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Donald Trump signed an executive order cutting off all aid and funding assistance to South Africa after threatening to do so a week ago over a law they passed which the US president claims is discriminating against white people. In that executive order Trump’s white house accused South Africa of “ Blatantly discriminating against ethnic minority whites in South Africa.
The law in question is the expropriating law Act, a law passed in South Africa a month ago. This law gives the South African government the ability to take land that is not being used an redistribute it, if it is in the public’s best interest. According to the South African government, the law was meant to right the wrongs of the apartheid government that forcefully took the native South African people’s land. Trump is calling this law ‘a racist law against white people’.
By Gamuchirai Mapako
Trump claimed that the order was being brought in response to South Africa’s new land law, which he claims violates people’s rights, as well as the international court case in which Israel is accused of genocide. Trump’s close adviser Elon Musk, born in South Africa, joined in the criticism asking on X why Ramaphosa had “openly racist ownership laws”. The executive order clearly references South Africa’s role in bringing accusations of genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The order said:
“In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the ICJ, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
“The United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation”, the order read.
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. Some are already viewing Trump’s executive order as the first step to what is coming.
This order comes soon after the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the nation, stating, “we will not be bullied”. He went on to appeal to Musk, Trump’s closest adviser over a phone call. Ramaphosa’s office said, in that call to Musk that the president “reiterated South Africa’s constitutionally embedded values of the respect for the rule of law, justice, fairness and equality”.
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