Trump Has Punished South Africa for Something Its Government Has Not Done
The new Act begins by outlining the 1994 constitutional provision on protecting property rights, thereby bringing Apartheid-era legislation into the new constitutional order. It also has a raft of new additions, including measures for compensating unregistered rights-holders on expropriated land (e.g. customary rights holders on traditional land or farm dwellers) and has provisions to combat land speculation. Most countries have state expropriation provisions as they are crucial to state infrastructure projects, and the 2025 Expropriation Act should be read as an instance of a very normal piece of legislation.
The main critique of the Act from groups that represent white farmers is that it lays the groundwork for uncompensated expropriation for land reform by allowing public interest as a ground for expropriation. The Act also has a provision for zero-rand compensation during expropriation. In other words, there are instances where the state can expropriate without compensation. However, the fears that this is seizure in disguise are overblown. The conditions that the act outlines for zero-rand compensation are so stringent that they seem unlikely to apply to productive farmland. For zero-rand expropriation, the land in question must be entirely unproductive, abandoned, held for pure speculation purposes, or indebted to the state for more than its market value (e.g. through unpaid rates).
Most of the Act lays out robust safeguards for landholders that guarantee fair compensation and an expropriation process that follows the rule of law with recourse to the court system for a landholder. What the Act might do is provide leverage to the state when it comes to dealing with landholders who are holding up public works or specific land reform projects by overvaluing their land.
The Expropriation Act should not be seen as a politically driven or racially targeted move. It is more focused on making public infrastructure projects more feasible, whether purchasing land for the construction of a power line or for assisting emerging Black farmers access land. There are concerns about how the Act may be used by corrupt local municipalities when it comes to expropriating captured urban properties or legalistic concerns about contradictions in provisions and timelines within the Act, but these do not imply the expropriation of rural farmland.
Trump’s executive order is disconnected from the reality of rural life in South Africa. Trump’s supporters have evoked claims of a “white genocide” due to rural violence exacted on white farmers. However, there is a gulf in how the global right presents the plight of white farmers in South Africa and what those farmers report on the ground. Instead of believing rural crime is a symptom of “white genocide,” white farmers have reported that Black farmers experience more crime than white farmers. While white farmers have invested in private security measures, Black farmers have less ability to do so given the historical inequality in access to capital and are thus more vulnerable.
Claims of “white genocide” rely on a statistic that white farmers are murdered at a higher-than-average rate. However, this statistic lumps all victims of farm attacks – regardless of race and occupation – into a numerator and limits the denominator to only include white landholders, rather than farmworkers, managers and dwellers who are often Black. This inflates the per capita effect of rural crime on white farmers. No one denies that rural life in South Africa is violent, but stock theft, robberies and violent attacks concern South African farmers of all races.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, rural crime does not target White farmers more than it does Black farmers, and the state has no real means or desire to strip white farmers of their land. The response to the Expropriation Act is another sign of the worrying trend of the global far-right amplifying and exaggerating concerns across countries, with little context or understanding of the real-life situation in those countries.
Alex Dyzenhaus is a research fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. This article, originally posted to the Africa at LSE blog, is published courtesy of the LSE.
