President Donald Trump’s attack on South Africa has brought relations between Washington and Pretoria to their lowest point since sanctions were imposed on the previous apartheid government in 1986.
It is also likely to reduce or eliminate White House participation in this year’s G20 meeting, hosted by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg in November. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that he will not attend the G20 foreign ministers’ preparatory meeting in protest.
In South Africa, this row comes seven months into a coalition government that is testing the ability of the former liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), to work with its partner, the strongly pro-Western Democratic Alliance (DA), which represents about 90% of white voters.
Ramaphosa’s ANC chose the DA over the third and fourth largest parties, which are black, anti-Western breakaways from the ANC that accuse the president of failing to address historic black land claims. Under this intense political pressure, the ANC produced an Expropriation Act it hoped would satisfy all sides.
The coalition government’s success depends on whether it can restore economic growth and reverse rising joblessness after 15 years of stagnation.
The spat began when Trump charged that “terrible things are happening in South Africa, they’re confiscating land and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.” At the same time, U.S. billionaire and the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has accused Pretoria of doing little to stop a “genocide” of white farmers.
Trump followed up with an Executive Order on Feb. 7, charging that the new law allowed government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” As a result of these “unjust and immoral practices,” the order froze all U.S. aid to South Africa, and promised to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Ramaphosa denied his government discriminates. “There is no single group that faces persecution,” he told Parliament.
“We are witnessing the rise of nationalism and protectionism, the pursuit of narrow interests and the decline of common cause,” he said. “But we are not daunted. We will not be deterred. We will not be bullied. We are a resilient people.”
Trump’s attack appeared to be prompted by the new law, under which no actions have yet taken place. A lobbying group campaigning against it only cited one previous example from 2018 of a farm being taken by a local official, who was forced to return it under a court order.
The DA has gone to court to review the constitutionality of the Act. It has a solid record of winning most of its court challenges. But all major parties backed the government in this fight against Trump, in part because it followed immediately after Trump froze USAID’s PEPFAR program, which supports HIV/AIDS treatment.
The medication for six million patients is paid for by South Africa, but PEPFAR contributes a crucial 17% of the cost in the form of nursing staff, quality monitoring, and other essential components.
Soon after an outcry from medical personnel who warned that AIDS patients who discontinue their regular medication may die, Rubio announced a waiver, but checks with program implementers indicate that the program has not yet resumed.
Behind the war of words is one of the most serious unaddressed maladies inherited from the apartheid past. Like its northern neighbor, Zimbabwe, getting land back taken under white governments was one of the primary missions of the anti-apartheid movement.
But both post-liberation Zimbabwe and South Africa did too little to implement those policies until a wave of popular sentiment made it political unavoidable. In Zimbabwe, the government was coerced into responding to a grassroots call for land by approving land invasions that led to about eight farm murders. A quarter of a century later, the economy of Zimbabwe has not recovered.
Most South African political parties and interest groups recognize that land reform is imperative.
Chris Burgess, editor of the Afrikaans language farmers’ magazine Landbou, agreed that there has not been land expropriation so far, and he is not especially concerned about the wording of the new law. “Farmers are less worried about the act as written than the spirit in which it will be implemented,” he told RS.
Burgess is especially concerned about the high rate of farm murders, though he has not seen evidence that white farmers were targeted for political reasons. Whites make up seven percent of the population, but only 2% of murders. Causes vary, and more employees are murdered on farms than white farmers.
Washington-based Genocide Watch’s Dr. Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, told The Spectator that “for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination.” There are instead, “opportunistic crimes,” sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or there are just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.
Stanton’s research in South Africa shows that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts. Farmers are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide.
South Africa is in the throes of a crime wave that saw 69 murders per day nationally, and farmers have long agitated for better protection. Official figures showed 50 farmers (black and white) were killed in 2023, and 26 by November of 2024, according to South African Farmers’ Weekly.
“There is deep distrust of the state ability to do something constructive and effective about both crime and land reform,” said Burgess.
The new Expropriation Act replaces an apartheid-era law. It provides for expropriation for eminent domain, but also to reverse centuries of discrimination, most notably in the 1913 Land Act, which deprived black South Africans of access to the majority of farm land in South Africa.
The Act provides for compensation to be determined by specific criteria. If land is unused, improperly acquired or owned by the government, compensation could be less. In some circumstances, it could be handed over without compensation.
Trump first heard about the controversy during his first administration, after a lobbying campaign by a white South African farming group, AfriForum, who met with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and made an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.
In 2025, about 70% of the land remains in the hands of whites, who constitute 7% of the population.
Soon after Trump’s criticism, AfriForum made it clear that it was opposed to Trump’s punitive measures, and joined most farmer organizations in saying they prefer to stay in South Africa and fight this battle to keep their land.
Ramaphosa has attempted to talk to Trump and announced a delegation will soon be going to Washington to try to ease tensions. But the argument about white farmers might be easier to resolve than another source of Trump’s displeasure.
The Executive Order also complains of South Africa’s “aggressive positions towards the U.S. and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
Ramaphosa is known as a skilled negotiator from his days as a trade union leader and in his negotiations with the white government that led to a democratic constitution. But if the demand is that he drop South Africa’s case at the ICJ, this might be politically difficult, because the ANC’s historic sympathy for Palestine is deeply entrenched since its days when it too was the underdog.
The coalition government has not yet come up with an agreed foreign policy, and the DA has historically been strongly pro-Israel, but some ANC leaders see Palestine as a deal breaker for the coalition.
Ramaphosa still hopes for a resolution with Washington. Before this clash, he announced his invitation to Trump for a state visit ahead of the G20. He still hopes to persuade him to come, but that too is hard to imagine after Trump and Rubio’s rebuke.
