South Africa fights back against Trump’s threat of funding halt

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U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, in Washington, on Jan. 31.Carlos Barria/Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump has expanded his global target list to include South Africa, complaining about “horrible things” by its leadership and threatening to halt all U.S. funding for the country.

South African leaders fought back on Monday, with one cabinet minister calling for retaliation by withholding mineral supplies from the United States. They also noted that the biggest victims of a funding freeze could be the millions of South Africans living with HIV who are dependent on U.S.-subsidized medicine.

Mr. Trump falsely claimed on Sunday night that the South African government is confiscating land from “certain classes of people” – a reference to the country’s white minority. In fact, while a new expropriation law has been approved, no actions have been taken under it, and white farmers continue to own almost 80 per cent of private farmland in the country, with little change since the apartheid era.

“I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!” Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Sunday.

Speaking to reporters later, he said: “Terrible things are happening in South Africa, the leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things. … They’re taking away land, they’re confiscating land and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”

Mr. Trump’s funding threat, if enforced by his administration, could inflict its greatest damage on South Africans with HIV. About 17 per cent of South Africa’s HIV budget is financed by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, introduced by former president George W. Bush in 2003.

The program has been vital in combatting the deadly virus across Africa and the developing world, saving an estimated 25 million lives since its launch. It is especially crucial in South Africa, where 7.8 million people are living with HIV, the largest number in the world.

South Africa’s HIV program is already suffering from another Trump decision: several clinics shut their doors last week after Mr. Trump imposed a temporary freeze on all foreign aid programs.

Mr. Trump and his closest advisers, including billionaire Elon Musk and others with roots in southern Africa in the apartheid era, have held a grudge against the South African government for many years.

In 2018, during his first term in office, Mr. Trump said he had ordered an investigation of “farm seizures” and the “large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa. Right-wing extremists have often alleged that a “white genocide” is under way in South Africa, and Mr. Musk repeated the allegation in 2023, but the claim has been widely debunked. Statistics show the vast majority of South African murder victims are Black and the number of farm killings has been in decline.

More than 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s economy is still dominated by white-owned businesses and commercial farms. It remains one of the world’s most unequal societies. The wealthiest 10 per cent of South Africans own about 85 per cent of household wealth, and only a small fraction of farmland has been redistributed from white ownership, almost always on the basis of negotiations and agreed prices.

AfriForum, a prominent lobby group for South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority, has repeatedly met with people close to Mr. Trump over the past several years to seek U.S. pressure tactics against the South African government. But on Monday the group said it only wanted U.S. sanctions against South Africa’s political leaders, not a far-reaching funding freeze that could hurt ordinary citizens.

Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, said Mr. Trump’s threats of a funding halt were motivated by a “devastatingly insane fringe conspiracy” of a “race war” in South Africa.

Beyond the “white genocide” theory, however, many U.S. politicians have also criticized South Africa for its close relationship with Russia and its legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Some have introduced resolutions in the U.S. Congress calling for action against South Africa.

Even if South Africa escapes a full halt in U.S. aid funding, it could face a bigger threat when a key trade program comes up for renewal this year. The African Growth and Opportunity Act gives preferred treatment to about 21 per cent of South Africa’s exports to the United States, creating an estimated 13,000 jobs in the country. The trade program expires in September and there is a growing possibility that Mr. Trump and his allies could cancel South Africa’s participation in it.

South Africa’s long-delayed expropriation bill, debated for years, is a replacement for a 1975 apartheid-era law. It brings the law into line with the country’s 1996 constitution, which provides for expropriation at below-market prices in some cases – as long as the compensation is “just and equitable.” Even the pro-business Democratic Alliance party, which plans to challenge the law in court, has acknowledged that it will not permit the arbitrary seizure of land.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to Mr. Trump’s threats by defending the expropriation law and proposing talks with the U.S. administration.

“South Africa, like the United States of America and other countries, has always had expropriation laws that balance the need for public usage of land and the protection of rights of property owners,” his spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said in a statement.

His Minister of Mineral Resources, Gwede Mantashe, went further. “Let us withhold minerals to the U.S.,” he told a mining conference in Cape Town on Monday. “If they don’t give us money, let’s not give them minerals.”

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