Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend Part one: African Development Foundation CFO told the White House he would not acknowledge a Trump appointee as agency head.
By Luke Rosiak
May 6, 2025
DailyWire.comEditor’s Note: This is part one of a series of investigative reports on the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting the microscope of the Department of Government Efficiency.A foreign aid official who refused the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to his agency’s financial records may have had a reason to keep auditors out: he steered illicit contracts to a friend who sent him secret payments, according to a law enforcement affidavit obtained by The Daily Wire.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, refused to grant DOGE access to its books and told the White House that the agency would not acknowledge President Donald Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. After a dramatic showdown in March, DOGE physically took over the building with U.S. Marshals, but control of the agency is now the subject of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems” — an objection that reads differently in light of the criminal probe.
For years, workers at the small, USAID-adjacent federal agency focused on Africa have told oversight bodies about allegations of self-dealing, procurement violations, and mysterious offshore bank accounts, many of them involving Zahui. But little was done about it, several told The Daily Wire.
One action that raised eyebrows was Zahui’s insistence on directing both grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd. According to spending records, it was awarded nearly $800,000 in contracts without competition. For example, a one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.
According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the federal contracts. ...
See also
Part Two: African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. StaffPart Three: Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor AfricansPart Four: ‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says
