Op-ed: We can't afford to turn our backs on South Africa in cutting USAID programs – Journal & Courier

Recently, I made my fourth business trip to South Africa, although the first for my current employer. While I don’t pretend to be an expert on South Africa, for years I have studied in-depth its troubled history, politics and economics, and engaged firsthand in its often-turbulent business climate.
President Trump recently abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development through billionaire (and South African native) Elon Musk. In adhering to West Point’s strict Honor Code and Cadet Prayer (choosing the harder right over the easier wrong), my classmate, John Voorhees, who managed USAID’s IT Security, refused to turn over its database to Musk’s deputies upon their entry, as they lacked security clearances. Just for doing his job, he was among the first USAID employees to be fired. He should someday be featured in a modern-day adaptation of “Profiles in Courage.”
While I am the first to admit there were some bizarre, and even sordid, USAID projects that never should have existed in the first place, within almost any taxpayer-funded budget, one can find waste, fraud and abuse, ranging from government contract cronyism, to nepotism, to lavishly unnecessary hotel expenses (I witnessed this in the defense industry and called it out to my chain-of-command.).
But just as the Voice of America helped Western democracies to win the Cold War and dislodge Communism in most, but not all, of the world, USAID has also helped to “win hearts and minds” in the interests of foreign policy, especially in South Africa with its 32.1% unemployment (The Economist, Feb 15-21).
As if abolishing USAID weren’t enough, Trump announced a cut to all of South Africa’s aid from the United States. This included ending the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funding, through which USAID was the conduit. South Africa’s high rate of AIDS is a legacy of apartheid, when black migrant laborers were not allowed to bring their families to live with them. As a result, prostitution near laborers’ camps ran rampant.
The cancellation of PEPFAR is a mistake, not only for public health reasons, but also to keep South Africa from drifting further into the orbit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), an expanding group that seeks to replace US global leadership but is essentially a front for China’s “debt trap diplomacy” Belt & Road Initiative.
The reason Trump cut all aid is because South Africa recently revived talk of land expropriation from its farmers without compensation. As a result, Trump announced that South African farmers could come to the United States as refugees (Henry County, Indiana, already has some Afrikaners working at a Dutch dairy farm). I agree with this offer by Trump, especially because since apartheid ended with South Africa’s first free election in 1994, over 7,000 white farmers have been murdered.
Within a few days of Trump’s announcement, the server crashed at the South African Chamber of Commerce in the United States, as it received 20,000 inquiries about the offer (The Citizen, Feb. 12)! The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the most left-wing party in South Africa’s Parliament, recently revived the apartheid era song, “uMama uyajabula uma ngibulala iBhunu (“My mother is happy when I kill a Boer”). Boer means farmer in both Afrikaans and Dutch.
It is my hope that USAID can be revived with stricter controls, perhaps under the Department of State. We cannot afford to turn our backs on South Africa now; China and Russia will take full advantage.
— Nate LaMar, an international director, served as Henry County Council president from 2009 to 2019.

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