A blanket of thick fog covers Lesotho’s capital, Maseru.
Winter in the southern African country feels colder than ever.
Thousands of garment workers have lost their jobs as the threat of US tariffs brings the textile industry to the edge.
Hundreds of thousands have been cut off from critical healthcare after the USAID withdrawal. Unemployed women stand outside the locked gates of factories asking for work.
HIV-positive mothers travel long distances to clinics for a limited supply of life-saving medicine, holding their babies wrapped in blankets.
Lives and livelihoods in Lesotho have been devastated by US President Donald Trump – a country he has said “nobody has ever heard of”.
The Basotho have certainly heard of President Trump. His name now evokes fear, worry and panic among many in the small nation his policies have targeted.
“People are scared of him, too much. When he says he will do something then he must do it,” says Maplape Makhele, a 32-year-old garment worker and mother of two.
“I have seen what he has done in South Africa and China. He doesn’t want to work with other countries.”
We spoke to Mpalape at her work station in the Afri-Expo Textiles factory while she sewed denim. This work was steady while Lesotho held the title of the “denim capital of Africa”.
Today, she is terrified of losing her job as the breadwinner of her family. More than 200 of her colleagues have already been laid off from the factory.
“We are close to only half operational,” says her boss Teboho Kobeli, the managing director of Afri-Expo Textiles Factories. He has cut around 500 jobs across three factories.
“We had been doing some US orders but now we have had to re-adjust ourselves,” he says. “There are a lot of job losses and I can see more jobs lost as of next month.”
Lesotho has declared a state of national disaster over high youth unemployment and job losses linked to US tariffs and aid cuts that will last until June 2027.
President Trump is expected to finalise tariffs on several countries including Lesotho and South Africa on August 1. In Lesotho, people are hoping for tariffs on the lower end at 10% but are preparing for a hit as high as 50%.
Any export duties will have an impact on industry here which has benefitted from 25 years of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) duty-free trade agreement with the US.
“That is multilateralism – to trade with one another and leverage on each other’s strengths,” Lesotho’s minister of trade and industry Mokhethi Shelile tells us.
“We did not think an economy so advanced, the pioneer of multilateralism, to renege and turn back on that very principle that has made it so big.
“We are done talking [with the US]. We are waiting for a response, for a final solution from them. We are told it will come soon but we don’t know how soon.”
We interviewed the minister at a celebration launching a government-sponsored factory expansion in Lesotho’s second city Maputsoe.
The factory is only 5km from the border gate into South Africa, its main export destination. Unemployed garment workers are huddled around the locked gates hoping to appeal to the trade minister for jobs.
Inside the warehouse, women furiously produced clothing for the South African market. Minister Shelile tells us that this regional trade is part of Lesotho’s solution but economists believe it is another dead end.
“I don’t think South Africa is an option for us given the problems that South Africa is going through itself,” says economist and former minister of mining Lebohang Thotanyana.
“South Africa has been hit by tariffs and is going to lose around half a million jobs as a result of the Trump effect.
“Some of those jobs on the citrus farms and automobile industry in South Africa were held by Basotho so it means they will be directly affected there as well.”
Read more from Yousra Elbagir:
White South African farmer elated Trump grilled his president
How the drug kush is ruining lives
Sky reporter returns to family home left in ruins by Sudan war
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Trade unionists in Lesotho’s capital Maseru have been speaking to laid off workers to explain the context of the devastating job cuts.
“It’s really hard for them because what the people want is the job,” says Ts’epang Nyaka-Nyaka, general secretary of the Economic Freedom Trade Union.
He is expecting his own wife to potentially lose her job at a factory exporting to American denim brand Levis. The two-thousand-member union is rapidly shrinking as more lay-offs are announced.
“They want the job – not the politics,” he says.
