What is South Africa’s new land law that Trump says is ‘egregious’ and ‘immoral’?

On February 2, in a post on Truth Social, Trump had accused South Africa of “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY”. This, he alleged, was a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION”, and promised to “cut off all future funding to South Africa” until the matter had been investigated.

The President’s close aide, “Special Government Employee” and the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk has attacked South Africa for its allegedly “openly racist ownership laws”, and had earlier accused the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa of inaction in the killings of white farmers.

What is the law that has angered Trump?

New Expropriation Act

On January 24, South Africa implemented the new Expropriation Act, which allows the state to seize land without compensation for public purposes or in the public interest in certain circumstances.

The law, which was discussed for five years, including public consultations, provides a legal framework for expropriation by the state in accordance with Section 25(2) of the South African constitution.

In most cases, the expropriating authority is required to negotiate with the property owner to reach an agreement on acquiring the property before resorting to expropriation.

A day after Trump’s social media post, President Ramaphosa clarified on X that the “Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution”.

Wrongs of apartheid era

The need for the new law, which repealed and replaced the apartheid-era Expropriation Act of 1975, arose from the highly skewed pattern of land ownership in South Africa.

According to research by Edward Lahiff, an expert on southern Africa at the University of Cork in Ireland, when racist minority rule over South Africa ended in 1994, about 86% of agricultural land was controlled by white people, who constituted 10.9% of the population. (‘‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s failed experiment in market-led agrarian reform’, Third World Quarterly, 2007)

The needle has not moved much in the three decades since then – a land audit from 2017, the most recent available, showed that white people still owned 72% of agricultural landholdings. Today, whites are only about 7% of South Africa’s 62 million population.

Under the 1975 Act, the state was obligated to pay owners to seize their lands under the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer” (WSWB), which delayed the process of land redistribution. The WSWB principle allowed owners to sell to the highest bidder on the open market, effectively protecting their racial preferences, Lahiff wrote in a 2005 policy brief.

Also, the “willingness” of the buyer alone was not enough, and while the state was free to intervene, it did not offer to act as an agent for the buyer, Lahiff noted. (‘From ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ to a people-driven land reform’, Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, 2005)

Land reforms to address this situation, including the new Expropriation Act, is part of the South Africa National Development Plan 2030, which aims to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by uniting South Africans.

The new law has faced resistance from the white-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the second largest in the ruling coalition. The DA has accused Ramaphosa’s African National Congress of not consulting its coalition partners on the law, and has criticised it as being unconstitutional.

Trump, the US, and South Africa

Trump had taken up the alleged violence against white South Africans during his previous term (2017-21) in the White House as well. In August 2018, after Fox News ran a segment on the South African government’s plan to redistribute land to black people who had been dispossessed during apartheid, Trump tweeted about “farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers” in that country.

In his Executive Order issued on February 7, Trump mentioned the “ethnic minority Afrikaner” people, the descendants of Dutch settlers who first arrived in the mid 17th century, and who speak a language called Afrikaans and have significant rural landholding.

However, the relationship between South Africa and the US had been developing strains even before Trump returned to the Oval Office. Pretoria has been cultivating ties with Russia and Iran in recent years, and in December 2023, it instituted a case against Israel, the closest ally of the US, in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Over the past week, the Trump administration has all but shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which coordinates the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the world’s largest effort to combat HIV/AIDS. PEPFAR has been critical to South Africa’s fight against the disease – of the $320 million aid committed to the country by the US in 2024, more than $220 million went to support its HIV/AIDS program.

In his February 3 post on X, Ramaphosa wrote that “With the exception of PEPFAR Aid, which constitutes 17% of South Africa’s HIVAids programme, there is no other funding that is received by South Africa from the United States”.

South Africa is estimated to have more than 9 million HIV-positive people, more than any other country. The future of PEPFAR is uncertain.