US President Donald Trump escalated international tensions by issuing an order targeting South Africa’s land policy and its foreign policy decisions.
The Executive Order
The EO further declares that South Africa has taken aggressive positions against the US and its allies, namely: “accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide” in the ICJ. Going further to condemn the SA government because of its strengthened relations with Iran.
The Executive Order calls all the US executive agencies (including USAID), to freeze all foreign aid to South Africa. It also offers Afrikaners a pathway to the US Refugee Admissions Program so that they would resettle as “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
The Hypocrisy
If we try to avoid the not-so-unrealistic assumptions, that the great focus on South Africa from the US, emanates from multiple policies and sovereign choices of the Cape country, such as being the last letter in the initials BRICS, daring to call out Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza at the ICJ, or building good relations with Iran.
Or the farce of Mr. Trump condemning “land expropriation”, while he announces that the US would expropriate the land of the Palestinians in Gaza. Or, the Trump/Musk duplicity, whose immigration policies are very exclusionary, turned abruptly welcoming to South African white Boers to immigrate and take refuge in the United States, to which the White South Africans themselves did not respond favorably.
All that aside, we can proceed to the rational analysis of the reasoning behind the South African Expropriation Act.
The Audit
In November 2017, the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform published its 2nd “Land Audit Report”, 4 years after the 1st report was issued in 2013, which found that “most of this state land was unsurveyed and unregistered trust land”. Recommending a phase 2 for the land audit to meet that challenge. The purpose of the 2nd Land Audit was to “provide information on private land ownership by race, nationality, and gender as of 2015”. The audit revealed that South African Whites own 72% of the total farms and agricultural holdings by individual landowners; followed by Coloured at 5%, Indians at 5%, and Africans (80% of the population) at a mere 4%.
The recommendations upon which the Land Audit Report concluded do not propose any unlawful or discriminatory expropriation of land deeds on racial grounds from White Afrikaners to Black South Africans. This leads us directly to the Act.
The Act
The South African government published the Expropriation Act in January 2025, repealing the Expropriation Act of 1975. The 2025 Act is designed to address the main issue, as the act states: “to enable South African citizens access to land on an equitable racial and gender basis”.
The Act stresses in its preamble that: “No one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property”, as it moves towards a future where all SA citizens without racial discrimination would be able to “gain access to land on an equitable basis”. The act merely highlights the racial historical background of the discriminatory land ownership status quo across the 8 provinces of South Africa, which that act is trying to address and change.
That historical background is marred with racial & apartheid laws that go back to the notorious Group Areas Act of 1950, further back to the Natives Land Act of 1913, long-preceded by racial colonialist practices since the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, followed within 5 decades by the founding of the Dutch Colony in Cape Town in 1652.
Noteworthy, are the official reactions of the Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower US administrations in the 1950s to the Group Areas Act, which remained neutral, reactionary, and even legitimizing towards white supremacy laws in South Africa, just to maintain mutually beneficial trade relations and the sustainable flow of Uranium from the SA apartheid regime.
The US did not shy away from abstaining in her votes on UN resolutions that condemned the discriminatory policies of the South African government.
This hypocritical pragmatism did stop, until the civil society pressures heightened after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. And it didn’t bear any fruit, until 1972, when former US Congressmen, John Conyers (D-MI) and Ron Dellums (D-CA), came up with the 1st legislation calling for sanctions and divestment against the South African apartheid regime. This should bring us back up to the hypocrisy part, but instead, let’s move on to reality.
The Reality
Regarding the halting of the US aid to South Africa, the total US aid to South Africa is estimated at $400 million. This amount represents less than 0.1% of South Africa’s GDP of roughly $410 billion. So, I guess, these alarmist doomsday voices warning the African country of disastrous economic consequences, need to reconsider. Or maybe now, after the USAID raid by Musk, these voices might stop howling at South Africa, after their funding dries out.
The time is ripe for African governments and institutions, that rely on US foreign aid, to understand the reality and the purposes behind them. They might find some inspiration in the decisions of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, against institutions who receive foreign aid in their countries.
This foreign aid acts as the access card to meddling and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, trying like South Africa to clear a path for a better future, by exacting change on its past laws and practices.
The continuous struggle for the awakening of African countries and the entire Global South requires serious measures by its leaders.
It’s time for South Africa to face the bully!
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
