US president Donald Trump has threatened South Africa with a cut off of all development aid after passing a land law that will allow the coalition government of ANC and D.A to seize white owned lands without compensation.
“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention. A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see,” Trump stated on his Truth Social platform.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa and is now one of Trump’s closest allies, also weighed in, sharing a post on X that claimed South African farmers were in “grave danger” following the bill’s approval.
This article reviews the issues at hand and whether Trump has any leverage to arm twist South Africa government.
Elon Musk through his X page, with followers of more than 215 mill, accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of implementing “openly racist ownership laws.” On her part, South Africa government defended herself, claiming that the land policy was essentially aimed at addressing the disparities created by decades of apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa that was ended in 1994.
In 1994, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president after all South Africans were given the right to vote.
But until the recently passed law, the government was only able to buy land from its current owners under the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer”/
Some people this this has delayed the process of land reform. In 2017, a government report said that of the farmland that was in the hands of private individuals, 72% was white-owned.
According to the 2022 census white people make up 7.3% of the population. However, some critics have expressed fears that the new land law may have disastrous consequences like in Zimbabwe, where seizures wrecked the economy and scared away investors.
The new law, the government has emphasized, is a way to right historic wrongs.
Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa with most private farmland owned by white people, 30 years after the end of the racist system of apartheid.
There have been continuous calls for the government to address land reform and deal with the past injustices of racial segregation.
However, internal criticism of this land reform argue that this latest assault on white owned land is not about addressing apartheid-era land injustices but to acquire public lands.
Private lands will be taken for infrastructural reasons that are needed by the government, not to give it to the landless.
The new Expropriation Act, which replaces the apartheid-era Expropriation Act of 1975, was officially signed into law by Ramaphosa on Jan. 23 after nearly five years of public consultation and parliamentary debate.
The legislation outlines the legal framework for the government to expropriate private property for public purposes or in the public interest, setting rules for how compensation should be determined.
While the act generally mandates fair compensation, it also allows for certain cases in which no compensation may be paid, provided it is deemed just and reasonable.
According to the South African parliament, local, provincial, and national authorities will have the power to enforce this law to acquire land for a variety of purposes, including infrastructure development, public services, and land reform.
However, the bill explicitly states that expropriation cannot occur arbitrarily or for reasons beyond serving the public good.
Land reform has long been a contentious issue in South Africa, where historical injustices have left the majority Black population with little land ownership despite the official end of apartheid in 1994.
During the colonial and apartheid eras, laws such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 severely restricted Black South Africans from owning or leasing land.
The result was widespread dispossession that concentrated land ownership in the hands of the white minority.
Although apartheid officially ended three decades ago, land ownership remains highly skewed, with white farmers still controlling much of the country’s arable land.
Opposition to the Expropriation Bill has come from various groups, both inside and outside South Africa. Critics argue that the legislation could lead to government overreach, diminish property rights, and create economic uncertainty, potentially deterring investment in the country. Trump’s recent statements are not his first criticisms of South Africa’s land policies. In 2018, while serving as president, he tweeted that he had directed his secretary of state to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”
He cited conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s claims that South Africa was seizing land from white farmers.
At the time, Ramaphosa fired back, urging Trump to stay out of South Africa’s affairs.
“He was not present when Black people faced apartheid and oppression,” Ramaphosa said, dismissing Trump’s allegations as uninformed.
On the same wavelength, South Africa accused Trump of seeking to sow division, with a spokesperson saying he was “misinformed”.
In response to Trump and Musk’s claims, the South African government has firmly rejected the notion that the new law constitutes land confiscation or that it targets any particular racial group unfairly.
A statement from Ramaphosa’s office on Monday emphasized that the law is a constitutional mechanism designed to ensure equitable land access.
“The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution,” the statement read.
Furthermore, Pretoria clarified that US funding to South Africa is largely focused on HIV/AIDS prevention programs, implying that Trump’s threat to cut funding would not significantly impact the nation’s economic stability.
The U.S. gave Africa more than $6.5 billion in humanitarian assistance last year. For many in Africa, Trump’s executive order halting foreign aid spooked arguably the world’s most successful foreign aid program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
Over two decades, the program with bipartisan support has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives, the vast majority in Africa, the continent it was designed to help most.
“The world is baffled,” the health minister of South Africa, the country with the most people living with HIV, said after the U.S. freeze on aid.
The minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, said the U.S. funds nearly 20% of South Africa’s $2.3 billion annual HIV/AIDS program through PEPFAR, and now the biggest response to a single disease in history is under threat.
The Trump executive order that froze foreign assistance programmes, with exceptions for allies Israel and Egypt.
Among the programmes that would be affected include the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which received approximately $120bn since its launch in 2003. The world’s largest health programme, since its launch by President George W Bush, PEPFAR is believed to have saved 25 million lives, enabled 20 million people with HIV to start antiretroviral treatment and prevented 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV.
Left untouched by the freeze is aid for Israel and Egypt, two of the largest recipients of US military assistance.
Both countries have faced scrutiny over their human rights records and calls to leverage US aid in exchange for substantial reforms.
The accompanying memo made special mention of waivers for “foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt and administrative expenses, including salaries, necessary to administer foreign military financing”.
Since the 1970s, Egypt and Israel together have received the lion’s share of worldwide US security assistance allocations: about $100 billion.
The decision by the world’s single largest donor has sent shockwaves across the world, with aid groups warning that the move will put lives at risk. In 2023, Washington disbursed $72bn in foreign aid across nearly 180 countries.
However, in the top the US aid recipients, South Africa is not in the list. The highest recipient is Ukraine that has gobbled $16.62 Bill, Israel 3.31 Bill and Ethiopia $ 1.77 Bill respectively. In East Africa, Kenya is our bellwether of the US foreign aid munching $0.89 Bill, Uganda 0.71 Bill and Tanzania 0. 65 Bill.
With all the hullabaloo about how the US can hit hard South Africa with development aid freeze looks like the matter has been overly exaggerated. South Africa is capable of absorbing the impact of the snub, and move on unfettered by US hostile actions.
