By Thobile Jiwulane

When Donald Trump, as part of his America in-ward looking policy, announced sanctions against the several countries in the world including the withdrawal of vital health aid to Africa, South Africa was unperturbed by the announcements.

Rather President Cyril Ramaphosa followed up with his unprecedent swipe at the newly inaugurated US President, who earlier criticised South Africa’s land reform policies that provided for expropriation of private land by the state for public interests. The Expropriation Act, signed into law recently by Ramaphosa, is not a new legislation at all, but it existed and used during the white apartheid rule to expropriate privately owned property for the purpose of development such as the building of roads, bridges, electricity infrastructure, rail transportation, among others.

But this time around, the democratic government which Ramaphosa leads, plans to use the land to compensation the landless black masses whose land were taken away from them by force by various colonial governments and the apartheid administrations between 1913 and 1980, a process that still continues subtly to date. The black ancestral land given and some leased to white farmers while blacks were forcefully removed and resettled elsewhere in small communal land throughout. To rub it in, many black former farm owners were forced to become farm labourers on the same land they used to own.

Soon after South Africa obtained its freedom or all inclusive independence in 1994, the Nelson Mandela government introduced land reforms to help restore the stolen land to the black  majority. This was resisted by the white farmers, the white opposition parties and the rightwing organisations and emerging small rightist groupings. They all have formed a bulwark against democratic reforms going beyond land to include changes on the economy, education and health introduced by the African National Congress (ANC) party.

The South Africa rightwing elements began to establish close ties with Donald Trump during his first term and have revived that relationship now that he is back in power.  Trump’s previously Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, often tweeted about the regular white farmer killings in South Africa and land, expressing the US concern. But the rightwingers, comprising a small section of Afrikaners, had deliberately failed to inform the US politicians that in fact most farm attacks are carried out by aggrieved farm-workers.  The exploited workers would take revenge after a farmer either refused to pay the wage due to the employee or the worker would have had enough of being abused by the employers, most of whom undermine labour laws.

Farmer killings, although they have subsided currently, were prevalent  on the rural farming corridors  throughout the country. The farmers themselves do not agree on the real cause of the attacks depending on which farmers’ union one speaks to.  The more conservative one blame the government for lack of action by other more liberal and black ones believe farmers ought to fairly treat their employees in the work place.

But nobody denies the fact that white farmers were once targeted by some sections of the former black liberation movements. Members of the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (APLA), a  military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a more Africanist section that broke away from the ANC in the late 50s, specialised in farm attacks after the unbanning of the liberation movement. APLA and PAC were widely condemned for these actions as they were considered opportunistic and too late as it was time for democratic negotiations and freedom. But all those struggle-related attacks were stopped completely after 1994 and to emerged years later as part of the soured employer-employee relations.

The white rightwing groups use their closeness to Trump and the overly sympathy they received from Republication Congressmen and women, to lobby against the South African land reforms. They have Trump’s ear and the US President often tweets about the land issues in South Africa even when there had not yet been widespread land grabs recently on the farms. Rather land grabs occur in urban centres around the cities where disgruntled local occupy vacant land illegally and erect shacks or shanties as their dwellings with the hope of getting a state-subsidise house known as RDP house. Often they targeted land belonging to the local municipalities that would have reserved it for future development planning such as housing and other infrastructure.

South Africa is among countries in Africa and elsewhere that Trump has targeted for sanctions through his presidential orders. But he had not singled out Pretoria but targeted most of Africa. In a shock move, the Trump Administration has withdrawn the $120 billion US Presidential Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PERPFAR). This is HIV-Aids project initiated by the Bush Administration as multi-year aid to fight HIV-Aids in the sub-Saharan Africa and is vital to the health of to continent’s poor populations.

Over the last 30 years at least, South Africa had been one of the larget beneficiaries of this long-running program that gave Washington a good name in Africa and it ran non-stop through four US administrations since its inception in 2003. The program is the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in the world. Nobody expected any US administration to stop it. But Trump, as they say, is unpredictable.

The South African government expected Trump to impose some sanctions against it anyway after Pretoria took Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza. The war has claimed the lives of close to 50 000 people killed in Israel attacks including under 1 800 in Israelis, 166 journalists and media workers, 120 academics and over 224 humanitarian workers since the war begin on 7 October 2023. But the withdrawal of PERPFAR came as a huge shock throughout Africa particularly in South Africa because Pretoria hope that one would be spared from any sanctions because of its significance as social welfare and health issue that should be divorced from any political tensions. Even political analysts, felt Trump has overstepped the mark on this one because the poor communities in the disease-prone continent would be the ones to suffer the most rather than the politicians.

When Trump complained about the land in South Africa, Ramaphosa responded with strong words. He told Trump in no uncertain terms to mind his business and not interfere in South Africa’s internal affairs. In a public address that is untypical of Ramaphosa, he told Trump: “Keep your America, we will keep our South Africa”. He was rephrasing the words of the late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, who said the same words to attack former British Prime Minister Tony Blair after he complained about land related human right violations targeting whites in Zimbabwe.

Ramaphosa said the handling of the land question in America was worse for it was settled with spilling of the blood of the innocent when the white settlers from Europe arrived, attacked and almost wiped out all the indigenous Americans from their ancestral land. South African blacks would not do the same but would attempt to find a peaceful solution to the problem with their white compatriots. According to the South African President, Trump should rather shut up as he complained about land in South Africa when he had not even set his foot on its soil. “We in South Africa, we are living as a nation, black and white, and we are going to find a solution to our land question. So Donald Trump must leave us alone,” Ramaphosa said.

The President received the longest applause for his criticism of Trump. Ramaphosa usually takes a conciliatory tone when confronted by an aggressive counterpart of another country.

But Ramaphosa himself is under pressure at home because his African National Congress had failed on its promise to the voters to deliver on the land reforms and to bring back the lost land for blacks. Very little has been transferred into the black hands since his ANC came to power with Mandela as the first black president in 1994.  To the contrary, the ANC is on the brink of losing power completely in future elections after it lost its majority in the May 2024 national elections forcing it to form a coalition with nine opposition parties under the government of national unity (GNU).

Local analyst say the ANC is attempting to cover the lost ground and the Expropriation Act is the last ditch move to address the issue and satisfy the masses. But the land reform had been retarded by corruption and nepotism in allocation. Instead of going to the landless masses, land had been shared  among state officials who now own farm lands that were supposed to be offered to the poor masses and those who genuinely lost it. The redistribution of land is mired in never-ending corruption by the state.  The top departmental officials, who are tasked with re-allocated the little land that has been recaptured from whites take advantage of their access to it and abuse their power by selling it and pocket the money or stealing it for themselves, their families, relatives and friends or lease it for their own benefit. This problem is widespread in provinces like the Eastern Cape where the majority of people have no land and had never benefited even during the land issued by former black homeland administrations, albeit also corruptly and through patronage.

So the battle between Trump and Ramaphosa is set to continue as the ANC has identified land as a means to win the hearts and minds of the voters that it disappointed for the last 30 years. The land reforms programmes remains the only opportunity where the party could clean its image in the eyes of the disgruntled black landless majority.  But as demonstrated in the May 2024 election, the voters had enough of boycotting the polls as an expression of anger against the ANC, rather they want to participate and vote the party out.

Another area envisaged as the next battle terrain is much anticipated expulsion of South Africa from AGOA – the African Growth and Oppornity Act, a legislation designed to give trade consessions such as duty free access to the US market by sub-Saharan African countries. Such law was initiated by Bill Clinton and like PERPFAR, it continued through all subsequent US administrations. Trump is notorious for his unpredictability, and nobody would be surprised if he announces that South Africa walk because of its stance against Israel. South African openly backs the Palestinian struggle against Israel oppression. Pretoria supports Palestinian self-determination including the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.

But one that South Africa would undoubtedly get a big punch on is its membership of BRICS, the economic forum of the developing world comprosing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that now includes a host of others known as BRICS Plus within the Global South. BRICS is bound to become the largest multilateral forum in the World making up close to half of the world GDP.  The body is promising to be the most powerful in the world and threatened to outdo the G7 hence the simmering tension between the economic big powers from both sides. The majority of the oil and mineral producers are within the South, which appears to be mostly set to join BRICS, which would definitely change the world economic order in favour of the Global South.

Trump has thrown the gauntlet firing the first salvo with his threat to levy 100% tariff for all countries that adopted the de-dollarisation or agree to dropping the US dollar as a currency of international trade. South Africa is among the founding BRICS members and therefor inside the battle.  Pretoria is unlikely to oppose BRICS’ the de-dollarisation move. But Pretoria sees Trump’s move as another of the US bullying tactics where the big power uses its economic and military power to threaten others and undermine their sovereignties.

However,  the US may try but South African seems to reach the point of no return in its resolve to stick with BRICS. Ramaphosa appears unperturbed by Trump’s sanction. He is confident that the such punishment would not affect South Africa in any substantial way because Pretoria is not a liability to Washington. In addition, the US is not South Africa’s number one tradition partner, but it occupied a third position after China on top of the list and the European Union. Political observers also concur that Ramaphosa should pay no attention to the Trump approach because his country could survive economically without the US. This particularly so now that the intra-Africa trade is set to intensify under the new African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The AfCFTA was established ostensibly to reduce Africa’s dependence on foreign aid so that its countries trade among themselves more. It’s considered as part of the Africa Rising once contemplated by African forebearers.

Furthermore, the sanction would also hit back at Trump especially when the BRICS countries retaliate by charging equally 100% tariffs against US goods. Even if Trump tried to make true of his promise to drill more oil as the US, his sanctions would have unintended consequences for him.

The US would still require energy from the Global South to fill its reserves while the US trade would be badly affected due to  retaliatory trade boycotts. Also the BRICS countries would try to intensify trade among themselves as solidarity and to compensate for Trump’s sanctions. This is where the US President would begin to realise he cannot have his cake and eat it.