Lesotho's
foreign minister said on Wednesday he was shocked and insulted by U.S.
President Donald Trump saying nobody has heard of the African country and
invited him to come visit.
Trump
mentioned Lesotho in his address to U.S. Congress on Tuesday evening while
listing some of the foreign spending he had cut as "appalling waste".
"Eight
million dollars to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which
nobody has ever heard of," Trump said, drawing laughs in the Congress.
Lesotho's
foreign minister, Lejone Mpotjoane, said the remark was "quite
insulting".
"I'm
really shocked that my country can be referred to like that by the head of
state," he told Reuters.
Lesotho, a
mountainous nation of about 2 million people which is encircled by South
Africa, has the highest average altitude of any country and is sometimes called
The Kingdom in the Sky.
"Lesotho
is such a significant and unique country in the whole world. I would be happy
to invite the president, as well as the rest of the world to come to
Lesotho," said Mpotjoane.
He said some
civil society organisations funded by the U.S. Embassy in Lesotho did work to
support the LGBT+ community, but the United States also provided important
funding for the country's health and agriculture sectors.
Trump's
administration has cut billions of dollars in foreign aid worldwide as it seeks
to align spending with Trump's "America First" policy.
Mpotjoane
said Lesotho was feeling the impact as the health sector had been reliant on
that aid for some time, but that the government was looking at how to become
more self-sufficient.
"The
decision by the president to cut the aid... it is (his) prerogative to do
that," said Mpotjoane. "We have to accept that. But to refer to my
country like that, it is quite unfortunate."