Times Of Swaziland: A CHINA SHOP IN ANTI-WOKERY A CHINA SHOP IN ANTI-WOKERY ================================================================================ Chris Morgan on 20/03/2025 08:10:00 The title is not to be taken too seriously. It’s certainly one that could rank as the most enigmatic of the month; possibly the most idiotic. I’ll start to unwind it. Firstly, the bull is missing. I’m not against him, though some in our society are happy to eat him. A raging bull, of course, once let loose in the shop of dazzlingly exquisite pieces of china, will smash them to bits. With the delicate shop attendant weeping copiously as all this happens. No one ever explains why the bull behaves like that. He might easily be quite a gentle character and inclined to wander round admiring the China. But you don’t take a chance on it. Which brings me to the real-life version. The elected leader of our dear friends on the other side of the waters – known as Mr Trump (the leader not the waters) - has moved into the role of bull in a China shop. By demolishing USAID, an agency that until a few days ago carried some imprimatur in international circles, Trump wound up an organisation to precisely the point where it was first wound up; If you get my meaning. And in disgrace, no less. Mr Trump described USAID as ‘a bunch of radical lunatics’. This ruthless attitude should have focused on a cleaning up and not an all-out destruction. I speak now as a tiny member of a developing country, Eswatini. My simple question to the USA is – ever seen a tsunami? It carries a Japanese name for ‘harbour waves’ and not really seen yet in Western countries. I say ‘yet’, but the future is another matter. Well, the tsunami swept everything before it. It flattened everything and everyone in sight, ruthlessly and indiscriminately, not caring two hoots whether the good and innocent perished along with the bad and dispensable. Precisely what has happened with USAID. The tragedy of that measure by the US Government is that medical health and disaster assistance, mainly to developing countries, have been hit at the same time as economic and other programmes. That’s not fair and one trusts that Mr Trump may do one of his favourite u-turns and creates another aid organisation to revive the humanitarian – especially medical - life-saving programmes. It’s urgent. Lives are being lost right now! Inflation-adjusted What is emerging is that USAID and many other international aid agencies have wasted their taxpayer money over the years. Personal incomes in sub-Saharan countries of Africa have hardly increased in real terms (inflation-adjusted) in the past two decades. So much for economic aid programmes. In Malawi, a recent report by the eminent magazine The Economist stated that, in 60 years of independence, Malawians have had more spent on them by aid agencies than by their own government. And, furthermore, in addition to the lives being lost through loss of medical assistance, much of the USA aid savings will be diverted to defence. Admittedly it will also serve to save lives otherwise taken by Russia, which continues to viciously attack Ukraine with absolutely no right to invade and subsume a sovereign State. And Mr Trump even blamed Ukraine for the war. That’s just not right; nor is it just. Adding further salt to the wound, other Western countries, including UK, France and Germany, are also reducing their aid budgets substantially, and mainly to allocate more to their defence budgets, including assistance to Ukraine. They are nowhere near as brutal as the USA in reducing foreign aid, but if an alien species were to invade planet Earth after a 50-year absence, they would not need earthly fire power to render them powerless. They would just say to each other: “What kind of crazy place is this? But there’s no other planet where we can survive. So, let’s just find another galaxy.” The loss of development assistance to needy countries of the world will be felt in many ways. And it’s no good thinking China, Russia and Middle Eastern countries will be providing much in the way of a substitute. They spend mainly on infrastructure loans and political influence. There’s your neo-colonialism. No one writes about that, do they? Words are exclusively for the past colonialism, blame-card in hand. Some colonialism was very bad, but not all was like that. Though it did exploit the resources of undeveloped countries of the world – especially Africa – and did not consider sufficiently the welfare of the indigenous people, it did bequeath infrastructure, industrial development and the supporting skills. Officially-approved racism that remained in some countries took a long time to become thoroughly shamed. The slave trade was the worst form, existing for centuries, before conscience emerged out of somewhere to get the respective participants to understand that slavery was plain wicked. ‘Woke’ has come to describe a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. While influential comedians like Ricky Gervais enjoy ridiculing the exponents of the woke culture, the latter has done far more good than harm. But now, ‘Our country will be woke no longer’, Mr Trump has said. “We believe that whether you are a doctor, accountant, lawyer or air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.” It has been entirely justified to redress the imbalances and inequities embedded in history, though it’s a fair balance that’s the fundamental requirement. A swing to the extreme, as demonstrated by the statement, is not good for American society.