Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders recently declared that development aid should be redirected to domestic priorities, adding: “Then they’ll just be a little hungrier in Africa, but not here.” ZAM contributor Oyunga Pala, author and journalist based in the Netherlands, reflects on this statement.
During the recent Dutch election debate in October, populist politician Geert Wilders, leader of the extreme right-wing PVV party, made a controversial remark. While making a case for zero percent VAT on groceries to lower the cost of living, he proposed redirecting development aid to domestic needs and added, “then they’ll just be a little hungrier in Africa, but not here.”
The crowd responded in a roar. Wilders hardly flinched. The resulting outrage was predictable, but for a politician defined by his populism and lack of filters, it constituted another moment for his “Dutch first” rhetoric.
What Wilders proposed is consistent with the policy shift in the Netherlands that has seen a move from aid to trade. The PVV Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Aid, Reinette Klever, sent her policy letter to the House of Representatives in February 2025, announcing a drastic cut to development aid. According to the letter, all Dutch aid must directly contribute to the country’s own interest, with the argument that this policy is more relevant for Dutch taxpayers.
Security deals
The focus has apparently moved from development aid to security and stability. We are now seeing the eruption of ‘security deals’ that are, in essence, thinly veiled attempts to police migration routes and stop illegal migration to Europe. Only recently, the Netherlands and Uganda cemented a deal facilitating the enforced return of foreign nationals who are not authorised to reside in the Netherlands to their countries of origin. This amounts, in effect, to outsourcing border control.
The Netherlands’ deal with Uganda is not an isolated case, but a concrete manifestation of the current, official EU-wide policy of externalising the migration burden onto non-EU states in North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a transaction founded on elite complicity: Europe pays for border control by financially incentivising non-EU states and, crucially, keeps both the mess and the moral scrutiny outside its perimeters.
To “save hungry Africa” is a convenient trope in Western politics
Wilders is undeniably an influential and popular figure in Dutch politics, and a central part of his brand is speaking uncomfortable truths. But his remarks on hunger in Africa are not uncomfortable; they are a loud and crude reiteration of a familiar trope in Western politics: the supposed moral obligation to “save poor, hungry Africa.”
That a stereotype like this still exists is hardly news. In the West, it is reinforced in countless ways. Humanitarian agencies that send volunteers to solicit donations at your door have normalised the notion that charity, meaning helping children in Africa and the non-Western world who have nothing to eat, is a moral obligation. This is constantly reinforced by dominant media framing, which presents Western audiences with images of impoverished Africans while appealing both to their compassion and their wallets.
External intervention and resource exploitation
The politics of hunger in Africa is not a new script. It is the old ‘white man’s burden’ on repeat, tracing back to the 19th century colonial legacy of a civilising mission imposed upon non-Western peoples, a mindset famously articulated in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem. It justified external intervention and resource exploitation, entrenching the belief that non-Western peoples in general, and Africans in particular, are incapable of addressing basic issues such as food security. This perspective was later reinforced by the saviour industrial complex in the post–World War II era, when aid became the dominant tool of intervention in postcolonial Africa.
The politics of hunger plays into the moral imperative and superiority because it benefits both sides of the political spectrum. The progressive, urban left appeals to global citizenship and compassionate ethics by funding large-scale development aid, yet this often ties funding to Western interests, reinforcing the image of Africans as recipients. Conversely, the populist right, led by figures like Wilders, frames aid as wasteful and corrupt, prioritising “smart trade” and nationalistic interests. The ultimate irony is that both models, Aid and Trade, achieve the same neo-colonial outcome: they keep Africa structurally dependent, either as a charity case or as a source of cheap raw commodities and labour.
Hunger persists in parts of Africa not as a failure of African agriculture, but from structural issues exacerbated by historical Western policy. The continent is battling accelerating climate change, droughts, and erratic rainfall, alongside acute security and governance challenges, but these challenges do not operate in a vacuum.
Hunger comes from structural issues exacerbated by historical Western policy
A classic case is the 1984 Ethiopian famine: a tragedy globally consumed as an image of helpless, indigenous failure. The context is always conveniently ignored. Conflict, often funded by Western war industries pursuing resource extraction, amplifies climate factors that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. The Ethiopian famine was initially treated by the West not as a humanitarian crisis demanding immediate action, but as a political opportunity, a Cold War tactic weaponising African hunger through food aid to gain leverage against the Soviet-backed regime.
These geo-political tactics have had profound and lasting effects on the lives of ordinary Africans. The legacy of Structural Adjustment Policies, for example, imposed by the IMF and World Bank during what the late Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire referred to as the ‘dead decade’ for Africa, disrupted local agriculture and opened African markets to subsidized Western imports. These neoliberal reforms, touted as a remedy for poverty, ended up escalating it. As economist Walter Rodney articulated in his seminal text How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, this lack of self-sufficiency is not organic: it is engineered.
Aid, corruption and dependency
Other notable voices challenge this framework entirely. Dambisa Moyo, in her book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, argues that billions in direct aid foster corruption, sustain dependency, and hinder indigenous growth and agency.
But the debate over ‘bad aid’ versus ‘good aid’ is simply a distraction. The fundamental structural reality is that Africa is a net provider of wealth to the Global North: its capital outflows consistently exceed the combined inflows of Overseas Development Aid (ODA) and Foreign Direct Investment.
Africa is a net provider of wealth to the Global North
According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the continent loses an estimated US$88.6 billion annually to illicit financial flows, a figure still used as the key benchmark by the UN and the OECD today. This massive drain is driven by profit repatriation from multinationals, aggressive debt servicing, unregulated natural resource extraction, and other illicit financial flows. While the likes of Wilders police the small inflow of charity, they conveniently ignore the massive pipeline of African wealth flowing outward.
Fair trade language
In progressive, liberal mainstream spaces in the West, there is often an emphasis on ethical aid to support democratic movements. Yet in far too many instances, the same wealthy countries seldom interrogate their role in instituting corrupt and imbalanced trade deals driven by multinationals operating under the veil of private enterprise.
The infusion of fair-trade language conveniently blankets the underlying profit motivation. Countries like the Netherlands dominate industries like floriculture by outsourcing production to Africa and Latin America. This creates a devastating effect where countries like Kenya, Colombia and Ecuador endure exploitative labour arrangements and environmental degradation. African land, water and labour that should be dedicated to food security are instead used to grow non-essential exports (such as flowers to the Aalsmeer auction) cheaply, competing with local food producers and ensuring low prices for the European consumer.
Importantly, the fact that parts of Africa have experienced hunger is not unique to the continent. The Netherlands endured its own season of hunger during the long-forgotten winter of 1944–1945, which saw the country suffer its most severe famine crisis, known locally as the “Hongerwinter.” The Dutch response to the Hongerwinter was a collective effort, encapsulated in the slogan “never again,” which shaped the nation’s postwar mentality. Food security came to be regarded as a matter of national defense, and Dutch policies reflected this, ultimately transforming the country into an agricultural powerhouse and the world’s second-largest exporter by value after the United States.
Conversely, the stereotyping of Africa and the persistence of the hunger trope ultimately reflect a failure of education systems that minimise the true complexity of African challenges, which arise from a combination of internal issues and external pressures, including economic instability, climate change, and political struggles, and are often compounded by the legacy of Western structural control originating in colonialism.
The debate requires a radical shift from viewing Africa as a moral problem to viewing the global economy as a structural problem. As a Dutch history teacher that I met in Groningen taught me, the crucial step is historical empathy, the understanding that the comfort of the Dutch supermarket and the anxiety over the rising cost of living are directly and historically subsidised by the continued, massive outward flow of wealth and labour exploitation from the African continent.
Africa’s hunger is not a burden that Dutch generosity must solve.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that Wilders’ statement revealed. Africa’s hunger is not a burden that Dutch generosity must solve. It is the historical and ongoing price of Western prosperity. And for Wilders to promise to prevent hunger here by creating hunger there, he explicitly admitted the exploitative nature of the global system.
Oyunga Pala is the author of Strength and Sorrow and editor of The Elephant.
