The US president, Donald Trump, has signed an executive order to cut financial assistance to South Africa, accusing the country’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners and offering them asylum in the US.
The order criticised a law signed by the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, last month that allows for land to be expropriated with “nil compensation” in limited circumstances.
South Africa was ruled by white Afrikaner leaders during apartheid, which violently repressed the country’s black majority, including forcing them to live in segregated townships and rural “homelands”. Afrikaners are descended from the Dutch, who began colonising South Africa in 1652, as well as French Huguenot refugees sponsored by the Dutch.
More than three decades after white minority rule ended, South Africa remains hugely unequal, with land and wealth still largely concentrated among white people, who make up 7% of the population, about half native Afrikaans speakers, while black people are 81%.
However, some white South Africans claim they are discriminated against, often citing the country’s affirmative action laws.
Trump’s executive order, signed on Friday, said there were “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners”.
It added: “In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the international court of justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire leading Trump’s efforts to slash the size of US government, including foreign aid spending, has criticised South Africa on his social media platform, X, for what he claimed were “openly racist policies”.
South Africa’s foreign ministry said in a statement that there seemed to be a “campaign of misinformation and propaganda”.
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains among the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” it said. “We reiterate that South Africa remains committed to finding diplomatic solutions to any misunderstandings or disputes.”
Conservative Afrikaner pressure groups said they were concerned about US aid to South Africa being cut and that South Africa would be excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
Agoa is US legislation that needs to be renewed by the US Congress this year, which allows South African exporters, including farmers, to sell thousands of products to the US tariff-free.
“This is indeed a crisis,” said Kallie Kriel, the CEO of Afriforum, which describes itself as a civil rights group for Afrikaners, but has been accused of racism. “If somebody is to blame it is the president and senior ANC [African National Congress party] leaders.”
“We want to also show appreciation to President Trump … for recognising and identifying the discrimination that Afrikaners are experiencing through racial legislation … through threats to property rights,” Kriel told a press conference, adding: “We became a people here, we are Indigenous people in this country and we are going nowhere.”
