Why is Trump Angry With South Africa?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

“South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability,’” American Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted Feb. 6 on X. Rubio also skipped a Group of 20 (G20) economic summit held in Johannesburg in late February. Why?

This came after U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the South African government over an act signed into law by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in January. According to the Expropriation Bill, the government may in some circumstances offer “nil compensation” for property where land is expropriated in the public interest. Opponents, including Trump, argue it is a threat to the principle of private ownership.

Trump on Feb. 2 accused the South African government of “hateful rhetoric” towards “racially disfavored landowners” by confiscating land and “treating certain classes of people very badly. The leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things. So that’s under investigation right now.” Trump warned that “we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

The president on Feb. 7 issued an executive order that charged South Africa with “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees” into the United States. He has promised them a rapid pathway to citizenship.

South Africa rejected these accusations, with the country’s Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola saying there is no arbitrary dispossession of land or private property with South Africa’s new land reform law. “This law is similar to the Eminent domain laws,” Lamola explained, which allow countries to expropriate private property for public use.

The issue of land is a highly emotive one in a country where historically, racist laws saw Black families forcibly removed from their land. Three decades after the collapse of South Africa’s white minority government in 1994, land ownership remains a contentious issue, with most farm property in the country still owned by whites. 

They make up a little more than seven percent of the population but own farmland that covers the majority of the country’s territory. Many Black South Africans have argued that Nelson Mandela and other leaders did not do enough to force the white minority to give up wealth that had been accrued during apartheid.

In 1996, the South African government launched its land reform programme, promising to settle all claims for redistribution by 2005 and to redistribute 30 per cent of white-owned commercial agricultural land to black South Africans by 2014. The fact neither target has been met helps explain the pressure for the current legislation.

Originally introduced as a bill in 2020, the law was intended as a mechanism to review the apartheid-era Expropriation Act of 1975 and align it with the current constitution.

Ramaphosa came out in defence of his country during a national address Feb 6, asserting that South Africa would not be bullied. “We will speak with one voice in defence of our national interest, our sovereignty and our constitutional democracy.” He described the bill as a “constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”

But, he added, beyond providing assistance for South Africa’s PEPFAR anti-HIV/AIDS initiative, “there is no other significant funding that is provided by the United States in South Africa.” South Africa received more than $400 million in aid from the United States in 2023, almost all of which went to funding efforts to fight HIV and AIDS. The government has said that American funding makes up about 17 per cent of its budget for battling HIV.

Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become a close adviser to Trump, is from South Africa. In 2023, Musk posted similar claims about South Africa on X, the social media platform he owns. “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” he wrote.

Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation and the author of Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa’s Brutal Farm Murders, said that while the government was not seizing land, it was trying to create a legal and policy framework to be able to do so. But even his group has not called on Trump to broadly cut aid to South Africa, but instead seek targeted actions against government leaders, some of whom have been involved in attacks on white farmers.

In his book Roets make the case that agents of the South African government, such as law enforcement officers, are either not willing to stop the farm attackers or actively assisting the brutal murderers.

A former American diplomat who served in South Africa for a few years believes Trump is going to do everything in his power to undermine South Africa’s chairmanship of the influential G20 club of countries.

All of this has come to the fore as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade deal under which the U.S. gives preferential access to its markets to certain African countries, expires in September. It is worth about $14.7 billion a year in South Africa’s trade with the U.S. and there is a risk that it will not be renewed.