Musk’s outrage over land reform in South Africa isn’t about fairness—it’s about fueling right-wing paranoia and preserving economic privilege.
February 19, 2025
Source: Africa Is a Country
Vineyard in the Western Cape. Image credit Chadolfski via Shutterstock.
Elon Musk is reconnecting with his country of birth. In recent weeks, he has rustled up a global right-wing panic over South Africa’s land ownership laws and affirmative action policies, culminating in Donald Trump issuing an executive order ending US financial assistance to South Africa and welcoming ethnic Afrikaners, who are supposedly “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” to resettle in America. Musk’s claims have found traction with right-wing Afrikaner nationalist groups at home, who have spent years stoking paranoia that white South Africans are an embattled minority facing persecution.
This whole debacle is absurd and divorced from reality. First, the impugned law —the Expropriation Act—signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in late January, does not give the state carte blanche to seize property without compensation. It only allows for the possibility of “nil compensation” in specific and limited circumstances, particularly when land is expropriated in the public interest. This may apply to unused land, properties without development plans or profit, or properties posing a community risk.
The Expropriation Act aims to rectify historical injustices in South Africa’s land ownership by replacing outdated apartheid-era laws with a framework that prioritizes public interest over private privilege. Rooted in constitutional principles, it moves away from the “willing seller, willing buyer” model, which historically protected white landowners, and instead ensures expropriation occurs with just and equitable compensation (rather than market-driven valuations). Contrary to claims that it allows land seizures without payment, the act follows a long-standing global legal tradition permitting states to expropriate property for public benefit.
To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical of the policy. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption and political capture have hindered South Africa’s land reform policies, making them slow, mismanaged, and largely ineffective. The government’s inability to process claims efficiently, coupled with widespread mismanagement and graft, has led to delays, disputes, and land deals that often benefit politically connected elites rather than the landless poor. Even when land is redistributed, a lack of post-settlement support—such as financial assistance, infrastructure, and technical training—has left many new black landowners unable to sustain agricultural production. As a result, land reform has failed to meaningfully redress historical dispossession, instead serving as a vehicle for elite enrichment while the majority of black South Africans remain landless and economically marginalized.
Advocates of expropriation without compensation often frame it as a working-class struggle, but in reality, its discourse has been driven by middle-class and elite voices, particularly within the ANC and the EFF, rather than foregrounding the landless poor. Although two-thirds of the South African population broadly support land reform in principle, it is a national priority for fewer than five percent of South African adults, while access to formal jobs and basic services dominate concerns.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical populist party founded in 2013 by Julius Malema, has been one of the loudest voices pushing for land expropriation, using fiery rhetoric about “taking back the land” to mobilize downwardly-mobile youth, unemployed South Africans, and the disillusioned black middle class. While the EFF frames itself as a movement for the dispossessed, its leadership—which it is increasingly losing to rival political parties—consists of former ANC Youth League members and black professionals who operate within South Africa’s political mainstreams. Its ideological commitments are often contradictory—prioritizing racial antagonism over class struggle, lacking deep engagement with working-class movements (most glaringly with organized labor), and operating within a highly centralized leadership structure that limits internal democracy.
The power of “the land question” comes not from any serious plan to support smallholder farmers or provide well-located urban housing and secure land tenure (which is what grassroots land justice movements campaign for) but from its historical resonance as the ultimate marker of dispossession. The ANC, feeling electoral pressure from the EFF, adopted expropriation without compensation into its platform, not because it felt that doing so made sense as a well-thought-out policy, but as a political concession to a growing nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile, the real issues—how to democratize land ownership and prevent beyond elite capture, ensure urban land reform, and provide infrastructure for land recipients—remain overshadowed by political spectacle. In the end, expropriation without compensation has functioned less as a tool for redistribution and more as a symbolic project for reclaiming black sovereignty within a post-apartheid state that still feels to many South Africans to be constrained by white economic dominance.
Yet this is not why the right is up in arms. Instead, the global right—and Musk in particular—have seized on land reform as a vehicle for their broader ideological agenda: stoking fears of white victimhood, discrediting post-apartheid South Africa as a failed state, and reinforcing the narrative that diversity policies inevitably lead to chaos and decline. The outcry has little to do with the real challenges of land reform and everything to do with advancing a political project that portrays any attempt at redress as an attack on white property rights.
This same reactionary impulse is evident in the contrived histrionics over Julius Malema’s singing of “Kill the Boer.” The chant, which dates back to the anti-apartheid struggle, has been a subject of legal battles and political controversy. Yet, there is no evidence linking it to orchestrated violence against white farmers (meanwhile, South African courts have repeatedly ruled that the chant, while provocative, is not literal incitement to violence). But for Musk and his allies––supposed free speech absolutists––the song serves as a useful prop in their narrative of white persecution. Some have even gone as far as alleging “white genocide,” which, even for the Anti-Defamation League, is a step too far.
Musk and his affiliates’ outrage is less about the song’s lyrics, history, or context, and more about reinforcing the idea that black political power in South Africa is inherently threatening. Ironically, this only plays into Malema’s hands—his politics thrive on provocation, and every pearl-clutching reaction from the global right bolsters his image as an uncompromising opponent of white capital. The more the global right froths at the mouth, the more Malema can present himself as the figure who unsettles the right people, keeping his populist credentials intact. It is a mutually reinforcing spectacle—one that ultimately does little to advance the material interests of landless South Africans.
The hysteria surrounding South Africa’s land reform policies is, in part, fueled by the specter of “Zimbabwefication.” The global right has long used Zimbabwe’s land seizures of the early 2000s as a cautionary tale of what happens when black-majority governments challenge white property ownership. The narrative goes that Zimbabwe’s economic collapse was a direct result of land expropriation rather than a combination of mismanagement, corruption, and structural economic constraints. This crude analogy ignores fundamental differences: unlike Zimbabwe’s forced land seizures, South Africa’s Expropriation Act remains bound by constitutional provisions ensuring fairness and public interest. More importantly, the comparison assumes that black-led governments cannot administer land reform responsibly, reinforcing a racist paternalism that undergirds much of the right’s critique.
The same ideological project is at work in the outcry over South Africa’s affirmative action policies. While it is true that employment and shareholding equity laws have been inconsistently applied and, at times, weaponized for cronyism, the broader claim that white South Africans are being systematically excluded from the economy is baseless. White South Africans continue to occupy the most lucrative positions in business, control the majority of private wealth, and benefit from generational economic advantages that decades of slow-moving transformation have failed to undo. Affirmative action, far from dismantling this entrenched inequality, has mainly served to cultivate a small black elite while leaving the structural dynamics of racialized wealth accumulation intact. But this is not what inflames Musk and his allies. Their real concern is not fairness or economic justice—it is the preservation of white economic dominance.
The irony is that some white South Africans, particularly those who reject the reactionary preoccupations of the right, remain trapped in self-defeating melancholia. Many claim to support “non-racialism” in principle but have not fully reconciled with the reality that true non-racialism requires dismantling the economic privileges they still enjoy. The Democratic Alliance, for example, who govern precariously in a coalition with the ANC, oppose “race-based” policies but stop short of advocating for more precise markers of disadvantage.
Instead, the DA has mastered the art of triangulation—publicly distancing itself from the global right while occasionally pandering to its anxieties. It sees itself as a liberal, meritocratic center, defending individual opportunity against both the ANC’s corruption and the EFF’s racial populism. Yet its version of meritocracy remains blind to structural inequalities, treating racial redress as a form of “racial nationalism” rather than a necessary response to historical dispossession. The party selectively engages with right-wing grievances—criticizing affirmative action, land reform, and the de-commodification of healthcare in ways that subtly affirm white fears—while simultaneously rejecting the overt racial nationalism of Musk’s panic or the Afrikaner lobby groups. But this strategy of appeasement and evasion only deepens its crisis, leaving it caught between a core electorate uneasy with change and a broader public that sees it as lacking a meaningful vision for redistribution.
Genuine progress demands more than nostalgia for a mythical, depoliticized “rainbow nation” consensus—it requires an acknowledgment that economic justice is not a zero-sum game. The challenge for progressives, then, is to frame redistribution as a punitive project targeting white South Africans, but as a universalist one that benefits the working class across racial lines (including those racially classified as “Coloured” and “Indian.”).
Even among those white South Africans who claim to see themselves as victims, few are actually willing to emigrate (for their part, the most prominent Afrikaner lobby group in South Africa, AfriForum, has said that the price of leaving would be “too high” and have walked back some of their earlier claims about the extent of land seizures). The Trump administration’s offer of “resettlement” for ethnic Afrikaners is pure political theater—South Africans, even those disillusioned with the country’s direction, are unlikely to trade in their relatively comfortable lives for an uncertain future in the US.
The imagined exodus of white South Africans fleeing “oppression” to build a new life abroad is an old fantasy, one that has circulated since the end of apartheid, but remains largely unrealized. The simple reason is that, despite the challenges, South Africa still offers a higher quality of life for many white citizens than the precarious existence they would face as economic migrants in the US or Europe. Their sense of victimhood, then, is not rooted in material dispossession but in a psychological discomfort with a country in which their hegemony is no longer unchallenged.
At the heart of the right’s panic is an unspoken truth: South Africa is a black country. This is obvious in its political leadership, its cultural life, and its everyday social reality. The state, the media, and the arts are overwhelmingly shaped by black South Africans, even as economic power remains disproportionately white. That economic imbalance, however, is not static. It is changing, and over time, it will inevitably transform. A society where the vast majority of people—81 percent of the population, and 91 percent if we count Coloreds and Indians—are black cannot remain indefinitely structured by the economic privileges of a small white minority (already, it is intra-racial, rather than inter-racial, inequality that contributes more to total inequality). Whether by gradual reform or sudden rupture, economic power will shift. White South Africans must accept this (or frankly, take up Trump’s offer). But so too must black South Africans, many of whom still define their political outlook in relation to whiteness, as though the country’s trajectory will always be determined by racial contestation rather than by internal class and ideological divisions.
The reality is that South Africa’s future will be shaped less by struggles between black and white than by the conflicts and contradictions within the black majority itself. As black South Africans continue to ascend in business, finance, and industry, the divisions between them—between the working class and the elite, the urban and the rural, and the different political and ethnocultural constituencies—will become more decisive than racial cleavages. In some ways, this is already happening: the ANC’s internal fractures, the EFF’s tensions with its base, and the rise of the MK Party—a Zulu-nationalist bloc led by former president Jacob Zuma—all point to a shifting political terrain where black South Africans are increasingly divided by class interests and political ideology rather than simply by a shared history of racial oppression.
This is not to say that race is irrelevant—far from it. The structures of apartheid-era dispossession still loom large over South African life. But the fundamental question of the next decades will not be whether black South Africans can claim political and economic power (they will), but how that power is distributed, who benefits from it, and whether it will be deployed in the interests of the majority or captured by a new elite. This is the conversation that must take center stage, rather than the tired distractions of white grievance politics or racial theatrics from political actors who thrive on polarization.
Musk’s intervention, then, is not just a distortion of South Africa’s realities, it is a symptom of a broader political malaise. His claims about land reform and affirmative action do not emerge in isolation but are part of an international right-wing strategy to undermine racial justice efforts, delegitimize post-colonial states, and recast white populations as besieged minorities. That this narrative has gained traction among reactionary movements worldwide speaks less to the actual state of South Africa than to the broader anxieties of a global elite struggling to maintain its privilege in an era of political and economic instability.
Yet, if Musk and his allies are eager to use South Africa as a battleground in their culture wars, it is also because they sense an opportunity: a government that has failed to deliver meaningful economic transformation, an opposition too fragmented and opportunistic to challenge the status quo, and a political discourse still ensnared in identity-driven polarization rather than substantive debates about economic justice.
If there is a way forward, it cannot be through reactive defensiveness or liberal appeals to a bygone era of rainbow nationalism. Nor can it be through the kind of cynical racial scapegoating that has turned economic policy into a spectacle of symbolic posturing. The challenge is to articulate a vision of justice that is rooted not in elite capture or racial grievance, but in genuine material transformation—one that reclaims land reform and economic redistribution as projects of mass uplift rather than elite consolidation.
This means reviving a class-based politics that does not allow figures like Musk to set the terms of debate. It means recognizing that economic justice in South Africa will not be achieved through nationalist posturing but through concrete policies that benefit everyone. And it means refusing the false binaries that define so much of the current discourse—between race and class, between redress and economic growth, between historical justice and a viable future.
Musk’s opportunistic intervention will come to nothing, just as Trump’s latest political stunt will fade from the news cycle. The deeper challenge is whether South Africa’s Left can rise to the occasion, reject the distractions, and build an economic program that speaks to the majority. Because until then, the country will remain vulnerable to those who see it not as a place to be transformed, but as a stage for their own ideological battles.
Vineyard in the Western Cape. Image credit Chadolfski via Shutterstock.
Elon Musk is reconnecting with his country of birth. In recent weeks, he has rustled up a global right-wing panic over South Africa’s land ownership laws and affirmative action policies, culminating in Donald Trump issuing an executive order ending US financial assistance to South Africa and welcoming ethnic Afrikaners, who are supposedly “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” to resettle in America. Musk’s claims have found traction with right-wing Afrikaner nationalist groups at home, who have spent years stoking paranoia that white South Africans are an embattled minority facing persecution.
This whole debacle is absurd and divorced from reality. First, the impugned law —the Expropriation Act—signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in late January, does not give the state carte blanche to seize property without compensation. It only allows for the possibility of “nil compensation” in specific and limited circumstances, particularly when land is expropriated in the public interest. This may apply to unused land, properties without development plans or profit, or properties posing a community risk.
The Expropriation Act aims to rectify historical injustices in South Africa’s land ownership by replacing outdated apartheid-era laws with a framework that prioritizes public interest over private privilege. Rooted in constitutional principles, it moves away from the “willing seller, willing buyer” model, which historically protected white landowners, and instead ensures expropriation occurs with just and equitable compensation (rather than market-driven valuations). Contrary to claims that it allows land seizures without payment, the act follows a long-standing global legal tradition permitting states to expropriate property for public benefit.
To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical of the policy. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption and political capture have hindered South Africa’s land reform policies, making them slow, mismanaged, and largely ineffective. The government’s inability to process claims efficiently, coupled with widespread mismanagement and graft, has led to delays, disputes, and land deals that often benefit politically connected elites rather than the landless poor. Even when land is redistributed, a lack of post-settlement support—such as financial assistance, infrastructure, and technical training—has left many new black landowners unable to sustain agricultural production. As a result, land reform has failed to meaningfully redress historical dispossession, instead serving as a vehicle for elite enrichment while the majority of black South Africans remain landless and economically marginalized.
Advocates of expropriation without compensation often frame it as a working-class struggle, but in reality, its discourse has been driven by middle-class and elite voices, particularly within the ANC and the EFF, rather than foregrounding the landless poor. Although two-thirds of the South African population broadly support land reform in principle, it is a national priority for fewer than five percent of South African adults, while access to formal jobs and basic services dominate concerns.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical populist party founded in 2013 by Julius Malema, has been one of the loudest voices pushing for land expropriation, using fiery rhetoric about “taking back the land” to mobilize downwardly-mobile youth, unemployed South Africans, and the disillusioned black middle class. While the EFF frames itself as a movement for the dispossessed, its leadership—which it is increasingly losing to rival political parties—consists of former ANC Youth League members and black professionals who operate within South Africa’s political mainstreams. Its ideological commitments are often contradictory—prioritizing racial antagonism over class struggle, lacking deep engagement with working-class movements (most glaringly with organized labor), and operating within a highly centralized leadership structure that limits internal democracy.
The power of “the land question” comes not from any serious plan to support smallholder farmers or provide well-located urban housing and secure land tenure (which is what grassroots land justice movements campaign for) but from its historical resonance as the ultimate marker of dispossession. The ANC, feeling electoral pressure from the EFF, adopted expropriation without compensation into its platform, not because it felt that doing so made sense as a well-thought-out policy, but as a political concession to a growing nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile, the real issues—how to democratize land ownership and prevent beyond elite capture, ensure urban land reform, and provide infrastructure for land recipients—remain overshadowed by political spectacle. In the end, expropriation without compensation has functioned less as a tool for redistribution and more as a symbolic project for reclaiming black sovereignty within a post-apartheid state that still feels to many South Africans to be constrained by white economic dominance.
Yet this is not why the right is up in arms. Instead, the global right—and Musk in particular—have seized on land reform as a vehicle for their broader ideological agenda: stoking fears of white victimhood, discrediting post-apartheid South Africa as a failed state, and reinforcing the narrative that diversity policies inevitably lead to chaos and decline. The outcry has little to do with the real challenges of land reform and everything to do with advancing a political project that portrays any attempt at redress as an attack on white property rights.
This same reactionary impulse is evident in the contrived histrionics over Julius Malema’s singing of “Kill the Boer.” The chant, which dates back to the anti-apartheid struggle, has been a subject of legal battles and political controversy. Yet, there is no evidence linking it to orchestrated violence against white farmers (meanwhile, South African courts have repeatedly ruled that the chant, while provocative, is not literal incitement to violence). But for Musk and his allies––supposed free speech absolutists––the song serves as a useful prop in their narrative of white persecution. Some have even gone as far as alleging “white genocide,” which, even for the Anti-Defamation League, is a step too far.
Musk and his affiliates’ outrage is less about the song’s lyrics, history, or context, and more about reinforcing the idea that black political power in South Africa is inherently threatening. Ironically, this only plays into Malema’s hands—his politics thrive on provocation, and every pearl-clutching reaction from the global right bolsters his image as an uncompromising opponent of white capital. The more the global right froths at the mouth, the more Malema can present himself as the figure who unsettles the right people, keeping his populist credentials intact. It is a mutually reinforcing spectacle—one that ultimately does little to advance the material interests of landless South Africans.
The hysteria surrounding South Africa’s land reform policies is, in part, fueled by the specter of “Zimbabwefication.” The global right has long used Zimbabwe’s land seizures of the early 2000s as a cautionary tale of what happens when black-majority governments challenge white property ownership. The narrative goes that Zimbabwe’s economic collapse was a direct result of land expropriation rather than a combination of mismanagement, corruption, and structural economic constraints. This crude analogy ignores fundamental differences: unlike Zimbabwe’s forced land seizures, South Africa’s Expropriation Act remains bound by constitutional provisions ensuring fairness and public interest. More importantly, the comparison assumes that black-led governments cannot administer land reform responsibly, reinforcing a racist paternalism that undergirds much of the right’s critique.
The same ideological project is at work in the outcry over South Africa’s affirmative action policies. While it is true that employment and shareholding equity laws have been inconsistently applied and, at times, weaponized for cronyism, the broader claim that white South Africans are being systematically excluded from the economy is baseless. White South Africans continue to occupy the most lucrative positions in business, control the majority of private wealth, and benefit from generational economic advantages that decades of slow-moving transformation have failed to undo. Affirmative action, far from dismantling this entrenched inequality, has mainly served to cultivate a small black elite while leaving the structural dynamics of racialized wealth accumulation intact. But this is not what inflames Musk and his allies. Their real concern is not fairness or economic justice—it is the preservation of white economic dominance.
The irony is that some white South Africans, particularly those who reject the reactionary preoccupations of the right, remain trapped in self-defeating melancholia. Many claim to support “non-racialism” in principle but have not fully reconciled with the reality that true non-racialism requires dismantling the economic privileges they still enjoy. The Democratic Alliance, for example, who govern precariously in a coalition with the ANC, oppose “race-based” policies but stop short of advocating for more precise markers of disadvantage.
Instead, the DA has mastered the art of triangulation—publicly distancing itself from the global right while occasionally pandering to its anxieties. It sees itself as a liberal, meritocratic center, defending individual opportunity against both the ANC’s corruption and the EFF’s racial populism. Yet its version of meritocracy remains blind to structural inequalities, treating racial redress as a form of “racial nationalism” rather than a necessary response to historical dispossession. The party selectively engages with right-wing grievances—criticizing affirmative action, land reform, and the de-commodification of healthcare in ways that subtly affirm white fears—while simultaneously rejecting the overt racial nationalism of Musk’s panic or the Afrikaner lobby groups. But this strategy of appeasement and evasion only deepens its crisis, leaving it caught between a core electorate uneasy with change and a broader public that sees it as lacking a meaningful vision for redistribution.
Genuine progress demands more than nostalgia for a mythical, depoliticized “rainbow nation” consensus—it requires an acknowledgment that economic justice is not a zero-sum game. The challenge for progressives, then, is to frame redistribution as a punitive project targeting white South Africans, but as a universalist one that benefits the working class across racial lines (including those racially classified as “Coloured” and “Indian.”).
Even among those white South Africans who claim to see themselves as victims, few are actually willing to emigrate (for their part, the most prominent Afrikaner lobby group in South Africa, AfriForum, has said that the price of leaving would be “too high” and have walked back some of their earlier claims about the extent of land seizures). The Trump administration’s offer of “resettlement” for ethnic Afrikaners is pure political theater—South Africans, even those disillusioned with the country’s direction, are unlikely to trade in their relatively comfortable lives for an uncertain future in the US.
The imagined exodus of white South Africans fleeing “oppression” to build a new life abroad is an old fantasy, one that has circulated since the end of apartheid, but remains largely unrealized. The simple reason is that, despite the challenges, South Africa still offers a higher quality of life for many white citizens than the precarious existence they would face as economic migrants in the US or Europe. Their sense of victimhood, then, is not rooted in material dispossession but in a psychological discomfort with a country in which their hegemony is no longer unchallenged.
At the heart of the right’s panic is an unspoken truth: South Africa is a black country. This is obvious in its political leadership, its cultural life, and its everyday social reality. The state, the media, and the arts are overwhelmingly shaped by black South Africans, even as economic power remains disproportionately white. That economic imbalance, however, is not static. It is changing, and over time, it will inevitably transform. A society where the vast majority of people—81 percent of the population, and 91 percent if we count Coloreds and Indians—are black cannot remain indefinitely structured by the economic privileges of a small white minority (already, it is intra-racial, rather than inter-racial, inequality that contributes more to total inequality). Whether by gradual reform or sudden rupture, economic power will shift. White South Africans must accept this (or frankly, take up Trump’s offer). But so too must black South Africans, many of whom still define their political outlook in relation to whiteness, as though the country’s trajectory will always be determined by racial contestation rather than by internal class and ideological divisions.
The reality is that South Africa’s future will be shaped less by struggles between black and white than by the conflicts and contradictions within the black majority itself. As black South Africans continue to ascend in business, finance, and industry, the divisions between them—between the working class and the elite, the urban and the rural, and the different political and ethnocultural constituencies—will become more decisive than racial cleavages. In some ways, this is already happening: the ANC’s internal fractures, the EFF’s tensions with its base, and the rise of the MK Party—a Zulu-nationalist bloc led by former president Jacob Zuma—all point to a shifting political terrain where black South Africans are increasingly divided by class interests and political ideology rather than simply by a shared history of racial oppression.
This is not to say that race is irrelevant—far from it. The structures of apartheid-era dispossession still loom large over South African life. But the fundamental question of the next decades will not be whether black South Africans can claim political and economic power (they will), but how that power is distributed, who benefits from it, and whether it will be deployed in the interests of the majority or captured by a new elite. This is the conversation that must take center stage, rather than the tired distractions of white grievance politics or racial theatrics from political actors who thrive on polarization.
Musk’s intervention, then, is not just a distortion of South Africa’s realities, it is a symptom of a broader political malaise. His claims about land reform and affirmative action do not emerge in isolation but are part of an international right-wing strategy to undermine racial justice efforts, delegitimize post-colonial states, and recast white populations as besieged minorities. That this narrative has gained traction among reactionary movements worldwide speaks less to the actual state of South Africa than to the broader anxieties of a global elite struggling to maintain its privilege in an era of political and economic instability.
Yet, if Musk and his allies are eager to use South Africa as a battleground in their culture wars, it is also because they sense an opportunity: a government that has failed to deliver meaningful economic transformation, an opposition too fragmented and opportunistic to challenge the status quo, and a political discourse still ensnared in identity-driven polarization rather than substantive debates about economic justice.
If there is a way forward, it cannot be through reactive defensiveness or liberal appeals to a bygone era of rainbow nationalism. Nor can it be through the kind of cynical racial scapegoating that has turned economic policy into a spectacle of symbolic posturing. The challenge is to articulate a vision of justice that is rooted not in elite capture or racial grievance, but in genuine material transformation—one that reclaims land reform and economic redistribution as projects of mass uplift rather than elite consolidation.
This means reviving a class-based politics that does not allow figures like Musk to set the terms of debate. It means recognizing that economic justice in South Africa will not be achieved through nationalist posturing but through concrete policies that benefit everyone. And it means refusing the false binaries that define so much of the current discourse—between race and class, between redress and economic growth, between historical justice and a viable future.
Musk’s opportunistic intervention will come to nothing, just as Trump’s latest political stunt will fade from the news cycle. The deeper challenge is whether South Africa’s Left can rise to the occasion, reject the distractions, and build an economic program that speaks to the majority. Because until then, the country will remain vulnerable to those who see it not as a place to be transformed, but as a stage for their own ideological battles.
Trump’s Fake Refugees
February 18, 2025
Source: Africa Is A Country
Image by Tia Dufour, public domain
Amidst the slew of executive orders issued by US President Donald Trump—ranging from reinstating plastic straws, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and proclaiming that only two genders exist—one, in particular, reverberated around braais, brandies-and-cokes, and bakkies from Brackenfell to Benoni: the executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” which included the policy that the “United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that the “United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The reaction to the announcement that Afrikaners—historically beneficiaries of the policy of apartheid, which included the most egregious state-sponsored dispossession and disenfranchisement—would now themselves be branded as refugees, ranged from ridicule to enthusiasm. Among Trump’s considerable support base among conservative Afrikaners, there was a smug elation following what they read as a recognition of their complaints that they were being threatened, marginalized, and at risk of losing their land. These complaints had particularly been fanned and promoted in recent years by the Afrikaner rights group AfriForum, who had been pushing a white genocide narrative for many years. Representatives of AfriForum had visited Washington, where they met Republican officials, appeared on conservative media outlets like The Tucker Carlson Show, and also extended their roadshows to conservative think tanks and conferences in Europe, like CPAC in Hungary. Here, they painted a dire picture of a South Africa where white farmers are under constant attack, on the verge of losing their ancestral land, and unfairly targeted by a corrupt and totalitarian government that discriminates against them in a type of reverse apartheid. Their deft communication strategy found sympathetic ears among US conservatives, and with Trump’s reelection, this campaign finally paid off. The White House’s justifications for the executive order read almost like an AfriForum press release and it is clear that AfriForum’s white victimhood discourse heavily influenced the Trump administration’s rhetoric and rationale.
Within South Africa—outside of the conservative minority of Trump supporters—the executive order met with responses ranging from ridicule to disgust. The government, political parties, and civil society groups have condemned it as a misrepresentation of South African policies and social realities. Faced with the strong backlash, AfriForum rejected Trump’s offer and said they remain committed to the country, but blamed the ANC government for the White House’s animosity.
But the executive order to fast-track refugee status to Afrikaners is anything but a humanitarian gesture from the White House. Instead, it aligns with the US president’s ideological playbook and political needs. Domestically, he has long thrived on stoking fears of “invasion” or cultural displacement—usually targeting immigrants of color. It is doubtful that Trump really knows or cares that much about South African farmers in particular. It is instead a cynical move to energize his right-wing base with a racialized narrative: casting himself as the defender of embattled white people against a supposedly vengeful black majority. This allows Trump to appeal to nativist conservatives who normally disdain refugee admissions but will make an exception when the refugees in question are white and Christian. South Africa is providing him with a convenient case study to support his talking points about the dangers of “woke” policies and the need to protect Western civilization. By offering sanctuary to Afrikaners, Trump signals that his America will serve as a haven for those who look and think like his core voters, even as it slams the door on others.
Geopolitically, the executive order plays into Trump’s nationalistic ideology and supports his objectives of isolating adversaries. The order juxtaposes a purported defense of a white South African minority with a reaffirmation of the US’s support for Israel. It condemns South Africa’s “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump clearly wants to be seen as punishing South Africa for bringing a case against Israel. In this regard, Afrikaner farmers are used as pawns in a much bigger geopolitical game. The irony of creating a fake class of refugees at the same time as suggesting that Gazans become refugees in neighboring countries because Israel, with the support of the US, turned the Gaza strip into a “demolition site” would not have escaped South Africans demanding justice for Palestinians.
Trump’s executive order, the campaign building up to it, and the response it elicited is, perhaps, first and foremost, a media event. The daily signing of a stack of leather-bound orders piled on the Resolute desk in the White House, is staged for the media to transmit the semiotic weight of power, determination and clarity of purpose. But Trump is no friend of the news media. On his own Truth Social platform, Trump referred to what he deems “a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.” This invocation of the “radical left media” is another signal to his base—his hostility to the press is well-known. During his previous campaign he repeatedly criticized the so-called fake news media and attacked journalists. By labeling the media as “radical” and “left” it makes it easy for him to delegitimize media criticism among his base, which has been primed to reject anything that is “left” or “woke.”
In South Africa, the media have also played a significant role in setting the agenda around farm murders and amplifying AfriForum’s campaigns. Even if support for the movement varies across outlets—most positive, of course, in the media outlet Maroela Media, established by Afriforum and its umbrella body Solidariteit—the movement has routinely been referred to as a “civil rights organization” instead of an Afrikaner-rights organization, and its statements and campaigns enjoyed widespread media coverage. Farm murders also attract coverage from a media that tends to attach more significance to white deaths than black ones. Afrikaans media, in particular, have, over many years, contributed to a victim narrative, constructing their readers as a people under siege. The organization is also very adept at using social media. Although they now deny having influenced the US president, AfriForum seems to have forgotten how they bragged on social media about their attempts to “garner support and lobby against racist theft” since 2018.
Related to media coverage is the issue of disinformation. The South African government has expressed concern about what it termed Trump’s “campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.” Not only has not a single piece of land been expropriated without compensation by the democratic government since 1994, but the act has not yet come into operation and will be subject to the Constitution. Ironically, in pointing out the misinformation, the ANC is now forced to admit the pace of land reform has been very slow. The idea that white Afrikaners are particularly singled out for violent crime is also false, even though it is a prevailing narrative in emotive arguments about a purported white genocide, including posts on X by Trump’s sidekick, the billionaire Elon Musk, whose white, privileged upbringing seems to keep informing his view of the country of his birth. Farm killings—violent and abhorrent as they may be—should be seen against the background of a massive crime problem in the country. Just last year, 27,000 people were killed, amounting to 45 people per 100,000. But statistics show that the murder crisis is even more acute for the country’s black majority, where homicides are more frequent but attract far less media coverage. Research indicates that while white South Africans make up around 8 percent of the population, they account for less than 2 percent of murder victims. None of these statistics resonate in Musk’s cheap shots at controversial politicians like Julius Malema, whose heated, theatrical rhetorical style is not that far removed from Trump’s own populist genre.
It has to be said, though, that although right-wing Afrikaner groups have been most vocal and visible in their attempts to push the white victimhood narratives, these ideas and attitudes are also present in some form in broader mainstream discourses, whether in formal politics (disillusionment among white voters has long been providing the Democratic Alliance with political capital, and they have already launched legal action against the Expropriation Bill) or the social class dynamics of suburban elites. It should also be noted that the majority of Afrikaans speakers are not white, and although AfriForum has attempted to co-opt “Coloured” communities, they do not share identical political attitudes.
If Trump had hoped for the executive order to extract subservience and attrition from South Africa, the response, by and large, has been the opposite. There is no question that US sanctions and discontinuation of aid will have a severe impact on the country’s economy and increase the misery of especially the poor black majority. If anything, this will damage US soft power in South Africa and lead South Africa to pursue its own strategic interests to a larger extent within the BRICS group of countries, and in particular China, which is already its largest trade partner. There has already been a decline in the positive perception of the US among South Africans, as Afrobarometer surveys have shown. The move may also have continent-wide resonance. The US can no longer rest on its laurels in the increasingly contested global media space on the continent, where it is competing with strategic narratives from China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and other foreign powers seeking to influence public opinion. Already, studies show that anti-US, anti-imperialist, and possibly anti-West messaging resonates with a significant number of Angolans, Ethiopians, South Africans, and Zambians and that these attitudes are a strong predictor of support for Chinese and Russian narratives.
Trump’s executive order aimed at punishing South Africa may, therefore, in the long run, turn out to have more negative consequences for the US than having to welcome to its shores a group of white refugees with a victimhood complex.
Herman Wasserman is professor of journalism at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Image by Tia Dufour, public domain
Amidst the slew of executive orders issued by US President Donald Trump—ranging from reinstating plastic straws, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and proclaiming that only two genders exist—one, in particular, reverberated around braais, brandies-and-cokes, and bakkies from Brackenfell to Benoni: the executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” which included the policy that the “United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that the “United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The reaction to the announcement that Afrikaners—historically beneficiaries of the policy of apartheid, which included the most egregious state-sponsored dispossession and disenfranchisement—would now themselves be branded as refugees, ranged from ridicule to enthusiasm. Among Trump’s considerable support base among conservative Afrikaners, there was a smug elation following what they read as a recognition of their complaints that they were being threatened, marginalized, and at risk of losing their land. These complaints had particularly been fanned and promoted in recent years by the Afrikaner rights group AfriForum, who had been pushing a white genocide narrative for many years. Representatives of AfriForum had visited Washington, where they met Republican officials, appeared on conservative media outlets like The Tucker Carlson Show, and also extended their roadshows to conservative think tanks and conferences in Europe, like CPAC in Hungary. Here, they painted a dire picture of a South Africa where white farmers are under constant attack, on the verge of losing their ancestral land, and unfairly targeted by a corrupt and totalitarian government that discriminates against them in a type of reverse apartheid. Their deft communication strategy found sympathetic ears among US conservatives, and with Trump’s reelection, this campaign finally paid off. The White House’s justifications for the executive order read almost like an AfriForum press release and it is clear that AfriForum’s white victimhood discourse heavily influenced the Trump administration’s rhetoric and rationale.
Within South Africa—outside of the conservative minority of Trump supporters—the executive order met with responses ranging from ridicule to disgust. The government, political parties, and civil society groups have condemned it as a misrepresentation of South African policies and social realities. Faced with the strong backlash, AfriForum rejected Trump’s offer and said they remain committed to the country, but blamed the ANC government for the White House’s animosity.
But the executive order to fast-track refugee status to Afrikaners is anything but a humanitarian gesture from the White House. Instead, it aligns with the US president’s ideological playbook and political needs. Domestically, he has long thrived on stoking fears of “invasion” or cultural displacement—usually targeting immigrants of color. It is doubtful that Trump really knows or cares that much about South African farmers in particular. It is instead a cynical move to energize his right-wing base with a racialized narrative: casting himself as the defender of embattled white people against a supposedly vengeful black majority. This allows Trump to appeal to nativist conservatives who normally disdain refugee admissions but will make an exception when the refugees in question are white and Christian. South Africa is providing him with a convenient case study to support his talking points about the dangers of “woke” policies and the need to protect Western civilization. By offering sanctuary to Afrikaners, Trump signals that his America will serve as a haven for those who look and think like his core voters, even as it slams the door on others.
Geopolitically, the executive order plays into Trump’s nationalistic ideology and supports his objectives of isolating adversaries. The order juxtaposes a purported defense of a white South African minority with a reaffirmation of the US’s support for Israel. It condemns South Africa’s “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump clearly wants to be seen as punishing South Africa for bringing a case against Israel. In this regard, Afrikaner farmers are used as pawns in a much bigger geopolitical game. The irony of creating a fake class of refugees at the same time as suggesting that Gazans become refugees in neighboring countries because Israel, with the support of the US, turned the Gaza strip into a “demolition site” would not have escaped South Africans demanding justice for Palestinians.
Trump’s executive order, the campaign building up to it, and the response it elicited is, perhaps, first and foremost, a media event. The daily signing of a stack of leather-bound orders piled on the Resolute desk in the White House, is staged for the media to transmit the semiotic weight of power, determination and clarity of purpose. But Trump is no friend of the news media. On his own Truth Social platform, Trump referred to what he deems “a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.” This invocation of the “radical left media” is another signal to his base—his hostility to the press is well-known. During his previous campaign he repeatedly criticized the so-called fake news media and attacked journalists. By labeling the media as “radical” and “left” it makes it easy for him to delegitimize media criticism among his base, which has been primed to reject anything that is “left” or “woke.”
In South Africa, the media have also played a significant role in setting the agenda around farm murders and amplifying AfriForum’s campaigns. Even if support for the movement varies across outlets—most positive, of course, in the media outlet Maroela Media, established by Afriforum and its umbrella body Solidariteit—the movement has routinely been referred to as a “civil rights organization” instead of an Afrikaner-rights organization, and its statements and campaigns enjoyed widespread media coverage. Farm murders also attract coverage from a media that tends to attach more significance to white deaths than black ones. Afrikaans media, in particular, have, over many years, contributed to a victim narrative, constructing their readers as a people under siege. The organization is also very adept at using social media. Although they now deny having influenced the US president, AfriForum seems to have forgotten how they bragged on social media about their attempts to “garner support and lobby against racist theft” since 2018.
Related to media coverage is the issue of disinformation. The South African government has expressed concern about what it termed Trump’s “campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation.” Not only has not a single piece of land been expropriated without compensation by the democratic government since 1994, but the act has not yet come into operation and will be subject to the Constitution. Ironically, in pointing out the misinformation, the ANC is now forced to admit the pace of land reform has been very slow. The idea that white Afrikaners are particularly singled out for violent crime is also false, even though it is a prevailing narrative in emotive arguments about a purported white genocide, including posts on X by Trump’s sidekick, the billionaire Elon Musk, whose white, privileged upbringing seems to keep informing his view of the country of his birth. Farm killings—violent and abhorrent as they may be—should be seen against the background of a massive crime problem in the country. Just last year, 27,000 people were killed, amounting to 45 people per 100,000. But statistics show that the murder crisis is even more acute for the country’s black majority, where homicides are more frequent but attract far less media coverage. Research indicates that while white South Africans make up around 8 percent of the population, they account for less than 2 percent of murder victims. None of these statistics resonate in Musk’s cheap shots at controversial politicians like Julius Malema, whose heated, theatrical rhetorical style is not that far removed from Trump’s own populist genre.
It has to be said, though, that although right-wing Afrikaner groups have been most vocal and visible in their attempts to push the white victimhood narratives, these ideas and attitudes are also present in some form in broader mainstream discourses, whether in formal politics (disillusionment among white voters has long been providing the Democratic Alliance with political capital, and they have already launched legal action against the Expropriation Bill) or the social class dynamics of suburban elites. It should also be noted that the majority of Afrikaans speakers are not white, and although AfriForum has attempted to co-opt “Coloured” communities, they do not share identical political attitudes.
If Trump had hoped for the executive order to extract subservience and attrition from South Africa, the response, by and large, has been the opposite. There is no question that US sanctions and discontinuation of aid will have a severe impact on the country’s economy and increase the misery of especially the poor black majority. If anything, this will damage US soft power in South Africa and lead South Africa to pursue its own strategic interests to a larger extent within the BRICS group of countries, and in particular China, which is already its largest trade partner. There has already been a decline in the positive perception of the US among South Africans, as Afrobarometer surveys have shown. The move may also have continent-wide resonance. The US can no longer rest on its laurels in the increasingly contested global media space on the continent, where it is competing with strategic narratives from China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and other foreign powers seeking to influence public opinion. Already, studies show that anti-US, anti-imperialist, and possibly anti-West messaging resonates with a significant number of Angolans, Ethiopians, South Africans, and Zambians and that these attitudes are a strong predictor of support for Chinese and Russian narratives.
Trump’s executive order aimed at punishing South Africa may, therefore, in the long run, turn out to have more negative consequences for the US than having to welcome to its shores a group of white refugees with a victimhood complex.
Herman Wasserman is professor of journalism at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
U.S. Rulers Versus South African Rulers – Versus Both Their Peoples and Ecologies
Cyril Ramaphosa vainly hopes Trump’s threats – on racial redress, woke G20 management and calling out Israel’s genocide – will be retracted over a round of golf and a bilateral trade deal
Second, act as individualized states and societies, taking umbrage at brash yankee ignorance, misinformation and open racism – but in essence, come to the gunfight with just a water pistol, by acting alone.
Third, organize other states and societies to encourage a full-fledged backlash against Trump and his main corporate supporters in Big Tech, banking and fossil capital, and in the process provide bottom-up solidarity to social forces in the U.S. and everywhere that are truly dedicated to equality and sustainability.
The South African government is at a fork, not sure whether to choose the second or third route, but with powerful local and international elements promoting the first.
Why are Trump-Musk-Rubio so insanely aggressive?
On February 6 at 2am, Trump’s foreign minister Marco Rubio announced a boycott of a February 20-21 event: “I will NOT attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change’.”
The DEI that Trump’s chief budget-cutter Elon Musk hates most is legislation aimed at apartheid-rectifying affirmative action for South African corporations, which are the world’s most unethical according to PwC. What is termed ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) aimed to create a black bourgeoisie, e.g. BEE’s two main beneficiaries, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his brother-in-law, fellow coal mining tycoon Patrice Motsepe. If Musk introduces Starlink satellite internet connections to South Africa, as Ramaphosa had requested last September during a New York meeting, BEE requires that Musk find a 30% co-ownership partner.
Musk calls these ‘openly racist ownership laws,’ apparently anathema to a white lad raised by an emotionally-abusive father, and trained in apartheid-era South Africa. As Musk told CBS reporter Lesley Stahl in 2018 of his youth, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.” Stahl: “I do know that you were bullied at school.” Musk: “I was almost beaten to death, if you would call that bullied” – i.e., training elite white kids received at Bryanston (Johannesburg) and Pretoria Boys high schools, in order to run the apartheid system and corporate South Africa.
On February 7, Trump responded to Ramaphosa’s vague “we will not be bullied” State of the Nation Address remark the night before, with another blast: “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump ruled that Washington “shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” (The latter charge is a canard as very little land reform has occurred.)
Moreover on February 10, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on all imports of aluminum and steel, including South African products. It is a fair bet that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal will soon be cancelled, or at minimum, that South Africa will be expelled.
How to reply, effectively?
Across the world, while many national leaders (e.g. from Denmark and Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Colombia and Canada) take the second route of individualistic back-lash, there are those Trump intimidates – e.g., King Abdullah of Jordan – who make unnecessary concessions.
In the latter category, it was highly symbolical that Ramaphosa’s presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya spoke just hours after Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu announced their desire for U.S. ‘long-term ownership’ of Gaza and the strip’s conversion into a real estate development that Trump termed the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. The world was disgusted, including even Washington’s Axis-of-Genocide allies in London, Berlin, Brussels and Paris.
But in a February 6 press conference, just after Rubio’s insults, Magwenya repeated an invitation first made on December 2 (the day after Trump threatened 100% tariffs on South African and BRICS exports): Ramaphosa expects Trump for a state visit before the G20 leaders’ summit in November. As Magwenya explained, “We are hoping that there will be time even for a round of golf. We have been trying to urge the president to steal a bit more time to get his swing back in order and back in the groove so that when he takes President Trump out for a round of golf, he’s able to put up a decent game.”
How can one have a decent game with the ‘Commander in Cheat’ who was nicknamed ‘Pele’ by caddies for his ability to kick the ball from the rough to the fairway, if the Presidency lacks the courage to utter even a word about Gaza’s fate, Israel’s repeated violations of the ceasefire, or even more murderous military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Another losing game is betting on intra-corporate trade, especially when Trump slaps illegal, willy-nilly tariffs on imports, almost whimsically. Yet on February 15, Bloomberg reported that Pretoria’s neoliberal Trade Minister, Parks Tau, is offering concessions to Washington in search of a bilateral free trade deal. The effect will be to assure profits for some of the world’s most destructive corporations’ South African branch plants and their major U.S. exports: BHP Billiton, ArcelorMittal, New York-listed (former South African oil parastatal) Sasol, the main German and Japanese automakers, and a handful of agri-corporates.
Trump has three realistic choices for trade with South Africa: 1) the status quo; 2) kick SA out of AGOA; and 3) kill AGOA completely. The latter seems most likely, given his hatred of Africa. The most unlikely would be a fourth option: a US-SA bilateral free trade deal, one favored by Tau, who is so pro-corporate he opposes ending South African coal sales to Israel because he celebrates WTO ‘non-discrimination’ (against genocidaires). This option would also mean Tau splitting South Africa out of Africa from the standpoint of U.S. trade.
The AGOA status quo overwhelmingly (95%+) provides tariff benefits to multinational corporates or to white plantation owners in automobile, steel, aluminum, petrochemical and vineyards. Most of these firms abuse SA’s scarce electricity and water supplies, and they also engage in non-renewable resource depletion (‘unequal ecological exchange‘), export profits via illicit financial flows and emit vast greenhouse gases, thus impoverishing SA even further.
AGOA beneficiaries are also extremely capital-intensive, carbon-intensive industries: the 27 leading electricity guzzlers in the ‘Energy Intensive Users Group’ consume 42% of the country’s coal-fired power, but hire just 4% of South Africa’s workers. Serving their interests, notes Bloomberg, Tau “considers such an accord better than preferential treatment because it would be a negotiated deal… a bilateral agreement would give South Africa a chance to negotiate tariffs with the U.S.”
Pretoria still fuels Israel
The world needs Pretoria to drop vanities like Ramaphosa’s time-out for golf practice or Tau’s mythical free trade deal, and instead provide strong moral leadership. The world needs the South African Ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, to reverse the ridiculous white-flag statement he made late last year: “We need to put away the [Palestine-solidarity] megaphone now. And [Ramaphosa’s] words were, it is now sub judice…I understand the need to completely recalibrate…that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that make South Africa an ally [of Trump].”
Just as urgently, Ramaphosa should halt mining companies’ support for Israel’s 17.5% coal-fired power grid. On February 11, a massive bulk-cargo boat – the ‘Cape Friendship’ – arrived at Israel’s Hadera Port directly from Richards Bay, South Africa, carrying 170,000 tons of coal. Asked by local Palestine activists to cut access to state-owned rail and port facilities for such shipments, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy simply ignored the correspondence.
While profits are drawn from such shipments (about $8 million each), South Africa’s Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, meanwhile, authorized his Director General Zane Dangor to help organize the Hague Group: nine countries defending the leading international courts from Trump’s lawlessness and sanctions. On January 31, their opening statement committed that South Africa, Colombia and other signatories would “prevent the docking of vessels at any port… in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry military fuel and weaponry to Israel, which might be used to commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law, of international human rights law, and of the prohibition on genocide in Palestine”.
But politicians from both Pretoria and Bogota look foolish with pronouncements like these, when violated so rapidly: in the former by Cape Friendship, and in the latter because Glencore and Drummond Coal also still ship fuel to the Israeli military from Colombia (recently on the Algoma Value, Despina V and Navios Felix bulk carriers, which also service Richards Bay), long after President Gustavo Petro’s June 2024 announcement that such coal sales would end.
Working with Glencore (a firm listed on both the Johannesburg and London stock markets), Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe has since 2006 made the most profits of any single South African from such shipments. Ramaphosa himself, as leader of Shanduka Coal, had until 2014 been Glencore’s leading local partner.
(Also reflecting these loyalties, Motsepe also welcomed a pro-Israel statement by South Africa’s chief rabbi at his 100,000-strong national Day of Prayer last December 10, and he is a FIFA soccer federation director representing Africa, joining that body’s refusal to urgently end Israeli participation – although after Moscow’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine, FIFA rapidly tossed out the Russians. In 2020, Motsepe had regaled Trump with flattery at the Davos World Economic Forum, “Africa loves you,” a sleazy sentiment he had to retract after a continent-wide uproar.)
For the sake of profit, local coal exporters like Motsepe are undermining Ramaphosa’s G20 solidarity-equality-sustainability hosting claims and making a mockery of Pretoria’s support for Palestine. Two other Johannesburg-born directors on the Glencore board – CEO Gary Nagle and former Pretoria central banker Gill Marcus – went quiet at the company’s 2024 annual meeting when challenged by a shareholder about the firm’s 1.5 million tons of coal just sold to Israel.
From futile appeasement to anti-Trump activism
In contrast, there are other constituencies demanding that Pretoria shift decisively to the third route. In late January, the SA Federation of Trade Unions called for Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions against both the U.S. in general and Musk in particular (Tesla vehicles, X.com social media and Starlink subscriptions). At minimum, the Nairobi-based Pan African Climate Justice Alliance suggested, the world should impose urgent climate-catalysed sanctions on Trump for exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change the day he took office.
If Trump-Musk-Rubio don’t immediately retract their attacks on South Africa, perhaps Ramaphosa could explore backlash potentials among the G19 foreign ministers on February 20, and threaten that the U.S. be expelled from the G20, given Rubio’s clear sabotage-oriented tweet. That penalty was first proposed by G7 leaders for Moscow in 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea, although the G20 did not implement it because of BRICS opposition.
Since Trump has also ended U.S. membership in the World Health Organization (with adverse implications for pandemic prevention), cancelled climate research and emissions-cuts commitments, and terminated USAID’s support for humanitarian assistance, reproductive health programming and much more, it would make sense to have the G20 and all other multilateral institutions push back by threatening to kick the U.S. entirely out of the United Nations, especially its neo-colonial Security Council. Indeed, it would be reasonable to consider relocating all the reasonable UN officials who will barely survive the four years ahead if based at its Manhattan complex to, say, Nairobi, which enjoys the same UN host-city status as Geneva.
On February 2, Trump had uttered, “Terrible things are happening in South Africa. The uh leadership is uh doing some terrible things.” It is time for Ramaphosa to show what truly ‘terrible’ things – i.e., strategies to achieve geopolitical, economic and environmental justice – might mean for the lawless Trump regime.
Ramaphosa’s latest massacre
Instead, the past few months witnessed Ramaphosa’s attacks on his own former constituency, when during the 1980s he presided over the National Union of Mineworkers. These included state-imposed starvation of hundreds of informal-sector artisanal ‘zama zamas’ (colloquially in isiZulu, those who ‘take a chance’) in abandoned South Africa mines, shocking the country and the world. In mid-January, 87 bodies were discovered within Stilfontein gold mine’s accessible tunnels in relatively close proximity to rescue gear, but countless more remain out of reach.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu and Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe. Courtesy of Zapiro.
These corpses mark a low point in an explicit class war disguised by rampaging xenophobia that will please Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump visiting Johannesburg in November, when Ramaphosa hosts the G20 leaders’ summit, is ironic. In a November 2024 speech made at the Rio de Janeiro G20, Ramaphosa railed against “the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as we are now seeing in some parts of the world, including in Gaza and Sudan.”
But just days before, the Minister in the Presidency whom Ramaphosa often calls upon to explain state policy, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, had rationalized many weeks of police oppression of Stilfontein mineworkers by calling them ‘criminals.’ She proclaiming that the police should “smoke them out!“ through denial of food, water, and vital medicines – e.g., immune-strengthening antiretrovirals for workers living with HIV. By then the starvation strategy had been underway for three months. (Ntshavheni is subsequently being investigated by police for corruption in her prior municipal management job, in an act a judge ruled “boggles the mind.”)
When more than 1800 Stilfontein mine workers surfaced, they were arrested. The vast majority were immigrants from neighboring states toiling in hellish conditions. Surviving workers had finally resorted to cannibalizing flesh from their dead comrades, as well as eating insects. The mutual-aid philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – which Ramaphosa often invokes (e.g. at Davos last month), was, like solidarity with Palestine, reduced to empty rhetoric.
Multiple forms of extractive exploitation
About two hours’ drive southwest of Johannesburg, old gold mines established in the 1940s-60s stretch across the landscape. Their depth of 2.8 kilometers – and 4 kilometres at Carletonville mine (halfway from Stilfontein to Johannesburg) – pockmarks the world’s most prolific seam. The Reef’s gold, discovered in the mid-1880s, once contained half the world’s historic reserves.
But alongside exhausted gold, diamond, coal, platinum, manganese, iron ore, chrome and other mineral lodes for which South Africa is infamous, are the detritus of capitalist degradation: more than 6,000 mines were never shut properly. Once they are considered sufficiently depleted by formal mining companies, many are picked clean by desperate artisanal zama zama mineworkers. Residues still exist — e.g., in the columns that hold up roofs that are over a century old, or in scrapings along the tunnel walls — but are exceptionally hazardous to mine.
Writing on conditions at Stilfontein, Sunday Times reporter Isaac Mahlangu described “an underground hierarchy in which those who did the digging and mining at the lowest levels were mainly foreigners, the majority from Mozambique. Very few South Africans did this work. Those at higher levels were rope-pullers or were involved in processing the gold. Others were tasked with distributing food… Gold dust was the main currency for buying goods from the shop deep underground on level 10.” One worker told him, “The gold that fills a Colgate [toothpaste] cap is worth $162 underground, although the shop does not give change.” A 5-kilogram bag of maize (corn) meal costs $270, which is 25 times its cost above ground.
Accounts are still emerging of the way police and the hard-to-track corporate directors responsible at Stilfontein Gold Mining (who had long ago abandoned the site) contributed to the mass murder. Although mining capitalists are responsible for extreme environmental, social, and economic irresponsibility across the Reef, many working-class South Africans were provoked into making heartless, xenophobic remarks, egged on by high-profile right-wing populists catching the energy of the Trump Effect.
As pressure rose to save the mineworkers’ lives, Deputy Police Minister Shela Polly Boshielo announced, “We are setting a wrong precedent, to say ‘people can get under the ground, do illegal mining, get all the money and everything, and then we will then come and rescue them as government’… So we are not even dealing with South Africans, who really, you can say, they’re trying to make a living. They [immigrant mineworkers] are not. They are illegal.”
Even more vitriolic remarks were made by Patriotic Alliance Deputy President Kenny Kunene (a Johannesburg municipal leader in partnership with Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress): “I have no sympathy for those who have died stealing the wealth of our country… I have absolutely no sympathy. They must die like rats underground there, all of them. They must burn in hell.” A common theme is that the artisanal mineworkers steal from society, as implied by another politician, Action SA President Herman Mashaba: “I personally have got no sympathy whatsoever for criminality.”
Also in mid-January, Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe announced his opposition to local community activists who suggested regularization of artisanal mining, i.e., that his ministry “give licences to steal gold to Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Lesotho nationals. It’s a criminal activity. It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main.” Mantashe attempted to put a number to the theft: “Illegal mining is a war on the economy… it is criminals attacking the economy. Precious metals illicit trade is estimated in 2024 to about $3.2 billion, a leakage on the value of the economy of the country.”
Against sub-imperialism
There are three possible replies to xenophobes. The first appeals to basic, genuine Ubuntu humanistic values. The most active trade union supporter is General Industries Workers Union of South Africa president Mametlwe Sebei, who is also a human rights lawyer. When two government ministers (Mantashe and the police minister) visited Stilfontein in mid-January, Sebei told a community meeting not far from the mine shafts: “These ministers are here at the scene of the crime. Hundreds of miners have died underground in what can only be a bloody culmination of their treacherous policies of the police operation, planned and executed with the approval at the highest echelons of the state, including the Cabinet.” The community responded by refusing to hear the ministers, forcing them to retreat in shame.
A second rebuttal is to point out that compared to the artisanal mineworkers’ low-tech extraction systems, there is a vast outflow of mineral wealth carried out by multinational mining corporations, nowhere near compensated for by reinvestment in the economy, society, and infrastructure.
A third is that surplus value feeding South African mining capitalism has been drawn from immigrant workers dating back at least 150 years, and those countries are today themselves resource-cursed by Johannesburg firms. As explained by Solomon Mondlane of Mozambique’s opposition Democratic Alliance Coalition, “50% of our gas in Mozambique goes to South Africa. 80% of our electricity in Mozambique goes to South Africa. And they buy it on a less amount, while here in Mozambique, we pay double the amount for what is produced in our country. And they will tell us we are busy flocking into their countries, when in actual fact our country is being looted by South Africa.”
The best-known local labor leader, Zwelinzima Vavi of the SA Federation of Trade Unions, agreed: “South Africa is often being accused of being a sub-imperialist and playing that role to its neighbors and to the rest of the African continent. Our daughters and sons [serving in the SA military] have been sent to the northern parts of Mozambique to fight a war on behalf of multinational companies [Total, ExxonMobil, ENI, BP, etc.] that are lining up to exploit the massive gas fields around Cabo Delgado. And they have been there, of course, with a clear instruction from France. The French President, if you remember, came unscheduled to Union Buildings [in May 2021], clearly to lobby South Africa to ensure that it has soldiers to put guards on the vast gas fields in the northern parts of Mozambique.”
Vavi continued, “This is what makes me sick — when people say, ‘They are stealing our mines, they are stealing our gold.’ Hold on, what are you talking about? Whose gold? How have you benefited, as a black South African, from this gold that you want to protect? And to celebrate the death of people ‘who are stealing our gold and who are illegal foreign nationals’? Mozambicans do not come to South Africa by choice. They do not cross the Kruger National Park such that they discover only a wallet [after immigrants are eaten by lions, leopards and hyenas], when a whole body cannot be traced… If you were to spend four or five days in a week with your children crying to you, sitting helplessly, not knowing what to do? People are driven by desperation. The fact that most of the people who are being rescued in these mines — zama zamas — are from Mozambique is not a coincidence. It’s because the revolution there failed, just like the revolution here in South Africa is failing.”
Ramaphosa’s own failings are indisputable; once the inspiring leader of the National Union of Mineworkers during apartheid, his major investment in Lonmin in 2012 led him to treat a wildcat strike as ‘dastardly criminal’ in emails he wrote 24 hours before the police massacred 34 platinum rock-drill operators who were demanding a $1000/month wage. Ramaphosa was a board member of Lonmin and advised the company to continue offshore illicit financial flows.
Going forward, South African solidarity with those struggling in Mozambique must be reignited, for the latter’s revolution against Portuguese colonialism had helped motivate an upsurge of confidence and the Soweto student protests in 1976. Mutual aid with the Mozambican citizenry is needed today, especially in forging stronger community-worker ties, as new rebels have risen up against the now-corrupted nationalists. That’s the anti-xenophobia agenda being forged by the artisanal miners themselves, backed by GIWUSA, SAFTU, Mining Affected Communities United in Action, and progressive lawyers.
As they take forward demands for a Commission of Enquiry into the hundreds of deaths, part of the work is a psychological reversal of the hatred found in state and society. This is necessary so that the ‘stealing’ of sovereign mineral wealth is better understood — as a core process of multinational corporate extractivism – and so that internationalism replaces xenophobia.
Can the 2025 G20 reignite internationalism? Or will it, as in Rio, coopt social militancy?
Ramaphosa’s use of the G20 chairing platform will include an attempt to relegitimize, to erase memories of Stilfontein. On February 20 he will welcome to Johannesburg the likes of Britain’s David Lammy, Germany’s soon-to-be-dethroned Annalena Baerbock, Kaja Kallis from the EU and several other ethically-challenged pro-Zionist Western foreign ministers; and from the original BRICS, Brazil’s Mauro Vieira, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and China’s Wang Yi (who are often also tasked with defending their elites’ prolific commercial and military ties to Israel), plus reactionaries from Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye – but not forgetting just one progressive, Juan Ramón de la Fuente from Mexico.
Because the G20 also entails a variety of business, civil society and academic side show events, the group’s host also possesses divide-and-conquer capacities, as were evident in Rio de Janeiro last November. In a planning meeting for the 2025 G20, Johannesburg-based ‘Fight Inequality Alliance’ leader Jenny Ricks pointed out how, “President Lula requested that movements and unions join the G20 ‘Social20’ – not the Peoples’ Summit – in the context of far-right fascism in Brazil. He wanted a more united thrust. A number of social and labor movements moved out of the People’s Summit into the S20, and that caused enormous tension.”
Just after the Rio G20, Laura Corcuera from the Spanish ezine El Salto offered a long article with an optimistic title: “Brazilian social movements open a new cycle of struggle against global financial capitalism.” But she pointed out how Lula’s G20-Social cooptation of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores trade union and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peoples Movement) “generated harsh criticism among Brazilian and Latin American grassroots social movements for having demobilized protests against the G20.” According to Sandra Quintela of the Jubileu Sul (anti-austerity and debt) network, “We do not want to legitimize that place as a space for dialogue. That is why we held this People’s Summit, an autonomous, sovereign and self-financed space.”
South Africans know well the fragmentation of politics due to ideological divergences, and 2024 was a test of whether the centre could hold within the country’s centre-right elites. It has held so far, within a Government of National Unity as prone to splintering as the 1994-1996 model just after apartheid. But at the global scale, given that G20 leaders’ own political delegimitization continues in many member countries, you would be very brave indeed to predict that a bloc of the most powerful, venal rulers can today even properly debate – much less deliver – Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability.
Where does that leave progressives who do not want to be bamboozled by Ramaphosa and his talented bureaucrats’ progressive phraseology? One graphic representation of a transnational capitalist class and its state supporters versus the 99% was made in a couple of (North and South) pyramids by Kevin Danagher, co-founder of San Francisco-based Global Exchange, to reflect differences between elite and grassroots globalizations. Here’s a tweak, from above:
The opposite effort – breaking the chains binding the top 1%, so as to make new ones linking the 99% – is now needed more than ever.
On Wednesday, February 19, G20-from-below internationalism against Trumpism is the webinar theme to be taken up by Bill Fletcher, Jr, the socialist, trade unionist, solidarity activist who was president of TransAfrica Forum, who cofounded standing4democracy.org and who cochairs the U.S. Campaign for Western Sahara. He will be joined by two South African notables: International Labour Research and Information Group strategist Dale McKinley and community organizer Bandile Mdlalose from Civil Society Unmuted Coalition.
For those in the U.S. fighting Trumpism, the online meeting time is early – 8am Eastern Standard Time – but the job of linking issues and constituencies could not be more urgent. Join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82726180745
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.
Cyril Ramaphosa vainly hopes Trump’s threats – on racial redress, woke G20 management and calling out Israel’s genocide – will be retracted over a round of golf and a bilateral trade deal
By Patrick Bond
February 17, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Surviving the Washington vs Pretoria diplomatic storm – which is increasingly beyond the protagonists on each side to manage given the lack of cool heads in U.S. President Donald Trump’s maniacal regime – will entail one of three routes forward:First, surrender immediately, and do what the bullies demand.
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Surviving the Washington vs Pretoria diplomatic storm – which is increasingly beyond the protagonists on each side to manage given the lack of cool heads in U.S. President Donald Trump’s maniacal regime – will entail one of three routes forward:First, surrender immediately, and do what the bullies demand.
Second, act as individualized states and societies, taking umbrage at brash yankee ignorance, misinformation and open racism – but in essence, come to the gunfight with just a water pistol, by acting alone.
Third, organize other states and societies to encourage a full-fledged backlash against Trump and his main corporate supporters in Big Tech, banking and fossil capital, and in the process provide bottom-up solidarity to social forces in the U.S. and everywhere that are truly dedicated to equality and sustainability.
The South African government is at a fork, not sure whether to choose the second or third route, but with powerful local and international elements promoting the first.
Why are Trump-Musk-Rubio so insanely aggressive?
On February 6 at 2am, Trump’s foreign minister Marco Rubio announced a boycott of a February 20-21 event: “I will NOT attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change’.”
The DEI that Trump’s chief budget-cutter Elon Musk hates most is legislation aimed at apartheid-rectifying affirmative action for South African corporations, which are the world’s most unethical according to PwC. What is termed ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) aimed to create a black bourgeoisie, e.g. BEE’s two main beneficiaries, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his brother-in-law, fellow coal mining tycoon Patrice Motsepe. If Musk introduces Starlink satellite internet connections to South Africa, as Ramaphosa had requested last September during a New York meeting, BEE requires that Musk find a 30% co-ownership partner.
Musk calls these ‘openly racist ownership laws,’ apparently anathema to a white lad raised by an emotionally-abusive father, and trained in apartheid-era South Africa. As Musk told CBS reporter Lesley Stahl in 2018 of his youth, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.” Stahl: “I do know that you were bullied at school.” Musk: “I was almost beaten to death, if you would call that bullied” – i.e., training elite white kids received at Bryanston (Johannesburg) and Pretoria Boys high schools, in order to run the apartheid system and corporate South Africa.
On February 7, Trump responded to Ramaphosa’s vague “we will not be bullied” State of the Nation Address remark the night before, with another blast: “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump ruled that Washington “shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” (The latter charge is a canard as very little land reform has occurred.)
Moreover on February 10, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on all imports of aluminum and steel, including South African products. It is a fair bet that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal will soon be cancelled, or at minimum, that South Africa will be expelled.
How to reply, effectively?
Across the world, while many national leaders (e.g. from Denmark and Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Colombia and Canada) take the second route of individualistic back-lash, there are those Trump intimidates – e.g., King Abdullah of Jordan – who make unnecessary concessions.
In the latter category, it was highly symbolical that Ramaphosa’s presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya spoke just hours after Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu announced their desire for U.S. ‘long-term ownership’ of Gaza and the strip’s conversion into a real estate development that Trump termed the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. The world was disgusted, including even Washington’s Axis-of-Genocide allies in London, Berlin, Brussels and Paris.
But in a February 6 press conference, just after Rubio’s insults, Magwenya repeated an invitation first made on December 2 (the day after Trump threatened 100% tariffs on South African and BRICS exports): Ramaphosa expects Trump for a state visit before the G20 leaders’ summit in November. As Magwenya explained, “We are hoping that there will be time even for a round of golf. We have been trying to urge the president to steal a bit more time to get his swing back in order and back in the groove so that when he takes President Trump out for a round of golf, he’s able to put up a decent game.”
How can one have a decent game with the ‘Commander in Cheat’ who was nicknamed ‘Pele’ by caddies for his ability to kick the ball from the rough to the fairway, if the Presidency lacks the courage to utter even a word about Gaza’s fate, Israel’s repeated violations of the ceasefire, or even more murderous military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Another losing game is betting on intra-corporate trade, especially when Trump slaps illegal, willy-nilly tariffs on imports, almost whimsically. Yet on February 15, Bloomberg reported that Pretoria’s neoliberal Trade Minister, Parks Tau, is offering concessions to Washington in search of a bilateral free trade deal. The effect will be to assure profits for some of the world’s most destructive corporations’ South African branch plants and their major U.S. exports: BHP Billiton, ArcelorMittal, New York-listed (former South African oil parastatal) Sasol, the main German and Japanese automakers, and a handful of agri-corporates.
Trump has three realistic choices for trade with South Africa: 1) the status quo; 2) kick SA out of AGOA; and 3) kill AGOA completely. The latter seems most likely, given his hatred of Africa. The most unlikely would be a fourth option: a US-SA bilateral free trade deal, one favored by Tau, who is so pro-corporate he opposes ending South African coal sales to Israel because he celebrates WTO ‘non-discrimination’ (against genocidaires). This option would also mean Tau splitting South Africa out of Africa from the standpoint of U.S. trade.
The AGOA status quo overwhelmingly (95%+) provides tariff benefits to multinational corporates or to white plantation owners in automobile, steel, aluminum, petrochemical and vineyards. Most of these firms abuse SA’s scarce electricity and water supplies, and they also engage in non-renewable resource depletion (‘unequal ecological exchange‘), export profits via illicit financial flows and emit vast greenhouse gases, thus impoverishing SA even further.
AGOA beneficiaries are also extremely capital-intensive, carbon-intensive industries: the 27 leading electricity guzzlers in the ‘Energy Intensive Users Group’ consume 42% of the country’s coal-fired power, but hire just 4% of South Africa’s workers. Serving their interests, notes Bloomberg, Tau “considers such an accord better than preferential treatment because it would be a negotiated deal… a bilateral agreement would give South Africa a chance to negotiate tariffs with the U.S.”
Pretoria still fuels Israel
The world needs Pretoria to drop vanities like Ramaphosa’s time-out for golf practice or Tau’s mythical free trade deal, and instead provide strong moral leadership. The world needs the South African Ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, to reverse the ridiculous white-flag statement he made late last year: “We need to put away the [Palestine-solidarity] megaphone now. And [Ramaphosa’s] words were, it is now sub judice…I understand the need to completely recalibrate…that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that make South Africa an ally [of Trump].”
Just as urgently, Ramaphosa should halt mining companies’ support for Israel’s 17.5% coal-fired power grid. On February 11, a massive bulk-cargo boat – the ‘Cape Friendship’ – arrived at Israel’s Hadera Port directly from Richards Bay, South Africa, carrying 170,000 tons of coal. Asked by local Palestine activists to cut access to state-owned rail and port facilities for such shipments, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy simply ignored the correspondence.
While profits are drawn from such shipments (about $8 million each), South Africa’s Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, meanwhile, authorized his Director General Zane Dangor to help organize the Hague Group: nine countries defending the leading international courts from Trump’s lawlessness and sanctions. On January 31, their opening statement committed that South Africa, Colombia and other signatories would “prevent the docking of vessels at any port… in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry military fuel and weaponry to Israel, which might be used to commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law, of international human rights law, and of the prohibition on genocide in Palestine”.
But politicians from both Pretoria and Bogota look foolish with pronouncements like these, when violated so rapidly: in the former by Cape Friendship, and in the latter because Glencore and Drummond Coal also still ship fuel to the Israeli military from Colombia (recently on the Algoma Value, Despina V and Navios Felix bulk carriers, which also service Richards Bay), long after President Gustavo Petro’s June 2024 announcement that such coal sales would end.
Working with Glencore (a firm listed on both the Johannesburg and London stock markets), Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe has since 2006 made the most profits of any single South African from such shipments. Ramaphosa himself, as leader of Shanduka Coal, had until 2014 been Glencore’s leading local partner.
(Also reflecting these loyalties, Motsepe also welcomed a pro-Israel statement by South Africa’s chief rabbi at his 100,000-strong national Day of Prayer last December 10, and he is a FIFA soccer federation director representing Africa, joining that body’s refusal to urgently end Israeli participation – although after Moscow’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine, FIFA rapidly tossed out the Russians. In 2020, Motsepe had regaled Trump with flattery at the Davos World Economic Forum, “Africa loves you,” a sleazy sentiment he had to retract after a continent-wide uproar.)
For the sake of profit, local coal exporters like Motsepe are undermining Ramaphosa’s G20 solidarity-equality-sustainability hosting claims and making a mockery of Pretoria’s support for Palestine. Two other Johannesburg-born directors on the Glencore board – CEO Gary Nagle and former Pretoria central banker Gill Marcus – went quiet at the company’s 2024 annual meeting when challenged by a shareholder about the firm’s 1.5 million tons of coal just sold to Israel.
From futile appeasement to anti-Trump activism
In contrast, there are other constituencies demanding that Pretoria shift decisively to the third route. In late January, the SA Federation of Trade Unions called for Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions against both the U.S. in general and Musk in particular (Tesla vehicles, X.com social media and Starlink subscriptions). At minimum, the Nairobi-based Pan African Climate Justice Alliance suggested, the world should impose urgent climate-catalysed sanctions on Trump for exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change the day he took office.
If Trump-Musk-Rubio don’t immediately retract their attacks on South Africa, perhaps Ramaphosa could explore backlash potentials among the G19 foreign ministers on February 20, and threaten that the U.S. be expelled from the G20, given Rubio’s clear sabotage-oriented tweet. That penalty was first proposed by G7 leaders for Moscow in 2014 after Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea, although the G20 did not implement it because of BRICS opposition.
Since Trump has also ended U.S. membership in the World Health Organization (with adverse implications for pandemic prevention), cancelled climate research and emissions-cuts commitments, and terminated USAID’s support for humanitarian assistance, reproductive health programming and much more, it would make sense to have the G20 and all other multilateral institutions push back by threatening to kick the U.S. entirely out of the United Nations, especially its neo-colonial Security Council. Indeed, it would be reasonable to consider relocating all the reasonable UN officials who will barely survive the four years ahead if based at its Manhattan complex to, say, Nairobi, which enjoys the same UN host-city status as Geneva.
On February 2, Trump had uttered, “Terrible things are happening in South Africa. The uh leadership is uh doing some terrible things.” It is time for Ramaphosa to show what truly ‘terrible’ things – i.e., strategies to achieve geopolitical, economic and environmental justice – might mean for the lawless Trump regime.
Ramaphosa’s latest massacre
Instead, the past few months witnessed Ramaphosa’s attacks on his own former constituency, when during the 1980s he presided over the National Union of Mineworkers. These included state-imposed starvation of hundreds of informal-sector artisanal ‘zama zamas’ (colloquially in isiZulu, those who ‘take a chance’) in abandoned South Africa mines, shocking the country and the world. In mid-January, 87 bodies were discovered within Stilfontein gold mine’s accessible tunnels in relatively close proximity to rescue gear, but countless more remain out of reach.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu and Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe. Courtesy of Zapiro.
These corpses mark a low point in an explicit class war disguised by rampaging xenophobia that will please Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump visiting Johannesburg in November, when Ramaphosa hosts the G20 leaders’ summit, is ironic. In a November 2024 speech made at the Rio de Janeiro G20, Ramaphosa railed against “the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as we are now seeing in some parts of the world, including in Gaza and Sudan.”
But just days before, the Minister in the Presidency whom Ramaphosa often calls upon to explain state policy, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, had rationalized many weeks of police oppression of Stilfontein mineworkers by calling them ‘criminals.’ She proclaiming that the police should “smoke them out!“ through denial of food, water, and vital medicines – e.g., immune-strengthening antiretrovirals for workers living with HIV. By then the starvation strategy had been underway for three months. (Ntshavheni is subsequently being investigated by police for corruption in her prior municipal management job, in an act a judge ruled “boggles the mind.”)
When more than 1800 Stilfontein mine workers surfaced, they were arrested. The vast majority were immigrants from neighboring states toiling in hellish conditions. Surviving workers had finally resorted to cannibalizing flesh from their dead comrades, as well as eating insects. The mutual-aid philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – which Ramaphosa often invokes (e.g. at Davos last month), was, like solidarity with Palestine, reduced to empty rhetoric.
Multiple forms of extractive exploitation
About two hours’ drive southwest of Johannesburg, old gold mines established in the 1940s-60s stretch across the landscape. Their depth of 2.8 kilometers – and 4 kilometres at Carletonville mine (halfway from Stilfontein to Johannesburg) – pockmarks the world’s most prolific seam. The Reef’s gold, discovered in the mid-1880s, once contained half the world’s historic reserves.
But alongside exhausted gold, diamond, coal, platinum, manganese, iron ore, chrome and other mineral lodes for which South Africa is infamous, are the detritus of capitalist degradation: more than 6,000 mines were never shut properly. Once they are considered sufficiently depleted by formal mining companies, many are picked clean by desperate artisanal zama zama mineworkers. Residues still exist — e.g., in the columns that hold up roofs that are over a century old, or in scrapings along the tunnel walls — but are exceptionally hazardous to mine.
Writing on conditions at Stilfontein, Sunday Times reporter Isaac Mahlangu described “an underground hierarchy in which those who did the digging and mining at the lowest levels were mainly foreigners, the majority from Mozambique. Very few South Africans did this work. Those at higher levels were rope-pullers or were involved in processing the gold. Others were tasked with distributing food… Gold dust was the main currency for buying goods from the shop deep underground on level 10.” One worker told him, “The gold that fills a Colgate [toothpaste] cap is worth $162 underground, although the shop does not give change.” A 5-kilogram bag of maize (corn) meal costs $270, which is 25 times its cost above ground.
Accounts are still emerging of the way police and the hard-to-track corporate directors responsible at Stilfontein Gold Mining (who had long ago abandoned the site) contributed to the mass murder. Although mining capitalists are responsible for extreme environmental, social, and economic irresponsibility across the Reef, many working-class South Africans were provoked into making heartless, xenophobic remarks, egged on by high-profile right-wing populists catching the energy of the Trump Effect.
As pressure rose to save the mineworkers’ lives, Deputy Police Minister Shela Polly Boshielo announced, “We are setting a wrong precedent, to say ‘people can get under the ground, do illegal mining, get all the money and everything, and then we will then come and rescue them as government’… So we are not even dealing with South Africans, who really, you can say, they’re trying to make a living. They [immigrant mineworkers] are not. They are illegal.”
Even more vitriolic remarks were made by Patriotic Alliance Deputy President Kenny Kunene (a Johannesburg municipal leader in partnership with Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress): “I have no sympathy for those who have died stealing the wealth of our country… I have absolutely no sympathy. They must die like rats underground there, all of them. They must burn in hell.” A common theme is that the artisanal mineworkers steal from society, as implied by another politician, Action SA President Herman Mashaba: “I personally have got no sympathy whatsoever for criminality.”
Also in mid-January, Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe announced his opposition to local community activists who suggested regularization of artisanal mining, i.e., that his ministry “give licences to steal gold to Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Lesotho nationals. It’s a criminal activity. It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main.” Mantashe attempted to put a number to the theft: “Illegal mining is a war on the economy… it is criminals attacking the economy. Precious metals illicit trade is estimated in 2024 to about $3.2 billion, a leakage on the value of the economy of the country.”
Against sub-imperialism
There are three possible replies to xenophobes. The first appeals to basic, genuine Ubuntu humanistic values. The most active trade union supporter is General Industries Workers Union of South Africa president Mametlwe Sebei, who is also a human rights lawyer. When two government ministers (Mantashe and the police minister) visited Stilfontein in mid-January, Sebei told a community meeting not far from the mine shafts: “These ministers are here at the scene of the crime. Hundreds of miners have died underground in what can only be a bloody culmination of their treacherous policies of the police operation, planned and executed with the approval at the highest echelons of the state, including the Cabinet.” The community responded by refusing to hear the ministers, forcing them to retreat in shame.
A second rebuttal is to point out that compared to the artisanal mineworkers’ low-tech extraction systems, there is a vast outflow of mineral wealth carried out by multinational mining corporations, nowhere near compensated for by reinvestment in the economy, society, and infrastructure.
A third is that surplus value feeding South African mining capitalism has been drawn from immigrant workers dating back at least 150 years, and those countries are today themselves resource-cursed by Johannesburg firms. As explained by Solomon Mondlane of Mozambique’s opposition Democratic Alliance Coalition, “50% of our gas in Mozambique goes to South Africa. 80% of our electricity in Mozambique goes to South Africa. And they buy it on a less amount, while here in Mozambique, we pay double the amount for what is produced in our country. And they will tell us we are busy flocking into their countries, when in actual fact our country is being looted by South Africa.”
The best-known local labor leader, Zwelinzima Vavi of the SA Federation of Trade Unions, agreed: “South Africa is often being accused of being a sub-imperialist and playing that role to its neighbors and to the rest of the African continent. Our daughters and sons [serving in the SA military] have been sent to the northern parts of Mozambique to fight a war on behalf of multinational companies [Total, ExxonMobil, ENI, BP, etc.] that are lining up to exploit the massive gas fields around Cabo Delgado. And they have been there, of course, with a clear instruction from France. The French President, if you remember, came unscheduled to Union Buildings [in May 2021], clearly to lobby South Africa to ensure that it has soldiers to put guards on the vast gas fields in the northern parts of Mozambique.”
Vavi continued, “This is what makes me sick — when people say, ‘They are stealing our mines, they are stealing our gold.’ Hold on, what are you talking about? Whose gold? How have you benefited, as a black South African, from this gold that you want to protect? And to celebrate the death of people ‘who are stealing our gold and who are illegal foreign nationals’? Mozambicans do not come to South Africa by choice. They do not cross the Kruger National Park such that they discover only a wallet [after immigrants are eaten by lions, leopards and hyenas], when a whole body cannot be traced… If you were to spend four or five days in a week with your children crying to you, sitting helplessly, not knowing what to do? People are driven by desperation. The fact that most of the people who are being rescued in these mines — zama zamas — are from Mozambique is not a coincidence. It’s because the revolution there failed, just like the revolution here in South Africa is failing.”
Ramaphosa’s own failings are indisputable; once the inspiring leader of the National Union of Mineworkers during apartheid, his major investment in Lonmin in 2012 led him to treat a wildcat strike as ‘dastardly criminal’ in emails he wrote 24 hours before the police massacred 34 platinum rock-drill operators who were demanding a $1000/month wage. Ramaphosa was a board member of Lonmin and advised the company to continue offshore illicit financial flows.
Going forward, South African solidarity with those struggling in Mozambique must be reignited, for the latter’s revolution against Portuguese colonialism had helped motivate an upsurge of confidence and the Soweto student protests in 1976. Mutual aid with the Mozambican citizenry is needed today, especially in forging stronger community-worker ties, as new rebels have risen up against the now-corrupted nationalists. That’s the anti-xenophobia agenda being forged by the artisanal miners themselves, backed by GIWUSA, SAFTU, Mining Affected Communities United in Action, and progressive lawyers.
As they take forward demands for a Commission of Enquiry into the hundreds of deaths, part of the work is a psychological reversal of the hatred found in state and society. This is necessary so that the ‘stealing’ of sovereign mineral wealth is better understood — as a core process of multinational corporate extractivism – and so that internationalism replaces xenophobia.
Can the 2025 G20 reignite internationalism? Or will it, as in Rio, coopt social militancy?
Ramaphosa’s use of the G20 chairing platform will include an attempt to relegitimize, to erase memories of Stilfontein. On February 20 he will welcome to Johannesburg the likes of Britain’s David Lammy, Germany’s soon-to-be-dethroned Annalena Baerbock, Kaja Kallis from the EU and several other ethically-challenged pro-Zionist Western foreign ministers; and from the original BRICS, Brazil’s Mauro Vieira, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and China’s Wang Yi (who are often also tasked with defending their elites’ prolific commercial and military ties to Israel), plus reactionaries from Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye – but not forgetting just one progressive, Juan Ramón de la Fuente from Mexico.
Because the G20 also entails a variety of business, civil society and academic side show events, the group’s host also possesses divide-and-conquer capacities, as were evident in Rio de Janeiro last November. In a planning meeting for the 2025 G20, Johannesburg-based ‘Fight Inequality Alliance’ leader Jenny Ricks pointed out how, “President Lula requested that movements and unions join the G20 ‘Social20’ – not the Peoples’ Summit – in the context of far-right fascism in Brazil. He wanted a more united thrust. A number of social and labor movements moved out of the People’s Summit into the S20, and that caused enormous tension.”
Just after the Rio G20, Laura Corcuera from the Spanish ezine El Salto offered a long article with an optimistic title: “Brazilian social movements open a new cycle of struggle against global financial capitalism.” But she pointed out how Lula’s G20-Social cooptation of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores trade union and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peoples Movement) “generated harsh criticism among Brazilian and Latin American grassroots social movements for having demobilized protests against the G20.” According to Sandra Quintela of the Jubileu Sul (anti-austerity and debt) network, “We do not want to legitimize that place as a space for dialogue. That is why we held this People’s Summit, an autonomous, sovereign and self-financed space.”
South Africans know well the fragmentation of politics due to ideological divergences, and 2024 was a test of whether the centre could hold within the country’s centre-right elites. It has held so far, within a Government of National Unity as prone to splintering as the 1994-1996 model just after apartheid. But at the global scale, given that G20 leaders’ own political delegimitization continues in many member countries, you would be very brave indeed to predict that a bloc of the most powerful, venal rulers can today even properly debate – much less deliver – Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability.
Where does that leave progressives who do not want to be bamboozled by Ramaphosa and his talented bureaucrats’ progressive phraseology? One graphic representation of a transnational capitalist class and its state supporters versus the 99% was made in a couple of (North and South) pyramids by Kevin Danagher, co-founder of San Francisco-based Global Exchange, to reflect differences between elite and grassroots globalizations. Here’s a tweak, from above:
The opposite effort – breaking the chains binding the top 1%, so as to make new ones linking the 99% – is now needed more than ever.
On Wednesday, February 19, G20-from-below internationalism against Trumpism is the webinar theme to be taken up by Bill Fletcher, Jr, the socialist, trade unionist, solidarity activist who was president of TransAfrica Forum, who cofounded standing4democracy.org and who cochairs the U.S. Campaign for Western Sahara. He will be joined by two South African notables: International Labour Research and Information Group strategist Dale McKinley and community organizer Bandile Mdlalose from Civil Society Unmuted Coalition.
For those in the U.S. fighting Trumpism, the online meeting time is early – 8am Eastern Standard Time – but the job of linking issues and constituencies could not be more urgent. Join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82726180745
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Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.
