Across Africa the news that a former colonial power, the UK, is to take a more strategic, political, hard-nosed approach to the way it spends its overseas aid budget, has been greeted with a mixture of frustration and cynicism. In announcing a merger between the Foreign Office (FCO) and the Department of International Development (DfID), Prime Minister Boris Johnson argued that the UK should be directing more attention and money towards countering Russian influence in nearby eastern Europe, and, by implication, spending less money in distant former colonies like Zambia and Tanzania where "for too long British overseas aid has been treated as some giant cashpoint in the sky". In Ghana, the head of the West African Civil Society Institute, Nana Afadzinu, criticised the British move as part of a broader trend of Western countries becoming "more myopic and inward-looking." She said Covid-19 had exacerbated the trend, as had Brexit. "Building international solidarity, supporting issues like human rights and an international development system - these are not going to be important [for foreign donors] any more," she said. "The challenge for us, for African leaders, is to unite, to stand as one."