Official who denied DOGE access to African Development Foundation allegedly hiding corruption, kickbacks at the agency

WASHINGTON, DC—The Daily Wire reports that a foreign aid official who blocked the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing his agency’s financial records wasn’t merely attempting to defy the Trump administration’s efforts to weed out fraud, abuse, and corruption from government agencies. Instead, he wanted to hide that he was steering contracts to a friend who was sending him secret payments. 

Documents obtained by The Daily Wire, citing a law enforcement affidavit, show that Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation (USADF), refused a request to have DOGE audit its books, while further telling the White House the agency did not acknowledge President Trump’s appointee as chairman of the board. 

ADF, a USAID-adjacent federal agency focusing on African issues, was the site of a showdown in March, where DOGE physically took over the building with US Marshals. Control of the agency is now part of a lawsuit objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems.” That objection seems to fail in light of the criminal investigation now targeting the agency. 

Apparent fraud at the agency is nothing new. Workers have been telling oversight bodies for years about alleged self-dealing, procurement violations, and bizarre offshore bank accounts, many involving Zahui. However, several sources told The Daily Wire that nothing was done about it. 

One matter that drew attention, however, was Zahui's insistence on directing grants and contracts to a Kenyan company called Ganiam Ltd. Spending records reveal that Ganiam was awarded nearly $800,000 in no-bid contracts. In March 2020, a one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed. Recall that, amid the COVID pandemic and related lockdowns, few people were traveling or holding conferences. 

The Daily Wire reviewed a search warrant application, which revealed that USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that Ganiam’s owner secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account during the federal contracts. As of today, neither man has been charged with a crime by the Department of Justice. 

Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, an acquaintance of Zahui’s for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later relocated to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure was in charge of awarding contracts at the Veterans Administration, and later formed his own company designed to obtain government construction contracts, taking advantage of a minority preference program. That company–Ganiam LLC–was based out of a Virginia house. Gakure also created a Kenyan company, Gakure Ltd. Under law, the African Development Foundation can only give grants to African entities. 

Inspector general agents interviewed Zahui in January 2024 to ask about the Ganiam contract. He claimed he had known Gakure personally since 1999 and had visited his apartment. The agents wrote that he “could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid." 

Despite declaring bankruptcy and having his house foreclosed on, Zahui was still named chief financial officer of USADF. When questioned by investigators about the travel contract issued in 2020, he claimed it was actually used for IT services. However, since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it was allegedly subcontracted to a different company, despite not being permitted to do so. 

Claiming he was “lazy” and didn’t want to seek a new vendor, Zahui continued to give no-bid contracts to Ganiam, while claiming “he did not receive any direct or indirect benefits from Gakure,” agents wrote. 

However, in February 2024, 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 the evidence was seized. They sought a warrant to examine the rest. 

On November 4, 2024, the day before the general election, agents executed the search warrant. 

President Trump fired the African Development Foundation’s board of directors in February while its CEO, Travis Adkins, resigned. In its place, a three-person committee, including Zahui, assumed CEO duties. 

On February 21, 2024, DOGE “demanded immediate access to USADF systems, including financial records and payment and human resources systems;” however, Zahui rebuffed those demands. One week later, the White House emailed Zahui and advised him that Pete Marocco, tasked with dismantling USAID, had become the acting chairman of USADF. Zahui said the agency wouldn’t honor that appointment since the Senate hadn’t confirmed Marocco. 

When DOGE returned, USADF staff locked the doors and refused to admit entrance, which created a showdown, according to a lawsuit filed against the oversight agency by the former board of directors. DOGE was finally able to access the building with US Marshals' assistance, and the staff was put on leave. 

The Daily Wire interviewed Zahui at his home. He noted that DOGE changed the locks on the building; however, there was a back door they were unaware of, and he had gained access since the DOGE takeover. He admitted to The Daily Wire that Gakure’s firm was selected due to their personal relationship, while saying Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID. 

During the period when Ganiam Ltd was paid as an African company, Ganiam LLC received approximately $90,000 in US COVID assistance money (PPP) to secure American jobs during the pandemic. The Daily Wire reached out to Gakure, however, he didn’t return a request for comment. 

While Zahui said that Ganiam performed IT services during the pandemic instead of the travel services they were contracted for, records show USADF paid $865,000 to another minority-owned contractor, Etranservices Corp., between 2020 and 2022 for IT services, with an option to bill up to $4 million. 

According to a former agency employee, in addition to the $800,000 contracts granted to Ganiam, USADF also awarded the company grants. Zahui initially denied that claim but finally conceded it was true. He said USADF gave grants to Ganiam to purchase airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events and take a trip to the United States to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is unknown how much grant money was given to Ganiam. 

The Daily Wire noted that 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 USADF oversight, to open an “immediate investigation” into several whistleblower complaints about financial irregularities at USADF, including “misuse of official funds; fraudulent and corrupt spending practices; conflicts of interest, [and] gross mismanagement.” 

Those irregularities included “an alleged $2 billion 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.” 

The Daily Wire obtained a videotaped interview in which regional portfolio manager Jeff Gileo, who supervised projects in Africa, admitted that “a lot of those projects, we never actually saw them. They were managed by [the CFO’s office] directly.” In one case, 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 vehemently denied to The Daily Wire that there was a $2 million deposit. He acknowledged there are accounts in Africa with money sitting in them, including some where the agency hadn’t been active for some time. He also claimed he traveled to open and close said bank accounts, but claimed the money was all accounted for. 

“We’ve not operated in Guinea for a long time, it’s been more than eight years not, 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 claimed. “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.” 

He claimed that he planned to assist Congress in locating the money, but he hasn’t told DOGE because they haven’t asked. According to a 2022-2023 financial statement, the agency had $9.7 million “held outside the treasury.” 

Despite the USAID inspector general being provided with extensive violations of procurement, personnel, and ethics regulations by USADF beginning in 2021, even clear-cut violations were not acted upon, according to Mateo Dunne, the agency’s former general counsel. 

In his 2023 letter, Sen. Risch warned USAID’s inspector general that if it didn’t reform USADF, Americans would lose trust in USAID and foreign funding as a whole, a statement that now seems prophetic. 

“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,” Risch wrote. 

Aided by DOGE, the American people now know how rampant the waste, fraud, and abuse were in USAID’s money tree.