TRUTH DECAYTrump Has Punished South Africa for Something Its Government Has Not Done
The US president has claimed the South African government is seizing land from white farmers. The reality is much more mundane.
US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that accuses the South African government of “disproportionate violence” and land seizures from the country’s white minority. The order suspends all aid to the country and offers Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans asylum in the United States. A subsequent ‘Fact’ Sheet containing many vague and dubious claims clarified that Trump believed that “the recent Expropriation Act enables the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority descendants of settler groups’ agricultural property without compensation”. However, the new Expropriation Act does not provide for race-based land seizures, and it does not persecute white South Africans.
Between 1913 and the end of Apartheid, the colonial and Apartheid governments seized Black-owned land and forbade Black South Africans from owning land in areas designated for white settlement. Laws confined the non-white population – who made up over 80 per cent of the population – to just 13 per cent of the country’s land. In the post-1994 democratic era, South Africa has struggled with its promise to redistribute land to address this inequality.
Since the 1990s, the post-Apartheid government has adopted a land reform program on the principle of “willing buyer, willing seller”. The existing landholder must agree to the sale of their land, and they are afforded fair compensation. But progress has been slow, and many have called for more expropriative measures where the state can either pay for land without the willingness of the seller or compensate them at a below-market rate. The most radical of these calls is for “expropriation without compensation,” which would involve the seizure of lands without any compensation for the landholder.
Calls for expropriative land reform within South Africa do exist and have been brought before parliament, albeit unsuccessfully. Anyone who has read the Expropriation Act can see that it does not lay the groundwork for uncompensated expropriation. Instead, the Act updates the 1975 Apartheid-era Expropriation Act for the legislation to be better able to respond to problems of today, rather than 50 years ago.
