South Africa Takes on Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump announced a halt to U.S. assistance to South Africa over land reform. More than three decades after the end of apartheid, about 70 percent of South Africa’s farmland is still owned by white South Africans, who make up less than 10 percent of the population.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month signed an expropriation bill into law aimed at addressing the disparity by allowing land to be seized without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest.”

Much of U.S. assistance is in the form of foreign aid, which Trump has stopped with his South African-born ally, billionaire Elon Musk. PEPFAR-funded facilities for treating the country’s large HIV-positive population remained shut in South Africa, despite limited exemptions announced over the weekend, posing a danger to millions of South Africans dependent on antiretroviral medications.

“There is no other significant funding that is provided by the United States in South Africa,” Ramaphosa said. Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s mineral and petroleum resources minister and African National Congress chair, said African nations should implement retaliatory measures on critical minerals. “They want to withhold funding, but they still want our minerals. … Let us withhold minerals. Africa must assert itself,” he told the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town on Monday.

South Africa and eight other nations on Friday also formed the Hague Group to defend the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the face of what they described as defiance of ICJ orders and attempts by U.S. officials to sanction the ICC. The alliance includes Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, and Senegal, which vowed to boycott arms transfers to Israel.