US President Donald Trump said South Africa “confiscated” land and “deals with certain classes of people very badly” when he announced that he was cutting off any future funding of the country while waiting for an investigation.
The land question in South Africa has long been a divisor, with efforts to correct the inequality of the white rule, criticism of conservatives such as Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who was born in South Africa and is a powerful Trump advisor.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a bill last month which stipulates that the government can, in certain circumstances, offer a “zero compensation” for the goods it decides to expropriate in the public interest .
“South Africa confiscates land and deals with some classes of people very badly,” Trump wrote on his Truth social platform on Sunday.
“I will cut all the future funding in South Africa until a complete investigation into this situation is over!” Trump wrote.
Pretoria argues that the bill does not allow the government to expropriate the arbitrarily property and must first seek to reach an agreement with the owner.
However, some groups fear a situation similar to the seizure by the government of Zimbabwe of commercial farms belonging to whites, often without compensation, after independence in 1980.
Later, in a briefing with journalists, Trump said that “South Africa leadership did terrible things, horrible things” without giving examples.
“It is therefore under investigation at the moment. We will take a determination, and until we discover what South Africa does – they remove lands and confiscating land, and in fact, they do things that are perhaps worse than that. “”
Land ownership is a controversial problem in South Africa with most agricultural land that still belong to whites three decades after the end of apartheid.
Since then, land courts have judged on a handful of land disputes and, after exhaustive processes, have returned land to previously displaced owners.
According to the South African government, the 1913 Aboriginal land law saw thousands of black families withdrawn from their land by the apartheid regime.
The delicate question was a particular rallying point for the right, with various conservative figures, notably the journalist of Musc and Right, Katie Hopkins, defending the cause of the owners of white land.
Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, with an engineer father and a mannequin mother born in Canada, leaving the country at the end of his adolescence. The official apartheid policy lasted until 1990 and the multi-racial elections took place in 1994.
Trump surrounded himself with powerful figurines from Silicon Valley who reached age in South Africa in apartheid, like David Sacks, his new artificial intelligence and his Czar cryptocurrency, who co-founded Paypal with musk.
The billionaire Peter Thiel – another co -founder of Paypal, who presented Trump to his vice -president, JD Vance – also lived in southern Africa, including time in Namibia which was then controlled by Pretoria.
He has already been accused of supporting the apartheid system, which violently subjected the black majority of South Africa to maintain the whites rule and economic control, which spokesperson denied on behalf.
