Donald Trump has offered a fast path to citizenship for South African farmers, after cutting aid to the country over what he termed “unjust racial discrimination” against Afrikaners.
The US president railed on his Truth Social platform against South Africa’s new laws, which give the government the power to take land from people without compensation in some cases.
“South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country. They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding,” he wrote.
“To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”
His comments came after a US directive that “all bureaus, offices and missions shall pause all obligations and/or dispersion of aid or assistance to South Africa”.
It followed Trump’s executive order to cut aid to South Africa for “rights violations” and for its decision to bring a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in which it accuses the country of genocide over its treatment of the Palestinian people.
The 7 February order stated: “In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 to enable the government ... to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.
“This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Trump’s ongoing condemnation of South Africa’s policies tracks closely with that of his close supporter, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who has long criticized his homeland for its “openly racist policies” and the “genocide of white people”.
Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, was an avowed racist and antisemite and a supporter of apartheid. He moved his family from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because of his interest in the racist policy. As he told the Nazi-aligned South African newspaper Die Transvaler: “It encouraged me to come and settle here.”
In 2023, Musk falsely claimed on X (Twitter) that the government was “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa”, and quoted the South African president’s comments about the expropriation act, saying: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”
This week, he retweeted several people on X who were claiming Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system was not allowed to operate in South Africa “simply because Elon isn’t black”.
A South African court last month dismissed claims made by Trump and Musk of a white genocide as “not real” and “clearly imagined”.
Afrikaners are white South Africans, and are predominantly descended from Dutch settlers. While they make up just over 7 per cent of the South African population, they dominated the country’s politics until the mid-1990s through the apartheid system of institutionalized racial segregation, which dictated where people could live and work, whom they could marry, and how they could mix in public.
In January this year, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa brought in a controversial law that allows the government to seize land without compensating its owners, but only if its seizure is in the public interest. This replaced a previous law that compelled the state to compensate owners.
The law is part of an effort to allow Black South Africans to reclaim land that was taken under an apartheid law introduced in 1950, which allowed the government to take land for the use of a single race. Before Trump’s order came into effect, the South African president said he wanted to “do a deal” with Trump to resolve the dispute, and that he would wait for the “dust to settle” to travel to the US and repair the relationship.
“We don’t want to go and explain ourselves. We want to go and do a meaningful deal with the United States on a whole range of issues,” Ramaphosa said at the end of February.
“I’m very positively inclined to promoting a good relationship with President Trump.”
South Africa had also been preparing a new trade deal in the hope of appeasing the US president.
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