‘WE must chart [a new] path in a world that is rapidly changing,’ President Cyril Ramaphosa told the South African people in his State of the Nation address in February. Without mentioning US President Donald Trump or Elon Musk directly, Ramaphosa gave a forceful denunciation of the remarkable swing in US policy toward South Africa since Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20. Describing the world South Africa must now navigate as characterised by rising nationalism and protectionism, Ramaphosa declared that Pretoria ‘will not be bullied.’
Ramaphosa’s address came in response to a whiplash-inducing turn from the era of Trump’s predecessor, former President Joe Biden, which has seen the machinery of the US government deployed to advance a misinformation agenda linked to South African white nationalist movements against Pretoria. As part of that turn, last week the US Embassy pledged immediate action on a petition from right-wing white Afrikaners, to whom Trump has promised refugee status.
Despite the new overtones, however, this sudden pivot comes against the backdrop of more long-standing tensions in the US-South Africa relationship over multilateralism, human rights and the role of rising powers in the global order. Given South Africa’s rotating presidency of the G20 and its membership in the BRICS grouping, Pretoria finds itself in the crosshairs of this toxic politics, which is already having diplomatic reverberations. Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped the G20 foreign ministers’ gathering hosted by South Africa, a move best understood as a simultaneous rebuke of the post-apartheid South African government, the International Court of Justice and the BRICS.
The recent round of tensions kicked off on Feb. 7, when Trump issued an executive order accusing South Africa of ‘government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,’ as well as of ‘aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies.’ These are, of course, shocking claims against a country that just a few months ago was being praised by the Biden administration for its commitment to strong, democratic governance. They are also surprising because they are, quite simply, false.
South Africa is a country racked by deeply unequal distribution of land, and the Expropriation Act completed a nearly decadelong effort to replace a 1975 law from the Apartheid era, during which at least 3.5 million black South Africans were displaced from their land and communities to the so-called ‘homelands’
In January, Ramaphosa signed into law the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, which was the proximate reason for Trump’s executive order. That order claimed the new law will ‘enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.’ That is a highly misleading characterisation, however. South Africa is a country racked by deeply unequal distribution of land, and the Expropriation Act completed a nearly decadelong effort to replace a 1975 law from the Apartheid era, during which at least 3.5 million black South Africans were displaced from their land and communities to the so-called ‘homelands.’ South Africa’s post-Apartheid constitution, however, prohibits arbitrary deprivation of property and requires compensation for any expropriation, and contrary to the claims made in Trump’s executive order, the new law neither denies compensation nor targets white landowners.
In fact, the act that US diplomats are now decrying is in line with basic laws on expropriation-or ‘eminent domain’ as it’s known in the US-enshrined in the constitutions of democratic nations around the world. The ‘takings clause’ of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, for instance, allows the government to-in Trump’s words-‘seize’ the property of Americans for a whole host of public purposes. In the US, governments at the federal, state and local level not only legally seize land to make room for roads or public works, but also regularly conduct ‘private-to-private’ transfers of properties from one landowner to another. All of this requires ‘just compensation,’ which South Africa’s new law similarly ensures.
The current tensions cannot be divorced from South Africa’s role as a representative of a Global South increasingly impatient about inequalities in the global order and increasingly resolved to address them
The reason for the law is that South Africa has an urgent need for land reform. The Natives Land Act of 1913 and a subsequent act in 1936 designated 87 percent of the country’s land for the exclusive ownership of white people, giving legal structure to a campaign of dispossession that divided the nation into a relatively prosperous white-controlled land mass with a cluster of increasingly depleted black reserves on the periphery and within cities. While those laws were quickly repealed after the liberation movement ended Apartheid in 1994, their legacies have been slow to shift. A 2017 land ownership audit found that more than 20 years after Apartheid, 72 percent of the country’s farming and agricultural land was owned by white South Africans, who make up less than 8 percent of the country’s population. By contrast, Black South Africans, who make up over 80 percent of the population, held a total of just 4 percent of the land. This inequality extends well beyond the ownership of land: The typical Black household in South Africa owns 5 percent of the wealth held by the typical white household.
But even in this context, the new South African law is in line with international norms. It limits expropriation to cases serving explicit public purposes, like building highways, or that are in the public interest as articulated by government programs, including land reform. As already noted, it requires that the amount of compensation ‘be just and equitable reflecting an equitable balance between the public interest, the interests of those affected, including an owner.’ And while it does contemplate contexts where no compensation would be just, such as for abandoned or unused property, this would not include confiscating the land of active farmers, as Trump’s executive order suggests. Most importantly, South Africa’s law does not raise the spectre of the kind of land occupations that raised rights concerns in Zimbabwe. Indeed, unlike many similar laws in the world, the law actually requires expropriating authorities to exhaust every effort to reach agreement with the owner on reasonable terms before considering expropriation.
This has not shielded the law from criticism. The centre-right Democratic Alliance party, currently in a coalition government with Ramaphosa’s African National Congress, opposed the law as policy and recently challenged it on procedural and content grounds. Meanwhile, from the left, the Economic Freedom Fighters called it a cop-out ‘only used to fool our people into believing that the [ANC] is doing something to address the almost tyrannical neglect of the land question in this country.’ The only thing everyone across South Africa’s political spectrum seems to agree on is that policy seeking to redress the country’s egregious inequality in land ownership over the past decade has not worked.
The new South African law is in line with international norms. It limits expropriation to cases serving explicit public purposes, like building highways, or that are in the public interest as articulated by government programs, including land reform
This is not Trump’s first time backing extremist positions on South Africa. In his first term, he sparked controversy by repeating this far-right narrative of the mass killing of white farmers. Now, of course, he has been joined in the White House by Elon Musk, who was raised in apartheid-era South Africa and has repeatedly backed that same narrative. To be clear, a great many South Africans-both Black and white-are deeply frustrated by the levels of crime in the country, as well as the inefficiency and corruption that mars effective governance. But the claims of widespread killings of white farmers is a disproven myth effectively spread by a set of far-right political operatives in South Africa-and now Washington.
But the current tensions cannot be divorced from South Africa’s role as a representative of a Global South increasingly impatient about inequalities in the global order and increasingly resolved to address them. This is underscored by South Africa’s position as chief prosecutor of the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, and its current term as rotating president of the G20, the first African country to hold the post.
South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel at the ICJ in December 2023, alleging that its actions in Gaza following Hamas’ attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, ‘are genocidal in character.’ Not surprisingly, Republicans in the US were incensed, but diplomatic condemnation came swiftly from the Biden administration as well. Even before the war in Gaza, the Biden administration had expressed frustration with South Africa’s refusal to join its international pressure campaign against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, with the US ambassador even publicly accusing Pretoria of supplying Russia with weapons in December 2022. While that accusation was quickly walked back and a subsequent independent investigation found no evidence for the claim, members of both parties in Washington have come to see South Africa as a bit of an avatar for waning US power and the messiness of a more multipolar world.
Meanwhile, South Africa recently took the helm of the G20 after a series of summits hosted by India, Brazil and South Africa, all democratic emerging powers that claim the mantle of Global South leadership. While Trump railed against the United Nations and the World Health Organisation during his first term, he largely embraced the G20 as a venue better-suited for his style of ‘America First’ dealmaking. Rather than withdraw from the group, Trump’s first-term foreign policy hands reshaped the G20’s trade agenda from avoiding protectionism to supporting ‘reciprocal’ trade and addressing issues like overcapacity. Trump even backed the multiple commitments agreed to at an emergency G20 meeting called during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The second Trump administration, however, seems uninterested in shaping the G20 policy agenda-in part because of its different policy priorities, but possibly also due to South Africa holding the G20’s rotating presidency this year. In announcing his intention to boycott the foreign ministers’ gathering, Rubio openly attacked what he called South Africa’s ‘anti-Americanism’ and mocked its chosen G20 theme of ‘Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability’ as meaning ‘DEI and climate change.’
Ramaphosa appears to be banking on the plausible idea that this is a transactional play to extract concessions from South Africa and is sending a delegation to Washington to seek a deal. We will see if that proves true or whether this is part of a broader bid by the Trump administration to weaken Global South leadership in multilateralism. After all, Trump has already declared that ‘BRICS is dead’ and threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on the BRICS nations if they try to establish an alternative reserve currency to the dollar.
World events, however, may very well be unkind to Trump’s hostility to South Africa and multilateral cooperation more generally. That will especially be the case if the current toxic mix of white nationalism in Washington and clashing ambitions disables the G20, which for all its flaws remains one of the few multilateral spaces capable of providing cooperative global leadership in 2025, at a moment when disease outbreaks, market meltdowns and continued armed conflict seem likely.
Matthew M. Kavanagh is the director of the Centre for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute and School of Health. He holds faculty appointments in global health and law.
This op-ed appeared first on World Politics Review.
