President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the United States would offer a pathway to citizenship for South African farmers facing land expropriation by their government. In a post on TruthSocial, Trump criticized South Africa’s treatment of farmers, claiming the government was “confiscating their land and farms,” and promised to stop all federal funding to the country.
“Any farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship,” Trump wrote. He added that the initiative would begin immediately.
In his first term, Trump expressed concern about racially-motivated violence in South Africa specifically targeting Afrikaner farmers and has been consistently critical of the country’s government.
The Friday statement follows an executive order signed in February that cited the nation’s apparent targeting of white land owners.
“In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation. This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners,” the order states.
“In addition, 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, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” the order adds.
“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” the White House said in a fact sheet following the order.
On the heels of the February order, South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa (pictured here) took to X to defend the measure. “The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution,” he wrote. The Act was signed into law days after President Trump’s second inauguration.
The South African government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has advocated for “land reform” for many years in order to address racial disparities in land ownership. In a 2018 report, Reuters noted, “Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC has followed a ‘willing-seller, willing-buyer’ model under which the government buys white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks.”
After a survey of title deeds in 2017, the news outlet reported that records show blacks own “four percent of private land, and only eight percent of farmland has been transferred to black hands, well short of a target of 30 percent due to have been reached in 2014.”
Wandile Sihlobo, however, disputes the finding, arguing in an article last year, “Almost 25% of all farm land previously owned by white land owners have been restored, redistributed to black South Africans or moved away to state ownership.” Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa and a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).
As of press time, the South African president has not responded to Trump’s offer to Afrikaner farmers, though Ramaphosa has previously downplayed claims of racially-motivated farm murders, attributing the violence to broader crime issues.
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Christina Botteri is the Executive Editor of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow her on X at @christinakb.
Image “President Donald Trump by President Donald Trump and “Afrikaner Farmer” by South African Tourism CC2.0.
