Ramaphosa survives mauling by Trump over ‘white genocide’ – BBC
Source: BBC News
Donald Trump has proved to be the political Rottweiler of right-wing Afrikaner groups, taking their fight to South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa.
They were quick to celebrate the US president’s ambush of Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, with the Solidarity Movement – which had toured the US to lobby the Trump administration – saying it welcomed the fact that South Africa’s “enormous problems have been placed on the international stage”.
Ernst Roets, a leading personality on the Afrikaner right, showed his admiration for the US president.
“Donald Trump made history today,” he said in a post on X, before thanking him for showing videos of firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing “Shoot the Boer (Afrikaner); Shoot the farmer” – and what appeared to be print-outs of stories of white people being attacked.
Solidarity’s Jaco Kleynhans went further, saying Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for “putting the farm murder crisis on the international agenda”.
But for leading Afrikaner political columnist Pieter du Toit the ambush showed that “months and years of exaggeration, hyperbole and misinformation fed into the American right-wing ecosystem by a range of South African activists had hit its mark”.
Like many South Africans he praised Ramaphosa for his measured handling of the encounter in the White House, smiling when Trump was frowning.
But many people are angry with the right-wing groups, saying they have shown a lack of patriotism by lobbying the Trump administration to take a tough line against the country.
Such critics point to the fact that South Africa has a government of national unity – made up of 10 parties from across the racial and ideological divide to tackle the nation’s myriad problems – from the high crime levels that affect all races and classes, to an unemployment rate of 32%, with black people struggling the most to find jobs.
For many South Africans, the “rainbow nation” was on display at the White House.
The government delegation included South Africa’s most senior white politician, John Steenhuisen – the agriculture minister who leads South Africa’s second-biggest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA).
He acknowledged South Africa had a “real safety problem”, adding that it required “a lot of effort to get on top of it”.
“It is going to require more policing resources,” he said.
But he dismissed the view that most white farmers were fleeing: “Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work.”
Trump’s video amplified the role of the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party in South African politics by showing its leader singing the “Shoot the Boer” song.
The party advocates the nationalisation of land, and Julius Malema revels in chanting the song at his political rallies – with Trump demanding to know why no action had been taken against him.
The song was once an anti-apartheid anthem, and Afrikaner lobby groups have tried to get it banned. But South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal has ruled that a “reasonably well-informed person” would understand that when “protest songs are sung, even by politicians, the words are not meant to be understood literally, nor is the gesture of shooting to be understood as a call to arms or violence”.
Instead, the song was a “provocative way” of advancing the EFF’s political agenda – which was to end “land and economic injustice”.
Ramaphosa pointed out to Trump that South Africa was a democracy – and while the government was “completely against” what Malema says, the EFF had a right to exist under the constitution.
The EFF fell to fourth spot in last year’s parliamentary election, with Ramaphosa refusing to give Malema political oxygen by making a deal with him to form a coalition government after the poll failed to produce an outright winner.
Steenhuisen told Trump that the DA, a centre-right party which stands for a free market economy, joined the government to keep the EFF out, and to help tackle South Africa’s problems.
“This government, working together, needs the support of our allies around the world so that we can strengthen our hand, grow our economy and shut the door forever on that rebel [Malema] getting through the doors of Union Buildings [the seat of government],” he said.
Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa hold the middle-ground in South African politics – the Afrikaner right-wing and the EFF, along with ex-President Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation) party, are at the extremes.
Ramaphosa promised to champion unity, invoking the name of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela – the symbol of racial reconciliation in South Africa after the end of white-minority rule in 1994.
But some Afrikaners feel they can no longer live in South Africa, and Trump has offered them refugee status. Nearly 60 of them have been resettled in the US.
Trump has given a boost to the right-wing, with some of them gathering outside the US embassy in South Africa’
Read more: Click here