the raw materials that drive the world. Africa remains the hotspot for human capital for the world. The earlier we start believing that and act that way on the table of conversations around the world, the earlier we start getting from Trump the better deal.”
The experts also said Nigerians who are illegal immigrants in the United States should come back home and help rebuild the country to avoid the clampdown by Trump.
Hours after he began his second term in office as United States president on January 20, 2025, Trump reiterated his ‘America First’ policy and announced a temporary freeze on almost all external aids.
The Trump presidency also announced the withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organisation. The decision by the world’s single largest donour sent tremors across the world, with WHO, the United Nations and other aid groups warning that the move will put lives at risk.
In 2023, Washington disbursed $72bn in foreign aid across nearly 180 countries. Of significance, Nigeria got $1.01bn in health and education aid from the US in the same year, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an American agency with a presence across the world. In Nigeria, the agency promotes “food and nutrition security, a healthier, better-educated population”, and humanitarian assistance of all sorts.
The USAID, among others, also provides antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. According to the UNAIDS and the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), there are 1.9 million people living with HIV in Nigeria.