(AFP) – President Donald Trump said Friday South African farmers were welcome to settle in the United States after repeating his accusations that the government was “confiscating” land from white people as he announced an end to federal funding. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” He said the process would begin immediately, calling the country a “bad place to be right now” as he announced a halt to all US aid to Pretoria.
Trump and Pretoria are locked in a diplomatic row over a land expropriation act that the Republican leader says will lead to the takeover of white-owned farms. The South African presidency swiftly responded, saying in a statement that it would not engage in “counterproductive megaphone diplomacy.” Trump, whose close aide Elon Musk was born in South Africa, said in February that a law signed the previous month would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” The law stipulates that the government may, in certain circumstances, offer “nil compensation” for property it decides to expropriate in the public interest.
English and Afrikaner colonists ruled South Africa until 1994 under a brutal system in which the black majority were deprived of political and economic rights. The new law is intended to address historic inequalities in land ownership, with the minority white population still owning most farmland three decades after the end of apartheid. But Trump accused the country of “being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country.”
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has said he wants to find agreement with the new US government on diplomatic, trade, and other issues. Ramaphosa announced in February that Pretoria plans to send a delegation to Washington to settle a host of issues. “We would like to go to the United States to do a deal,” he said in a discussion with Goldman Sachs vice chairman Richard Gnodde. “We don’t want to go and explain ourselves, we want to go and do a meaningful deal with the United States on a whole range of issues,” he said.
Ramaphosa said he had a “wonderful” call with Trump soon after the US leader took office in January. But relations later “seemed to go a little bit off the rails,” he said. Many of Trump’s high-profile supporters took to social media to praise his leadership, although far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who accompanied Trump to events during his campaign, voiced concerns over adding to migration in the United States. “Let’s hope we can increase the number of mass deportations first. Immigration won’t get better if more people come in while deportation numbers remain extremely low,” she posted on X.
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