Although President Trump’s Feb. 7 Executive Order on “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” refers to land expropriation as the cause of his decision to end all aid and assistance to South Africa, his real beef with South Africa is that it refuses to align its foreign policy with Washington.
He actually accuses South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies.” If this sounds like the Biden-Blinken foreign policy with added claws, that’s because it is. First, Trump’s outrage over South Africa bringing a case to the ICJ against Israel for genocide treats that action as though the real crime has been committed by South Africa! Second, Trump sees BRICS as an enemy that must be destroyed, and South Africa is Africa’s senior, founding member of the BRICS.
Trump, like his predecessors, is determined to protect the sovereignty of the United States, and equally determined to abuse the sovereignty of all others, because, after all, such abuse has been bought and paid for by U.S. aid. Trump’s rumored pick for U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, Joel Pollak (formerly a South African), said in a Feb. 4 interview with News24 (South Africa) that South Africa “must abandon race-based policies and align with the U.S. on Israel and China if it is to continue to benefit from aid and special trade arrangements,” according to a News24 paraphrase.
So where does the South African government’s expropriation of land fit in? At the end of 2024, a South African bill for the expropriation of land became law. It provides for compensation in most cases, but with a few exceptions, of which the most important is this: “Where the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is not to develop the land or use it to generate income, but to benefit from appreciation of its market value.” The background is that from 1913 onward, the white masters of South Africa, by statute, denied the right of ownership to black South Africans for the property they owned or had long occupied. Massive amounts of land were simply expropriated, usually by government authority—without compensation, and some are being held in an undeveloped state.
Joel Pollak said in the Feb. 4 interview that “The world is tired of South Africa’s focus on redressing the past.” (Oh, did I steal your family’s homestead? That was a long time ago, get over it!)
Trump himself posted on Truth Social on Feb. 2: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.… A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum … The United States won’t stand for it, we will act.…”
However, John Steenhuisen, parliamentary leader of the white-led Democratic Alliance, who is also the Minister of Agriculture, contradicted Trump in a public speech Feb. 8 when he said he didn’t want Afrikaner farmers to emigrate: “There is no land being expropriated on a mass scale from anybody in South Africa without compensation. It’s not to say that the expropriation act is not harmful and that is why it has been challenged legally by DA [Democratic Alliance], but we have to make sure that we safeguard our agricultural sector and jobs of commercial farmers and small-scale farmers.”
A separate interview where Steenhuisen makes a similar point
Trump’s interest in making propaganda about the land is to build a constituency for himself among the Afrikaners, for use in turning South Africa into a U.S. puppet, especially in foreign policy.
