U.S. international aid cuts were “long overdue,” Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said in comments printed on Wednesday.
Hichilema said that the reductions from Washington, the abolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and cuts to other international handouts had given the southern African nation the opportunity to “take care of our own affairs.”
“It forces us to grow our economies and to do the things we should have been doing,” he told the Financial Times, although he acknowledged that it was “painful for now,” as the “instantaneous” cut left his government very little time to adjust to the faucet of aid being shut off….