President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke to Elon Musk, the SA-born billionaire and close aide of Donald Trump, over the US president’s remarks about land expropriation in SA and his threat to cancel funding to the country.
A social media post by Trump on Sunday that he would be “cutting off all future funding to SA until a full investigation” was based on false reports that land grabs were under way and led the rand plunging in value on Monday.
Musk, who left SA for the US in the late 1980s, fanned the flames in a post on X where he asked Ramaphosa whether “openly racist ownership laws”, apparently referring to the Expropriation Act that became law in January, discriminates against white people.
Without providing further details, Ramaphosa’s office said he had held discussions with Musk on Tuesday “on issues of misinformation and distortions” about SA.
“In the process, the president reiterated SA’s constitutionally embedded values of the respect for the rule of law, justice, fairness and equality,” the presidency said in a post on X.
Trump’s initial post on X led to an avalanche of criticism against him in SA. Even AfriForum, which has been critical of President Cyril Ramaphosa signing the Expropriation Act into law, came the country’s defence.
Ramaphosa and international relations & co-operations minister Ronald Lamola were also quick to reject Trump’s claims that land would be confiscated by the state.
A group of prominent civil society organisations in SA has also hit back at Trump, saying his criticism of the country's of land expropriation laws are “demonstrably untrue” and “border on the absurd”.
“SA's government and executive are frequently deserving of fierce criticism (and) we are proud of our record in doing so and of our unrelenting efforts to hold them to account,” 19 civil society organisations in SA wrote in an open letter to the US.
“But the idea that SA is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly is demonstrably untrue and would be absurd were this lie not now being propounded at the very highest levels of US government.”
The group includes the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution, Corruption Watch, Defend Our Democracy, the Helen Suzman Foundation, Media Monitoring Africa, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of SA and the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation.
“In his threat, Trump leaves unstated exactly who the certain classes are who are being treated very badly. Thirty years after democracy, SA remains among the most unequal places on Earth, with that inequality largely tracking racial lines: the typical black household in SA owns 5% of the wealth held by the typical white household. For far too many South Africans democracy has yet to allow an escape from crippling poverty,” the group states in the letter.
Trump added that SA’s land legislation permitted the government to confiscate land “unfairly” and that certain classes of people were being treated “very badly”.
Trump’s social media post comes days after NGOs supported by the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aid Relief (Pepfar) were left waiting for formal guidance on how to implement the limited waiver on the US administration’s freeze on foreign aid.
Update: February 4 2025
This story has been reworked with talks between Ramaphosa and Elon Musk
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