US president Donald Trump has nominated Leo Brent Bozell III to take over as ambassador to South Africa.
A formal letter dated 24 March confirmed the nomination and was sent to the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations. It read: “Leo Brent Bozell III, of Virginia, to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of South Africa.”
Bozell is set to replace Reuben Brigety, who made headlines during his time in Pretoria where he accused the South African government of arming Russia.
The move also comes just days after Dana Brown, who was acting as the United States’ top diplomat in South Africa, quit the job and left the US State Department with immediate effect.
Bozell is best known as the founder of the Media Research Center, a conservative organisation in the US which says it “exposes and counters the leftist bias of the national news media”.
But his nomination is raising eyebrows because of a ghostwriting scandal that hit him in 2014.
At the time, Bozell was a regular columnist at the Quad-City Times, a daily US newspaper. But the publication dumped him after it emerged that he didn’t write his own work.
“Bozell may have been comfortable representing others’ work as his own. We’re not. The latest disclosure convinces us Bozell has no place on our print or web pages,” the Quad-City Times said in a statement.
Several former staff members of the Media Research Center confirmed that Bozell relied on a colleague, Tim Graham, to write his opinion pieces and books “for years”.
Even the Media Research Center admitted that Bozell wasn’t the real author behind his columns.
His appointment comes at a time when relations between South Africa and the US are tense.
Trump previously accused South Africa of taking land from white farmers, specifically Afrikaners, without compensation. He responded by stopping US foreign aid to the country through an executive order.
However, the South African government has never taken private land since the end of apartheid in 1994.
