Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist feuding with Elon Musk over USAID cuts, wants you to know that an eight-year-old girl named Achol Deng died in South Sudan because she lost access to HIV medicines when DOGE disrupted USAID programs. He invites Musk to come hold starving children and look into their eyes — without mentioning the 400,000 who died while the aid was flowing, the $25.2 billion in oil revenues that the UN says hardly reached essential services, or that the president’s twelve-year-old son held a 25 percent stake in a holding company.
Today, all that is blamed on “corruption.” But the story untold is that South Sudan, in and of itself, is a creation of “democracy-building” efforts - perhaps more so than any other country in the world.
If Kristof does not believe me - then perhaps he will believe his own publication home. New York Times, back in 2014, called South Sudan “in many ways an American creation, carved out of war-torn Sudan in a referendum largely orchestrated by the United States, its fragile institutions nurtured with billions of dollars in American aid.”
This is the story of how USAID built, and destroyed, an entire country.
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