FROM THE BARREL

IT would be insensitively naïve to imagine that the Washington-Pretoria relations can be gleaned from the US-RSA prism only. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quick in reminding us that it is the price South Africa must pay for initiating the genocide petition against Israel at the ICJ.

Put differently, this means the genocide case is an adequate reason for the US administration to permanently damage its relations with South Africa. And considering Tel Aviv’s stranglehold over US succession politics and its policy machinery, it mattered very little whether or not it was US President Donald Trump in office or his democratic equivalent.

South Africa may not have a Trump problem. It has a massive Netanyahu headache.

There are many labyrinths that have conspired to this awkward moment. If Leslie Warburg, the USAID Director for Southern Africa, the last head of USAID, is still in the Republic of the Free, she may hold critical answers to a number of pressing enquiries.

These questions and their postulates have intrinsic redeeming qualities that seek to settle once and for all the role of the USAID in South Africa’s 2024 general elections. And who knows, even prior to that?

Without any doubt, this is the best time to do two things quickly. First, terminate the GNU kerfuffle without further delay. And second, resuscitate the former President Thabo Mbeki-era-initiated Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Anyone receiving money from a foreign government for whatever reason, whether or not for HIV/Aids and other health-related programmes, must be registered as a foreign agent. The Foreign Agents Register must be published every month for all South Africans to see. To be sure, USAID, NED, and the George Soros-funded organisation are all departments or agents operating on the will and, far too often, whims of a foreign government.

So many of these foreign agents have been funded for all kinds of reasons. They only had to assume the sobriquet of non-governmental organisation to fit neatly in the regime change ecosystem. What, pray tell Warburg, was the role of USAID in funding an organisation just so the government can be compelled to buy supplies and feed zama-zamas in perpetuity?

Closing the USAID money spigot has led to an emergency trip to Washington by a list of desperate political agents, somewhat reminding us that the 2024 general elections were not free and fair.

The DA led the pack, and so soon thereafter they were reportedly joined by AfriForum and then Solidarity. The latest high-profile visitor is the Cape Independence Party. Many more are in the US alright, clandestinely consulting just so their begging bowls should not trigger the ire of the chattering masses.

If elections were called today with the opposition parties drying up from the perverse USAID largesse, the general outcomes would be widely different. First, there will be no Moonshot conspiracy of the Maidan variety.

The pollsters would not be so exuberant in manufacturing educated twaddle, giving credence to the quip that there are lies, more lies, and statistics! With the same methodology and probability guesswork, they predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide. Unbelievable!

For once, Aunty Hellen Zille will not threaten anyone, least of all, with a doomsday scenario. The newspaper advertisements against the ANC will be attenuated. The AWB is still not a registered political party yet, and Afriforum may somewhat scale down on its whimsical litigation against the state.

The people in their numbers will line up in silence again and vote peacefully, with the fervent hope that this time around the IEC will submit to the will of the people.

In the records that she inherited from her predecessors, it would be interesting to know what, if anything, Warburg would contribute to the most tragic political event of the ANC since its formation in 1912.

What role did the USAID play both as a prelude and during the Mbeki dethronement by the generation of incendiary publicity leading up to the putsch?

Mbeki too saw it coming. He was too deeply invested in the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA), a tripartite that easily facilitated South Africa’s acceptance into BRICS. His African Renaissance proposition was indubitably destined to clash with the globalist worldview of unipolar dominance.

From his remonstration with the HIV/AIDS narrative to the ire of the US big pharma, it is possible to appreciate from an alternative political prism that HIV/Aids, pandemic or not, was a eugenics pet project aimed at the diminution of population numbers, especially in the global south.

If Mbeki and Gaddafi desired the same things, although articulated differently, Mbeki’s finesse was snuffed in 2007 in a choreography that facilitated the ANC’s loss of political innocence. As for Muammar, his jingoist militancy met a gory death in 2011 caught on film, arguably at the same masterful hand.

Pity our most revered tycoon family, the Oppenheimers, and their gratuitous daughters, Mary and Kirsten. Either of them funded so many political parties that garnered a meagre one or two seats in parliament.

However, it is our omniscient taxman, Edward Kieswetter, who must confirm that all this donation by the altruistic daughters attracted 25% tax. He has to. Or else someone will compel discovery against Sars in a court of competent records. Unless, of course, the names were a smokescreen. The money could have come from USAID!

There is a possibility that the USAID is unfairly tainted. But then again, this is the organisation that funded the Covid-19 virus and paid for its acculturation in the laboratories of Wuhan, at least according to the hearings in the US Senate.

Trump may or may not receive the Nobel Prize, a goal which his administration has clearly set its sights on. However, the bar to achieve it is extremely high—impossible even. Resolving the Nato proxy war against Russia may, within reason and with Moscow’s acquiescence, be achievable.

However, in order to scale the threshold that will earn him the ultimate prize of peacemaker, he will have to bring permanent peace to Palestine without eviscerating their population any further nor diminishing the remainder of the acreage of their land.

If he does, Washington and Pretoria would both achieve the same political objective of ending the genocidal slaughter in Palestine! Trump will earn his Nobel Prize. And for Pretoria, perhaps for once they will have free and fair elections.

* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law. The views expressed here are his own.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.