TRUMP THREATENS TO CUT DONOR AID TO SOUTH AFRICA
Cancelling Donor Aid Is Good, But It is False That South Africa is Planning Farmland Seizures
I will start by saying that I fully support Trump cutting “donor aid” to foreign countries. Donor Aid is nothing, but a gigantic influence peddling operation used by western countries to gain a say in the affairs of recipient nations.
That explains why UK continues to shovel money at China and India under an outdated donor aid scheme that was packaged back in the early 1970s when both Asian nations were extremely poor. These huge countries have since grown wealthier. In fact, China itself gives interest-free financial aid packages to countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. And yet, the United Kingdom, whose economy has shrunken in size over the decades, continues to insist on keeping alive the 1970s era donor aid programme for China and India.
Why is that? Well, for the answer, I refer you to February 2012 when India decided to buy French Rafale jet fighters instead of Eurofighter Typhoon, which is partly British-built. India’s decision to patronize French military industry not only angered British politicians, it even prompted hysterical threats of cutting UK donor aid to the South Asian country.
In other words, the UK government sees its financial aid packages as leverage to be used against the recipient country. Of course, India called the bluff of British politicians, asking them to withdraw their financial aid if they so pleased. The British refused to follow through on their threat and carried on pumping the “donor aid” to India. Wealthy China also continues to receive “donor aid packages” from the United Kingdom, albeit downsized.
The ruling British political elites insist on giving away these unsolicited monies because they delude themselves into believing that “donor aid” buys them influence and a say in the local affairs of both Asian giants. And even when their attempts to interfere in the affairs both Asian countries repeatedly fail, British ruling elites steadfastly hold onto the belief that their financial aid allows them to have a foot in the doors of both nations. The US political establishment is of the same mentality. They see American largesse in the form of “donor aid” as a powerful tool for influence and control in recipient countries.
The fact of the matter is that South Africa does not need American “donor aid” packages as it makes enough money from tax remittances from its indigenous companies spread all over Africa (e.g. MTN Group) and from its export of diamonds, coal and gold. Nevertheless, just like India and China, South Africa is quite happy to accept freebies from Western nations when they are offered. Trump cutting American influence-peddling “donor aid” will have no effect whatsoever on the South African political and cultural landscape.
A cursory look at his social media post leaves no doubt that Trump—like most Americans— is grossly misinformed about the situation in South Africa due to the influence of ignoramuses and outright liars that run rightwing US media outlets.
Rightwing media in USA tries hard to convince its audience that 4.7 million white citizens of South Africa are in turmoil despite their full integration into the society where they function as judges, lawyers, doctors, engineers, civil servants, government ministers, parliamentarians, accountants, police officers, military officers, etc.
Unfortunate crimes committed by common criminals in recent times against a small fraction of whites—mainly rural farmers—are grossly misrepresented to give the impression that the entire white population of South Africa is about to be exterminated.
Does the South African government practice “affirmative action” as claimed by the rightwing US media? Yes, it does. But not to the ridiculously exaggerated extent that I normally read in those media outlets. Let me use the South African armed forces of the post-apartheid state as an example to burst some of the myths flying around.
With the end of the apartheid South African state in 1994, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) was created by merging apartheid-era SADF, Umkhonto We Sizwe (UWS) and the Azania People’s Liberation Army (APLA).
UWS was the military wing of the African National Congress when it was still an underground activist organisation campaigning for multiracial democracy to replace the autocratic apartheid regime. A sizeable number of senior-ranking UWS personnel received military training in the Soviet Union and its East European satellite states.
The rival APLA was the military wing of the extremist Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which rejected the idea of multiracialism and wanted a racially exclusive state for black South Africans only. Accordingly, PAC only admitted blacks into its organization while ANC admitted people of all races who opposed the apartheid regime. Because of its extremism, PAC did not receive widespread support in most African countries, and its rabid anti-communism precluded it from getting any military assistance from the Soviets and other Communist nations. The only exception was Maoist China, which provided some token assistance to PAC and its armed wing, APLA.
While UWS paramilitary fighters mostly focused on carrying out waves of bomb blasts, sabotage operations and cross-border raids mostly aimed at the apartheid regime, their APLA rivals straightforwardly carried out a campaign of murdering white rural farmers under its “One Settler, One Bullet” policy, which was designed to mock the ANC slogan of “One Man, One Vote” for all South Africans, regardless of race. Horrific murders of farmers and their families carried out by APLA paramilitaries was a veritable part of the salad bowel of propaganda fodder used by the apartheid regime to justify its violent subjugation of all non-white racial groups in the country, including the black majority.
In the spirit of post-apartheid reconciliation of 1994, the various military formations that fought each other in the past were combined to form the SANDF. Contrary to the rubbish that one reads from rightwing US media outlets, no attempts were made to purge all whites who had served in apartheid era institutions, including the defunct South African Defence Force (SADF). White military personnel transferred to the post-apartheid SANDF.
General Georg Meiring was in charge of the SADF when the apartheid regime ceased to exist. He was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to run post-apartheid SANDF from 1994 to 1998. General Siphiwe Nyanda— the former deputy commander of the defunct Umkhonto We Sizwe— was the first black South African to head the racially integrated SANDF when he succeeded Georg Meiring in June 1998.
Senior white military officers who commanded the ground forces (army) of the post-apartheid SANDF include Lieutenant-General Hattingh Pretorius, who served as the army commander until December 1994, followed by his successor Lieutenant-General Reginald Otto, who held the post until June 1998. Major-General Michal J. de Goede, who is currently in service, assumed the role of acting army commander from 2019 to 2020, following the sudden death of the preceding black army commander, Lieutenant-General Thabiso Mokhosi, on 10 December 2019.
Lieutenant-General James Kriel was overall commander of the air force of apartheid SADF. He remained in his position after SADF was dissolved and reconstituted as the post-apartheid SANDF. He retired in 1996 after 37 years in military service. His successor as air force commander was another white senior officer, Lieutenant General Willem Hendrik Hechter, who served until his own retirement in February 2000 after 35 years in military uniform. Another white officer, Lieutenant-General Roelf Beukes, replaced him as South African Air Force commander and served until retirement in February 2005. Lieutenant-General Carlo Gagiano, yet another white officer, took over from Rolf Beukes and served as air force commander until his retirement in 2012 after 44 years as a military officer.
Lieutenant-General Fabian Msimang— a former Umkhonto We Sizwe fighter trained in Soviet military aviation schools—became the first black commander of the racially integrated South African Air Force upon the retirement of Carlo Gagiano.
What about the navy of post-apartheid SANDF? Well, the Mandela government retained the apartheid-era naval chief, Vice-Admiral Robert Claude Simpson-Anderson, who is of English ancestry, until his retirement on 31 October 2000 after 36 years in uniform. He was promptly succeeded by a Dutch-Afrikaner naval chief, Vice Admiral Johan Retief, who served until his own retirement on 28 February 2005 after 38 years in military service.
Eleven years after Nelson Mandela’s government ushered in the post-apartheid era, SANDF got its first black navy chief in the form of Vice Admiral Refiloe Mudimu, a former Umkhonto We Sizwe fighter who received his military training in Angola, USSR and the German Democratic Republic.
None of the information provided above diminishes the reality of the “affirmative action” policies implemented by the post-apartheid South African state. However, these policies appear to be hyper-focused on the country’s business sector and are structured to enrich politically-connected black South Africans.
Indeed, the “affirmative action” programmes developed by Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Commission failed in its stated mission to redress the economic inequalities among ordinary black South Africans created by apartheid state policies. Nevertheless, it successfully addressed the economic standing of several well-connected ANC stalwarts such as Saki Macozoma, Mosima “Tokyo” Sexwale, Patrice Motsepe and Cyril Ramaphosa who was the chairman of the BEE Commission in 1998.
BEE programmes of the late 1990s stand as excellent examples of how “socialist” political activists such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa learned to Stop Worrying About Class Inequalities and Love the Bourgeoise Lifestyle of Wealthy Businessmen. Instead of Slim Pickens cheerfully riding on a falling aerial N-bomb in Dr Strangelove, imagine ANC stalwarts swimming in a gigantic pool of cash and diamonds.
Two decades later, Cyril would become President of South Africa and admit that BEE programmes have severe shortcomings. But his solution to the problem is to “reform” the BEE programmes to ensure that “they are not exploited for corrupt purposes.” Talk of closing the barn door after the donkey had escaped, lived a long life in the wild forests, and died peacefully of old age.
On a more serious note, I personally abhor any “affirmative action” scheme as I have witnessed its unfairness in the form of the ethno-regional quota system used by federally-owned Nigerian universities to offer admission to students with poor grades from the Northern states at the expense of students with superior grades from the Southern states.
The quota system is justified on grounds that the Northern states—with their extremely low literacy rates—are “educationally less developed” and therefore need “affirmative action” to compete with their Southern counterparts.
Following the familiar trajectory of other countries that has implemented some form of “affirmative action”, the quota system in Nigeria has failed to achieve anything tangible. After several decades of implementing it, the “educationally less developed states” of the North are still lagging behind. Meanwhile, huge resentment exists among Southerners at whose expense the federal quota system is being operated.
But I digress. Circling back to South Africa, it is intriguing the obsession with which rightwing US media follow the boisterous character known as Julius Malema— a man kicked out of the ANC over a series of transgressions that alarmed the senior leadership of the party.
Some of those transgressions include: (1) challenging the authority of Jacob Zuma who was then ANC leader and President of South Africa; (2) the violent thuggish behaviour of his followers; (3) visiting Mugabe-ruled Zimbabwe to announce support for violent land seizures at a time when ANC was trying to portray itself as an impartial mediator between Zanu-PF and the opposition MDC party; (4) racially provocative comments that did not sit well with ANC, which has white party officials; (5) verbally attacking then-incumbent Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan who was an ANC member of Indian South African descent.
Initial disciplinary procedures against Malema by the ANC in May 2010 ended with him being asked to undergo “anger management classes”. He was also asked to apologize to party leaders including Jacob Zuma. Within a year, Malema was back to criticizing ANC party elders, especially the utterly corrupt Zuma. The final straw was Malema’s embarrassment of South Africa by wading into the affairs of neighbouring Republic of Botswana.
The government of Botswana was strongly opposed to the repressive policies of Mugabe’s government, which was causing many Zimbabweans to flee as economic refugees across the Zimbabwe-Botswana border. The upper middle-income country was then governed by the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP).
Being a strong supporter of the violent land expropriations in Zimbabwe, Julius Malema publicly denounced the Botswana Democratic Party as “a foot stool of imperialism, a security threat to Africa, and always under constant puppetry of the United States.”
The ANC reacted to the speech by starting another internal disciplinary process in August 2011 that was marred by the violence of Malema’s supporters at the party headquarters in Johannesburg.
In November 2011, the disciplinary committee chaired by Derek Hanekom announced its intention to remove Julius Malema from his leadership of the the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) and suspend his membership of ANC for five years for “bringing the party into disrepute”.
A protracted appeals process ensued, during which Malema repeatedly disparaged members of the committee whom he was attempting to persuade to reconsider their verdict. Given the incorrigibility of Malema, the disciplinary committee changed its verdict from suspension to outright expulsion in February 2012.
In April 2012, Cyril Ramaphosa— then the deputy leader of the ANC—confirmed that Malema had exhausted the appeal process and was permanently banished from the ANC.
Free of the strictures of the ANC, Julius Malema created a brand new political party in his own image, which he called the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The EFF blends Marxist rhetoric with “black nationalism”.
I am yet to see evidence that Malema extends his incendiary rhetoric to white members of the ANC. For now, his invectives seem to be directed mainly at white liberal politicians that dominate the Democratic Alliance (DA) for their staunch transatlantic worldview.
It is a fact that within the coalition government of South Africa, liberal cabinet ministers belonging to the DA tend to support NATO, Zelensky’s Ukraine, and the ICC arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin. These stances frequently lead to disagreements between these liberal cabinet ministers and their russophile ANC counterparts in the governing coalition. Just for added context, there are six cabinet ministers (4 whites and 2 blacks) belonging to DA. By contrast, ANC has 22 cabinet ministers (21 black and 1 white).
The apartheid-nostalgic white conservative party, Freedom Front Plus (FFP), has 6 seats in parliament, and is not known to care much for foreign policy matters. Instead, it is absorbed in its self-proclaimed role as the “defender of rights and interests of Dutch-Afrikaner minority and Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds.” In South African parlance, Coloureds refers to individuals of mixed race ancestry.
Nevertheless, the lone cabinet minister representing FFP in the coalition government—Pieter Groenewald—has expressed some sympathy for Israel and condemned ANC for involving South Africa in the Gaza genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unsurprisingly, Pieter is also opposed to any land expropriation programme that doesn’t include compensation. Both stances puts him and his FFP on the opposite side of Julius Malema.
When Malema is not accusing white South African opposition politicians of “western imperialism” or declaring his love for Vladimir Putin (see above video), he engages in racially incendiary rhetoric against rural white farmers who cultivate the farmland that Malema wants to forcibly expropriate in the Zimbabwean style.
Of course, it is not strictly true that he wants expropriation to follow the Zimbabwean style. Most of the violent seizures of farmland from white Zimbabwean farmers were not carried out by official government agencies. It was performed by a pro-Mugabe non-governmental organization called Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association, which had 30, 000 members and received its funding from the ruling political party, ZANU-PF.
For obvious reasons, Julius Malema would prefer a national government to carry out an “orderly” South African version rather than the thuggish non-governmental organization that executed the chaotic Zimbabwean original.
Malema’s racial rhetoric not only unnerve some white South Africans, it also attracts the rapt attention of rightwing US media that exaggerate the importance of a motormouth whose EFF party performs well below the DA. In the 2024 election, EFF managed to secure 9.52% of the total votes cast.
Rightwing US media largely ignores the fact that the white-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) consistently secures 20-22% of the votes in general elections and is steadily increasing the number of municipalities across the country that it governs. Equally ignored is the trend where many middle-class blacks, disillusioned with the ANC, are now supporting smaller opposition parties, including the DA.
Instead, US rightwing media plays Julius Malema’s videos on a loop to stupefy its domestic audience, which obviously includes Donald Trump. Does the newly elected US President know that South Africa is currently governed by a coalition government consisting of several political parties including ANC, DA and FFP? I bet the answer is “No”.
By the way, there are no forcible farmland seizures about to break out in South Africa. There is indeed a new law passed by the South African Parliament that allows national, provincial and local authorities to expropriate land for public purpose subject to a just and equitable compensation being paid.
Last I checked every nation in the world has a similar law. In the United States, that law is called Eminent Domain.
Unfortunately, outright lies and misinformation travel thousands of miles before the truth is able to put on its running shoes.
In the video clip below, Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, expresses his fears that misinformation about the new land law might lead Trump to go beyond his stated plan to withdraw “donor aid” and impose US tariffs (or a trade embargo) that would adversely affect many jobs in the agricultural sector of South Africa:
Of course, the US-based South African billionaire Elon Musk is fully aware of all of this. Many of his close relatives still live in South Africa. But being a resident of hyper-racially sensitive country like USA, he cannot resist the urge to manipulate and grift his way into the favour of ordinary conservative white voters displeased with his advocacy for increased legal immigration through H-1B Visas.
*******
POSTSCRIPT : I intend to publish a comprehensive article in the future that delves into the history of South Africa and provides insights into the country's current state of affairs. The upcoming article will aim to debunk all the nonsense propagated by media outlets, especially those right-leaning ones in the USA. In the meantime, I recommend that you read my previous article discussing Zimbabwe, if you haven’t already read it.
Dear reader, if you like my work and feel like making a small donation, then kindly make for my Digital Tip Jar at Buy Me A Coffee. You can also click the yellow image above.
My possibly naive view is that trump uses whatever excuse to put pressure on South Africa. Other African countries to follow.
To me it is clear that he nervously follows the Cold War era strategy by consolidating his backyard (americas), seeking expansion (Greenland) and asserting influence in Africa.
What this administration seems to be acutely aware of is that the new world order is forming and their understanding is that we are moving back to Cold War era spheres of influence. Trump is in a hurry to achieve especially the backyard cleaning. I expect a coup, military intervention or both in Venezuela soon, possibly other south and Central American countries, and increased “interest” in Africa.
In South Africa, are Presidents appointed by Parliament?
That was my impression after reading that EFF represents <10% of voters.