US President Donald Trump has stepped up his economic fight with other countries after already slapping huge 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods. Putting another country in his sights, on Sunday night, Trump announced that he would be cutting off all aid to South Africa after what he called a “massive human rights violation.”
Angered by the country’s recent attempt to move away from its colonial past with drastic land reforms, Trump made the pledge to stop all of the US’ $318 million in aid until its government reconsiders the legislation. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the law, which will allow for land to be expropriated, sometimes without recompense, will address “the legacy of colonial dispossession.”
Land ownership in the country has remained contentious since the end of the Apartheid system, which legally enforced racial segregation and privileged the white minority for almost 50 years, only ending in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president. However, three decades on, the majority of land is still owned by white people, which the country’s president described as continued “apartheid spatial planning,” which his government would end.
Trump blasted on his Truth Social platform: “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.”
With billionaire South African Elon Musk backing his agenda to slash public spending, partly through the Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency, the President did not hold back in his threat to Ramaphosa: “The United States won’t stand for it, 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!”
Speaking to reporters after blasting the South African government on social media, Trump added that their “leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things,” but refused to elaborate.
It is not the first time that the country has become the target of the US President, with Trump claiming in his first term in office that white farmers in South Africa were being murdered and their land taken over, which has never been substantiated.
While Musk’s involvement in Trump’s decision to cut off aid is unknown, the Tesla owner has spoken about the issue of land ownership in the past. The tech billionaire was born under Apartheid in 1971 to a South African engineer and a Canadian model but became a US citizen in 2002, where he worked to found PayPal alongside fellow countryman and billionaire Peter Thiel, who introduced Trump to his now Vice President JD Vance.
However, the topic of white land ownership has been of concern to him in recent times. Responding to a video of activists chanting the anti-Apartheid song “Kill the Boer” in 2023, Pretoria-born Musk drew criticism for claiming: “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.”
