Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend
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. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.
Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd. The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities.
In January 2024, inspector general agents interviewed Zahui about the Ganiam contracts, and he acknowledged having known Gakure personally since 1999, and having been to his apartment. He “could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid,” the agents wrote.
Zahui — who was named chief financial officer of the federal agency after he declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on — acknowledged to investigators that the travel contract was executed after COVID had already shut down travel. He told them the contract was actually used for IT services, but since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it subcontracted it to a different company. A Department of the Treasury contracting official told the agents that was not allowed.
Zahui continued to give more contracts to Ganiam without competition, which he justified by saying he was “lazy” and didn’t want to find a new vendor. “Zahui stated that he did not receive any direct or indirect benefits from Gakure,” agents wrote.
But in February 2024, the agents seized Zahui’s work phone and examined a subset of the data.
“Agents found text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote.
“After identifying these payments, the agents stopped their review. Based on the aforementioned evidence, there is probable cause to believe that there are additional relevant communications and instances of payments on the TARGET DEVICE in the applications that have not been reviewed,” they told a judge on October 29, 2024, eight months after seizing the device. They asked for a warrant to examine the rest.
On November 4, 2024, the day before the presidential election, they executed the search warrant.
This February, President Trump fired the African Development Foundation’s board members, and its CEO, Travis Adkins, resigned. A three-person committee, including Zahui, took over the duties of CEO.
On February 21, DOGE “demanded immediate access to USADF systems including financial records and payment and human resources systems,” but Zahui stalled them. On February 28, the White House emailed Zahui that Pete Marocco, the Trump operative tasked with dismantling USAID, had become acting chairman of the African Development Foundation. Zahui told the White House that agency staff would not honor the appointment because Marocco had not been confirmed by the Senate.
When DOGE returned, staff locked the doors and refused to let them in, creating a dramatic showdown, according to a lawsuit filed against DOGE by the now-fired board. DOGE eventually gained access to the building using U.S. Marshals, and put the staff on leave.
In an interview with The Daily Wire at his home, Zahui said DOGE changed the locks, but that they didn’t know about a back door, and he had gained access since the takeover.
He acknowledged that he selected Gakure’s firm because of their personal relationship, and said Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID.
During the same time period that Ganiam Ltd. was paid as an African company, Ganiam LLC received roughly $90,000 in U.S. coronavirus assistance designed to prevent the loss of American jobs. Gakure did not return a request for comment.
Zahui told The Daily Wire that Ganiam performed IT services during COVID instead of the travel services advertised on contracting documents. Contracting records show that the agency, with only 30 employees, was separately paying astronomical sums for IT, including $865,000 to another minority-owned contractor called Etranservices Corp. between 2020 and 2022, with the option to bill up to $4 million.
A former agency employee told The Daily Wire that on top of the $800,000 in contracts to Ganiam, the African Development Foundation also awarded it grants. Zahui initially denied that to The Daily Wire, then conceded it was true. He said it gave grants to Ganiam, which it was required to use to buy airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events on the continent and to take a trip to the United States, where they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The amount of “grants” to the company is unknown.
In November 2023, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), then the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, asked the USAID inspector general, which has oversight of the African Development Foundation, to open an “immediate investigation” into what he said was a slew of whistleblower complaints about financial irregularities at the agency. Those included “misuse of official funds; fraudulent and corrupt spending practices; conflicts of interest [and] gross mismanagement.”
Among the irregularities cited was “an alleged $2 million deposit by [Zahui] into a bank account in Ghana in February 2023 — that typically would require signature by at least two presently responsible fiduciary agents of the agency,” Risch wrote. “This may also explain why a senior USADF official was unable to account for major financial discrepancies included in the agency’s FY2024 budget request.”
In an internal videotaped interview obtained by The Daily Wire, regional portfolio manager Jeff Gileo, who was tasked with supervising projects in Africa, said, “a lot of those projects, we never actually saw them. They were managed by [the CFO’s office] directly.” For example, he said he asked for information about a grant in the country of Mauritius and was “told no, because there might be some other information in there that people don’t need to know about, being run by finance.”
Zahui strongly denied to The Daily Wire that there was a $2 million deposit. He said it was true that there are accounts throughout Africa with money sitting in them, some in countries where the agency hadn’t been active in years. He also said that he had traveled to open and close such bank accounts, but that the money was all accounted for.
“We’ve not operated in Guinea for a long time, it’s been more than eight years now, but the bank account is there. There’s money there. When we attempted to transfer the fund to the U.S. Treasury, it didn’t work. We tried three times,” he said. “I went to Botswana, I close it, I take the money out. I went to Swaziland….I close it, and the funds are accounted for today. I couldn’t bring it here because I couldn’t cross the — so we put it where we transfer them in an account, what we call ADF — I forget the name, but we have an account in Kenya.”
“We call it funds ‘outside of treasury,’” he said, adding that he planned to help Congress locate the money, but that he hasn’t pointed it out to DOGE because no one has made contact with him. According to its 2022-2023 financial statement, the agency had $9.7 million “held outside treasury.”
Mateo Dunne, the agency’s former general counsel, told The Daily Wire that he provided the USAID inspector general with extensive documentation of violations of procurement, personnel, and ethics regulations by African Development Foundation officials beginning in 2021, but that even clear-cut violations didn’t appear to be acted upon.
Sen. Risch warned USAID’s inspector general in the 2023 letter that if it didn’t urgently reform the African Development Foundation, Americans might lose trust in USAID and foreign funding as a whole.
“Development assistance plays an important role in U.S. foreign policy. Turning a blind eye to alleged fraud, corruption, and mismanagement in any single development agency or program would undermine the credibility of U.S. development assistance across the board,” he wrote.
Now, just over 3 months into the Trump administration, USAID and the African Development Foundation are gone.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/foreign-aid-official-who-resisted-doge-took-secret-payments-after-steering-africa-money-to-friend