South Africa’s president fired back at President Trump on Monday after the American leader accused the South African government of “confiscating land” and “doing some terrible things, horrible things.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a statement that his country had not seized land. Rather, he said that a law he recently signed on land expropriation struck a careful balance between using land for public good and protecting private property rights.
“We look forward to engaging with the Trump administration over our land reform policy and issues of bilateral interest,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.
During his first term as president, Mr. Trump claimed that land seizures from white South Africans were rife, a false narrative pushed by some right-wing groups in South Africa.
Mr. Trump said on Sunday in posts on Truth Social and comments to reporters that the United States would cut off aid to South Africa pending an investigation into the country. But Mr. Ramaphosa said that other than a program to battle H.I.V. and AIDS, South Africa receives no funding from the United States.
The issue of land has been a contentious one in South Africa for generations.
In 1913, the colonial government passed a law confining Black South Africans to just 7 percent of the country’s territory, essentially dispossessing many Black people from their land. Although the Black population would make slight gains in land ownership in subsequent decades, that uneven distribution remained largely in place.
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has made efforts to redistribute some land to Black people. But white South Africans, who comprise about 7 percent of the population, continue to dominate land ownership. White-owned farms occupy about half of South Africa’s surface area.
Still, those facts have done little to stop some on the far-right in South Africa from promoting the false narrative that white South Africans have been widely dispossessed of their land and have even been victims of genocide. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and is a close adviser of Mr. Trump, has pushed some of those conspiracy theories.
In the post-apartheid era, the Black-led government in South Africa mostly purchased land from willing white sellers, rather than taking it without compensation. The law that Mr. Ramaphosa signed does allow for land to be taken without compensation, but analysts say there are many checks and balances in place to prevent abuse. The most likely application, analysts say, will be to take land that is not in use. Many of the country’s most staunch land redistribution activists argue that the law does not go far enough.
Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s foreign minister, likened the law to eminent domain in the United States, saying in a statement that “our expropriation act is not exceptional.”
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