South Africa is busy Zimbabwifying itself, ready to expropriate white-owned farms without compensation. At this point, it should be a pariah state. But in goes President Obama, likely to egg them on.

He's been photographed kite-surfing with Richard Branson off Necker Island, relaxing on David Geffen's yacht in French Polynesia with Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey, river-rafting with his family in Bali and posing with a celebrity chef in Tuscany. To those who have paid only casual attention to former President Barack Obama's foreign travels since he left the White House in January 2017, it can seem as if Mr. Obama has been on an extended vacation of the kind only the very rich can afford. But the former president has also met quietly with groups of young people in New Zealand, Brazil, Indonesia and Singapore, as well as paying calls on foreign leaders, including Xi Jinping of China, Emmanuel Macron of France, Justin Trudeau of Canada and Malcolm Turnbull of Australia. Now, Mr. Obama is inaugurating his most significant international project as an ex-president, with an announcement on Monday that the Obama Foundation plans to convene 200 young people this July in Johannesburg for five days of meetings, workshops and technical training.

That would be South Africa, the same South Africa that got itself in the news for voting to amend its constitution to expropriate productive white-owned farms without compensation, just as Zimbabwe did, creating what will become an impoverished hellhole. A whiff of the local sentiment can be read in this local lunatic leftist's essay, printed in Newsweek here.

I've been to places where expropriations in the name of "the people" (led by comrades acting as community organizers) happened – namely, Venezuela. While I was there in late 2005, I specifically asked farmers in the rural Yaracuy and Cojedes states to take me to places where land was expropriated in the name of correcting "injustice" and empowering "the people." The places I was taken were fallow hellholes, gone to seed by their unmotivated leftist comrade masters and their unwilling indigent tenant farmers supposedly benefiting from it in the name of "the collective." I remember a ragged red Chavista flag fluttering in the breeze on a hill to mark the shambling weed-filled disaster as miserable-looking people sat huddled by a tent, doing nothing, which stood in stark contrast to the neatly maintained farm across the road that had yet to be expropriated. I have heard since that they all have been expropriated in the name of "social justice" now, so I can only imagine what a garbage- and weed-strewn fallow wasteland it now must be.

South Africa has launched itself into the same fate now, and there will be weeds, and there will be hunger. You'd think the Zimbabwean example would terrify them, but their rulers are so left-wing that it actually excites them.

This brings us to the sorry spectacle Obama is supposedly honoring by going to that troubled place that ought to be a pariah state right now. Obama claims he adores Nelson Mandela and the better world and better men his example supposedly created, according to the Times piece. He will likely give similar words to what he gave in this speech here, given the similar players. But what we are seeing now in South Africa is Mandela's legacy: a terrible failure of soft socialism that incubated slowly and is now coming to fruition as locals get tired of 20 years of ANC failure and reparation-minded fanatics, led by something called the Economic Freedom Fighters. Obama is going over there to legitimize this failed trajectory, this historic progression of progressives that is taking the country to the Stone Age?

Imagine if some white politician during the Apartheid era went to South Africa, supposedly to buck up the locals. Would the Apartheid boycotters have respected him? Hardly. They would have called South Africa a pariah state and insisted that the politician not go.

How much more valid is such a boycott strategy now, given that South Africa has opted to violate private property and faces a certain Zimbabwe fate? There will likely be platitudes from Obama about racial healing and racial justice in this speech, but the country has listened to this tripe for years, and its logical progression has been to reach expropriation and the destruction of title deed and private property. Just take a look at the kinds of thinking that goes on in South Africa among its tony intellectual class.

Will Obama say something to counter this, even as his agenda is to create more community organizers? Don't bet on it. It's unlikely he even believes in it himself.