Trump slams South Africa’s attempt to redress the imbalance of land ownership

The South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has phoned up Elon Musk in a bid to take the heat out of the accusations made by Donald Trump over his country’s new Expropriation Act.

Egged on by Musk, Trump has said he will cut US funding to South Africa while an investigation is carried out into what he is condemning as unfair land confiscations.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

Musk weighed in with a comment on his own social media platform X, directed at Ramaphosa, saying, “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”

Subsequently, Trump told reporters that South Africa’s “leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things,” though he failed to offer any examples of this, The Guardian reports.

“So that’s under investigation right now,” he added. “We’ll make a determination, and until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing – they’re taking away land and confiscating land, and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”

Seventy-eight percent of farmland in South Africa belongs to the white population which accounts for just 7% of all South Africans.

Ramaphosa explained on X, “South Africa, like the United States of America and other countries, has always had expropriation laws that balance the need for public usage of land and the protection of rights of property owners.”

South Africa’s foreign ministry issued a statement, saying: “We trust President Trump’s advisers will make use of the investigative period to attain a thorough understanding of South Africa’s policies within the framework of a constitutional democracy.”

Ramaphosa added that the harm any US funding freeze could do to South Africa would be limited as only US aid the country received was 17% of its HIV/Aids program, The Guardian reports.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s Mineral Resources Ministry said if Trump freezes funding, South Africa has the option of withholding vital mineral exports to the US, according to Al Jazeera.

South African lawyer and legal activist Tembeka Ngcukaitobi called the hysteria over the Expropriation Act “mischievous.”

“The mischief has been the misrepresentation, as if [to say] what the ANC wants to do is Zimbabwe-style land grabs, which is plainly not the case,” he told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, the BBC points out that the British authorities confiscated almost all the land from the black population back in 1913.

The Natives Land Act led to the black majority being forced to live in poor regions, known as homelands, until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.

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